Social poetics and Dialogical approach

Extracts from Daniel W Clarke' PhD thesis work:
Social Poetics of Place Making

Cunliffe notes that this is where the difference between social poetics and linguistics lies: whereas social poetics focuses on these taken-for-granted relationships, linguistics studies the relationship of various elements of language. For Cunliffe (2002: 129), social poetics is a research “practice” that “attempts to embrace and enact a dialogical approach ”. The five reminders are:

• the use of metaphors, images, and analogies that allow or provoke us into seeing
  connections
• the use of instructive forms o f talk to move others, such as “do this,” “look at that,”
  “listen ,” and “fin sh this by tomorrow ”
• forms of talk that reveal possibilities or new ways of connecting: “imagine,” “suppose we
  look at it like this,” and “think what would happen if . . . ?”
• the use of gestures: pointing, shrugging, and thumping the desk as we speak
• the use of comparisons, different language games, or juxtaposing words or phrases in
  unusual ways, so that we are struck or moved to see new connections

Towards an Ontological Social Constructionism

Some extracts from John Shotter's talk:

“What we come to form, and thereafter understand (both the formed and the forming), emerge from us being in language in conversations in movements in relationships in culture in nature (we do not have language etc ‘in us’). The Being ‘in’ these various ins can best be understood by letting ‘the feeling that comes’ (by being in these various ins) create its own metaphors, and let those metaphors be part of the language one searches through in order to find a meaning.” (Tom Andersen, no date).

In this, Tom’s thinking was, we might say, comprehensively ‘ecological’ –

from Bakhtin (1986) – one of the originators of the whole dialogical approach to human relations:
“An utterance,” he says,
“is never just a reflection or an expression of something already existing and outside it that is given and final. It always creates something that never existed before, something absolutely new and unrepeatable... But something created is always created out of something given... What is given is completely transformed in what is created” (pp.119-120).

 ‘deep’ changes in that they are not just changes in what we ‘think about’, they are not to do with learning some new and previously unknown facts or bits of information, but changes in what ‘we think with’, changes in how we relate to, or orient ourselves toward our surroundings, and as a result – as Tom might put it – to find ourselves immersed ‘in’ a situation quite different from what we felt ourselves to be ‘in’ previously.

 there are two kinds of difficulties we can face in life, not just one: There are those kind of difficulties that we might, following Wittgenstein (1980), call “difficulties of the intellect” (p.17). These are difficulties that we can formulate (or form) as problems and solve by constructing an appropriate theoretical system within which to ‘think them through’. But overcoming orientational or relational difficulties requires a quite different approach... and that, of course, expresses straightaway the nature of our difficulty:
What actually is involved in our approaching a situation or circumstance that we at first find quite bewildering or confusing or dis-orienting?
 Wittgenstein (1980) calls these kind of difficulties, “difficulties of the will” (p.17) – making use of a word, I venture to surmise, with a very bad press among us here in this conference. But by it, he means, he says, to draw attention to “what people want to see” (p.17), what it is they look for or expect to see as they begin to try to get a sense of ‘where’ they ‘are’, and how they might ‘go on’ within the situation within which they ‘find themselves’.

 a basic bodily need for orientation that is continually at work within us; we need to know ‘where’ we are, ‘what’ actually ‘is’ the situation that we are ‘in’. Thus, the “whole quest of discovery is thus initially... ‘directed’ not to get what we want but to discover what we want to get”(p.177).

[trad psycho.] It has only discovered there what happens when men are led to behave as if they are rats, machines, information channels, etc.... Constructing a true image of ourselves demands a radically different approach,”

. We need first to be ‘introduced’ to them, to meet them face-to-face’, so to speak, in order to acquire some expectations as to how they will respond to a whole range of our actions in our relations to them.


Learning theory-talk, on the other hand, is like learning a second language. It is not concerned with things and activities as they are in themselves; its function is not to help those confronted with raw appearances make a first sense of them. It is a cognitive device in terms of which things and events, which already make one kind of sense to us, may be talked of as being other than what ordinarily they seem to be – for instance, a theorist might tell us that what we talk of as ‘love’ is really ‘object cathexis’.

a theory is of use to third-person outsiders, standing over against and uninvolved in the personal situation of the first- and second-persons. Thus, rather than being context-dependent and personal, theoretical talk, strictly, must be context-free and impersonal. Consequently, these really rather strange and unusual forms of talk must always be accompanied, it would seem, by an account of how they should be understood and put to use; in other words, we must be especially taught, as specialists, to put our everyday ways of understanding and acting on one side, and to function as our theories require.

