Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Oh Oh
Thursday, February 28, 2008
PowerPoint and the new publications
- Yiannis Gabriel, “Against the Tyranny of PowerPoint: Technology-in-Use and Technology Abuse,” Organization Studies 29, no. 2 (Februar 1, 2008): 255-276.
- Hubert Knoblauch, “The Performance of Knowledge: Pointing and Knowledge in Powerpoint Presentations,” Cultural Sociology 2, no. 1 (März 1, 2008): 75-97.
- Bernt Schnettler u. Hubert Knoblauch (Hrsg.), Präsentationen. Formen der visuellen Kommunikation von Wissen, Konstanz: UVK 2007
- Bernt Schnettler & Rene Tuma (in preparation), Presentation, Failure, and Risk - A Video - Analysis of PowerPoint Usage
- David Stark & Verena Paravel, “PowerPoint in Public: Digital Technologies and the New Morphology of Demonstration.” forthcoming 2008 in Theory, Culture & Society.
Monday, February 11, 2008
February Update
Most interesting in the last time was the talk Bruno Latour gave at LSE last week, a recording of the talk can be found here.
Latour is a quite impressive speaker, seems to be a funny guy. He spoke about Gabriel Tarde, the old counterplayer of Durkheim, which stands for a sociology of relations/translations. Very keen on presenting a lot of fancy network tools from his students, new datascapes which make new theories necessary (!!! - a good question of a woman in the audience was how many social theories we would have to expect next week).
It is quite interesting that Latour has shifted his focus of interest from the actants to the relations, but in his theory there is not much difference, as every actor is constituted by his relations to other actants in the network.
The enemy, which Latour always adresses is the sociology of the Social, as a own entitiy. In Latours and presumably tardes terms this is the entity to be explained not the explanandum. In fact, I think from my point of view this is a cardboard enemy/dummy. Be honest, "the social" is never a explanaition.
I was interested in what John W. Meyer would say whom I consider to be more on the structural end of the spectrum, but also he would agree that it is the various mediators which make the world culture what it is.
Has Latours position become common sense?
Friday, January 04, 2008
New links for the new year
http://www.cbc.ca/ideas/features/science/index.html
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
The nature and consequence of Karl Marx’s skin disease
From an analysis of the original correspondence, it has been possible to establish that Karl Marx’s incapacitating skin disease was hidradenitis suppurativa, not ‘boils’ as was universally assumed at the time and since; the psychological effect of this illness on the man and his work appears to have been considerable.Article
Talk – Discussion: Peter L. Berger on Dez. 12, 2007.
Last week he had a talk at a discussion organized by the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung in the Leibnitz-Saal of the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften. The Topic of the event was:
Transatlantischer Dialog über Religion und Politik
"Die Würde des Menschen ist unantastbar"
Religiöse und demokratische Werte im Spannungsfeld internationaler Politik
(trans-atlantic dialogue: the dignity of the human being is untouchable. Religous and democratic values in a field of tension in international politics).
Bergers main argument was, that relativism and fundamentalism are two counterparts, which are deeply interrelated with and rooted in the process of modernisation. Moving away from a zone of "taken for granted knowledge", a "questionable zone of knowledge" becomes bigger and bigger and takes all certainties away. Radical forms of relativism destroy every basis of moral judgement and do not allow the people to know what is right and what is wrong. Science leads to a dissolution of certainty. As a consequence the modern wishes to be "liberated from the liberation" and is looking for new certainties. In this view, fundamentalism is not a pre-modern phenomenon, but a highly modern reaction.
Fundamentalism can be found in two forms: as (1) a totalitarian state, which tries to exclude other forms of knowledge and enforces its borders or (2) as a sub-society, which forms some kind of counter-culture (Berger gave examples from radical religious, but also feministic groups for both).
In a normative judgement Berger argues, that relativism as well as fundamentalism are bad for society and we do need a “politic of moderation” as solution for our moral dilemma. Faith is not impossible, if you know, that you have chosen certain basic values (the notion of choosing is suppressed by fundamentalism!), but at the same time have to stand in for them, and have to make them a basis for your action and judgement (and not tolerate every unacceptable practice because of a misunderstanding of the concept of tolerance). The central value, the dignity of human beings, must be accepted and defended against its enemies. The problem is, that we do not know easy answers to all problems: When does a life start (debate about embryonic Stem-cells) and other uncertain answers cannot be given easily, but have to be grounded on the basic moral norms. Sociological or biological “functionalism” is not able to give answers to this problems, the policymakers and every individual have to decide and to use our empathy for this decisions.
To make it a little bit easier, Berger drew a line, on which we can locate our decisions.
On the one end, there are unacceptable practises, which cannot be tolerated (e.g. torture or killing) on the other end of the line practises (like having to wear a headscarf) are easily acceptable. In between, there lie the really problematic ones, and there the decision about “right” action can only be given in context. For Berger and his discussant, bishop Huber, moderate ehtics and moral foundation can be found in christianity, and this is the cause, why they are necessary for a good society.
In my opinion, Berger gave an interesting, but very abstract and vague analysis. I would agree to most of his arguments, but the problem is, that he avoided all the concrete and important questions. He addressed the problem so vaguely, that with his normal postulates none of the problems can be solved.
In the contemporary discussions, you can not only look at the moral norms, which found decisions, but they are more complicated. The problem is, that every decision has (more or less) unwanted and unanticipated consequences. Many problems, which should be solved by “moderate” politics, cannot be removed with a moderate approach in polity, because the problems are too big.
But Berger was talking about moral foundation and not about concrete policy, this is, why his conservative arguments may be acceptable, but the question of the adequate means is still open. He addressed global inequality as unacceptable, but did not say a word about the policy to resolve this problem.