Wittgenstein,
shows us how easily we can (mis)recognize the unique what-ness of the things or events before us: how, for example, we can treat something that is a living and still developing organism as if it was something dead and finished, how we can treat something that arouses an anticipatory response in us (a tense feeling of expectation) as simply presenting us with a picture (an image, shape, or form) that requires our ‘interpretation’, and so on

Descartes:
thereby make ourselves, as it were, masters and possessors of nature” (p.78). It bothers me for one very obvious reason: It is aimed at the exploitation of Nature, not in our own interests, but for our own desires. This might be excusable in our search for energy resources, for instance, but when other people are studied for ‘the uses fro which they are appropriate’, the unethical nature of this aim is clear.

In line with our ‘separatist’, Cartesian forms of thought, it is only too easy for us to think of ourselves as occupying the world, with the earth beneath us and the sky above (as depicted in (a) above). But a world that is merely occupied, he argues, “is furnished with already-existing things;” whereas, one that is inhabited, within which we and many others exist as living beings, “is woven from the strands of their continual coming-into-being” (p.1797).  He calls such a world, which, as such, is still coming into being (as depicted in (b) above), a world within which the many different flowing strands of different activity intertwine, intermingle, become entangled with each other, and then, sometimes, separate, “the weather world.” I will just call it a turbulent, not-yet-settled, dialogically-structured world, a world that is still-in-the-making.

, if I was allowed only one word in which to express what I think to be most important in our lives together, it would be the word: responsiveness. But if I was allowed to add another word to it, I would say spontaneous responsiveness, or to offer a whole phrase, I would say that it is the way that our living, bodily responsiveness to the movements and  activities the others and othernesses around us that is expressive of the meaning of those movements and activities to us, and thus crucial to our being able to communicate with each other

• That there are two kinds of difficulties in life, not just one, and that before we can turn to solving problems, we need to gain orientation, to gain a sense of what in fact is the situation we are in;
• That the search for repetitive patterns can be misleading, each new circumstance we confront is uniquely itself and we need to meet it face-to-face, so to speak, to become acquainted with it; 4. That as result of the spontaneous responsiveness of our bodies, we can learn about events and happenings in our surroundings that we can learn in no other way;
• – but we must be careful, words are not innocent, and no single metaphor can capture all its aspects (and metaphors conceal as well as reveal);
• That, as a consequence of all of this, we must give up Descartes’ nice clear and distinct idea of a world of ‘matter in motion according to laws’, and embrace the very strange, flowing, turbulent world of our everyday lives in which we, like plants growing from a seeds, have our existence within a special confluence of flowing streams of energy and materials that our bodies are continually working to organize, to intertwine or to ‘orchestrate’ into the unbelievably complex forms of our human achievements and behaviours to come.
• All his life, Tom retained his disquiets with what seemed to be finished and finalized stabilities in our treatment of others: What other ways might be open to us? What might we do instead? And those disquiets have motivated me also – and indeed, I venture to suggest, that same restlessness, that need to know: “Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?” (Gauguin’s questions) still sits with us all here in this hall, now.

Difficulties of the intellect and difficulties of the will

So, although such inquiries cannot offer anything objective, anything that can easily be pointed at and described, nor can they offer us any techniques for immediate practical application. They can in fact offer us something of much more value to those of us as professional practitioners who must act in the moment, from within the midst of complexity. All objective approaches tell us only of what we already know how to inquiry into; they lead us only towards the continual re-discovery of sameness, simply the elaboration of the cognitive knowledge we already possess – they cannot inform us of the distinctively different, invisible, possibilities for action available to us in each new and unique situation we occupy.

In exploring it – the choice to stop doing something along with the spontaneous emergence, i.e., the non-choice, of a better alternative to it – I want to distinguish between two kinds of difficulties we can face in our practical affairs: What Wittgenstein (1980) called difficulties of the intellect, and difficulties of the will (p.17) I want to stick with talk of difficulties instead of talking of problems, for as we shall see, talk of problems is much more to do with arriving at answers to clear questions, while talk of difficulties is more to do with overcoming confusions and disorientations in practical life.  

We can formulate difficulties of the intellect, then, as problems which, with the aid of clever theories or appropriate frameworks of thought, we can solve by the use of reasoning, by rational methods. Difficulties of the will, however, are quite different. For they are to do with how we need to find a way of relating ourselves (bodily, i.e., sensitively and emotionally) to the others and othernesses around us, how we orient ourselves or take up an attitude or stance towards them, the ways in which we see them, hear them, experience them, value them – for it is these ways that determine what possibilities for action we can perceive in the situation we are in, they determine or ‘give shape’ to the lines of action we finally resolve on carrying out. And unlike the static contemplative thinker, we must do all this from within our engaged activity with the others and othernesses we encounter within the situation of our action, either actual or imagined.