I liked one joke he told:
There is a guy, which always complains about his new job. Asked what he does, he says he has to sort oranges into three baskets: small, medium and big. In fact this is a nice job, but he did not like this job, because of “all this decisions”.
Important Literature by Peter L. Berger
Berger, Peter L. (1963), Invitation to Sociology: A Humanistic Perspective, Anchor Books.
Berger, Peter L. and Thomas Luckmann (1966), The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise its the Sociology of Knowledge, Anchor Books.Berger, Peter L. (1967), The Sacred Canopy, Doubleday.
Berger, P. L., Berger, B. and Kellner, H. (1974), The Homeless Mind: Modernization and Consciousness, Penguin.
Thursday, November 29, 2007
LSE Lecture: On Actors, Networks, and Plasma: Heidegger vs. Latour vs. Heidegger
Abstract (taken from the LSE Page):
Though Heidegger continues to solidify his status as the consensus “great philosopher” of the twentieth century, there are some obvious points of difficulty with his ontology. Latour strikes an effective blow on two of these points. First, he restores agency to non-human actors. Second, he revives a taste for concrete discussion of specific kinds of objects (trains, apricots, volcanoes).Yet there is one key weakness in Latour’s ontology that must be addressed: his relationism. The reality of an actor, for Latour, is defined by the way it affects, modifies, or perturbs other things. This leads to problems that I will review in my talk, and which are only partly remedied by Latour’s intriguing new concept of plasma.
Surprising resources for a new realism are found in Heidegger’s fourfold of earth, sky, gods, and mortals. Transforming Latour’s army of onefold actors into an armada of fourfold objects, we find a Heideggerian alternative to Latour’s shapeless molten plasma. Latour corrects Heidegger’s Dasein-centrism, but at the same time Heidegger counters Latour’s overinvestment in relationality. In this way, object-oriented philosophy crossbreeds the virtues of its two ancestral heroes.
In fact he was giving a short introduction into Latour and Heidegger, pointing out strenghts and weaknesses
| | Latour | Heidegger |
| Strengts | Rejects domination of human beings over entities Specific actors treated on their own terms | Things not reduced to their relations |
| Weaknesses | Things fully reduced to their relations | Human dominance Specific entities usually treated with contempt |
Harman argued that their strenghts would perfectly complete each other. Heidegger, in his view was completely misinterpretet when read as a pragmatist, because he was not concerned with the question of consciousness and unconsciousness (I would argue not dividing consciousness and action this is exactly the central point - at least in - sociological pragmatism...but thats another discussion). Every thing & actor in Heideggers work has got a character which is deeper than the qualities which can be experienced in practical use, there are some hidden qualities (I think it is always a little bit strange to assume there are hidden forces behind any actor, that is what I dislike with the structuralists as well - and this is the same that Latour would criticise), which are divided into 4 qualities. This is why we are talking a Fourfold actor. Things are deeper than practise.
Latour on the other side, in Hamans view, comes to a paradoxical problem in his argumentation, because when everything just needs something third to translate the other then it leads into a infinite regress. "Any two things are only linked by a third thing."
This, and the argumentation, that a object is only a object in its current network of assoziations (lets call it context) leads to the situation that according to latour everything is happening at the same time. Paradoxically by this strong situatedness, everything is cut-off from the next point in time, because everything is bound and needs to be translated by a third to change.
Harman told, that the hidden solution in Latours writing is the force of the Plasma (which I haven't read about right now, but I havent finished "Reassembling the Social" jet), which is able to break up assoziations.
In fact, the solution for Harman, if I understood him right, is to introduce a metapysical power into Latour, which he takes from Heidegger, to improve it, and to explain, what the essence behind "things" is.
In my eyes this approach might be interesting, but I'm not a philosopher (bloddy hell, thank god!) and not sure if I understand the concept of Heidegger (probably I should read some of it). Introducing a metaphysical power and hidden qualities of objects, which cannot be seen in practice seems a quite strange solution to me, when I reflect on it.
Harman is going to send this Paper to Latour in some time, and told, that we could get it, if we asked him, so just do it. If I misunderstood him, please comment.
CBAS/Paul Martin
His aim was to show the socio-technical expectations, promises and visions wich are proposed for these new technologies and how social sciences deal with them. In fact, the social science reflection came a little bit short in his quite "techy" talk, but I think there are many links to topics like Innovation, Path Creation and Leitbilder, and network formation on which research is pushed forward inside STS. Martin illustrated how in the different areas (with different levels of success) value is created:
- Tissue Engineering
- StemCell Therapy
- Gene Therapy
- Molecular Diagnostics
- Pharmacogenetics
This is mainly, because the nature of medical knowledge. The central assumption, that medicine is a form of science is quite new (evidence based medicine came up in the 70s), and there are not enough sufficient bridges between laboratory and hospital. It is not even clear, what are criteria for clinical utility. Maybe even a new understanding of the human body is necessary, here social science plays a key-role.
In fact, Martin had a quite gloomy view on the new techniques, and tried to slow down all the big expectations laid on them.
There was a discussant, Dr Chris Mason, UCL, who did especially not agree with this last point, he argued for quick realisation and big opportunities in this area, evoking a comparission with the IT field, which also had some up and downs (some kind of wave-model was mentioned, i did not understand the name of the author which developed it). The discussion went to economic chances for investment in this field and later on on the very interesting role of military in pushing innovations. "It aims at injuring, not killing soldiers, right now, because of this money is pumped into the Biomed sector."
The discussion and the topic stayed quite on the surface - we should blame the short time and the interdisciplinary background of the participants for this, but I think we can see some interesting fields for research in this.
Abstract