> (1) First, problem-solving: Approaching a newness or strangeness as a problem to be solved requires us to first analyze it into a set of identifiable elements; we must then find a pattern or order amongst them; and then hypothesize a hidden agency responsible for the order (call it, the working of certain rules, principles, or laws, or the working of a story or narrative). We then seek further evidence for its influence, thus to enshrine it in a theory or theoretical system. We go on to make use of such theories in giving shape to our actions. In other words, we manipulate the strangeness (now known in terms of the theory) to produce an advantageous outcome which we call ‘the solution’ to our problem, and we then turn ‘to apply’ the theory elsewhere.

As investigators, we ourselves remain unchanged in the process; we remain outside and separate from the other or otherness we are investigating; rather than being engaged or involved in with it we are ‘set over against’ it; in acquiring extra knowledge about it – in the form of facts or information – we gain mastery over it. // in fact no

(2) Alternatively, in resolving on a line of action: Instead of immediately trying to analyze it into its elements, we can treat the other or otherness as a being that is still radically unknown to us, and, by ‘opening’ ourselves to being spontaneously ‘moved’ by it, we can ‘enter into’ a living, dialogically-structured relationship with it – In other words, we can become involved or engaged in an active, back and forth relationship, with it, a relationship in which, if we go slowly, and allow time for the imaginative work that each response can occasion to take place, we can gain a sense of the ‘inner landscape’, the ‘invisible landscape of possibilities’ confronting us to become “visibly-rational” (Garfinkel, 1967, p.vii) to us.

- We enter a new situation; (3 secs)

- We are confused, bewildered, we don’t know our way about; (3 secs)

- However, as we ‘dwell in’ it, as we ‘move around’ within the confusion, a ‘something’, an ‘it’ begins to emerge;(3 secs)

- It emerges in the ‘time contours’ or ‘time shapes’ that become apparent to us in the dynamic relations we can sense between our outgoing activities and their incoming results; (3 secs)

- An image comes to us, we find that we can express this ‘something’ in terms of an image; (3 secs)

- But not so fast, for we can find another, and another image, and another – Wittgenstein uses a city, a toolbox, the controls in the driving cab of a train, and many different types of games, all as metaphors for different aspects of our experiences of the use of language (3 secs)....

Having gone through a number of images, we can come to a sense of the landscape of possibilities giving rise to them. Indeed, we can gain a sense of familiarity with such landscapes, that we can come to feel confident of knowing our way around within them, and of being able to resolve on ways of going on within them.   

But the process of resolving cannot simply be a matter of calculation, it involves judgement, a moving around on the landscape of possibilities, being spontaneously responsive to the consequences of each move, and judging which one (or combination of moves) best resolves the initial tension aroused in one’s initial confusion – for, to repeat, we are operating here, not in the realm of actualities but of possibilities.

while we can decide very precisely what not to do, resolving on a new line of action, gathering together all the relevant features of the now new situation one faces, takes judgement – for, to repeat, we have to consider, not facts, but possibilities. And a moment of judgement – the 3 to 5 second ‘present’ moment of a judgment (Stern, 2004) – entails, I want to suggest, some judgemental work, work in which we go out, imaginatively and feelingfully, to relate ourselves to various aspects of our current circumstances, aspect-by-aspect, sequentially, over time, with the aim of gathering them all together into what we might call an inner landscape of possibilities. Only once we have done this, only when we know our “way about” within such a landscape can we feel some confidence in “going on” (Wittgenstein, 1953).


It is what the nature of that imaginative judgmental work feels like, looks like, and sounds like that, if time allowed, I would like to discuss further. For, I would want to claim, that coming to act in a way that seems to be for the best in a particular situation is not something we can decide upon simply within ourselves, we must turn towards the now new situation to which we have chosen to relate ourselves, and open ourselves to being spontaneously responsive to it – if we can do that, we will then find that various crucial happenings simply will occur quite spontaneously in the complex processes at work in the emergence of alternatives.

So, although such inquiries cannot offer anything objective, anything that can easily be pointed at and described, nor can they offer us any techniques for immediate practical application. They can in fact offer us something of much more value to those of us as professional practitioners who must act in the moment, from within the midst of complexity. All objective approaches tell us only of what we already know how to inquiry into; they lead us only towards the continual re-discovery of sameness, simply the elaboration of the cognitive knowledge we already possess – they cannot inform us of the distinctively different, invisible, possibilities for action available to us in each new and unique situation we occupy.

, we need to recognize that we face two kinds of difficulty in our lives: those of the intellect and those of the will (Wittgenstein, 1980), difficulties we can formulate as problems which we can solve by creating a priori frameworks or perspectives in terms of which to ‘work out’ solutions, and orientational or relational difficulties require a different, hermeneutical-phronetic approach, aimed at resolving on a line of action. Resolving or overcoming difficulties of this kind requires us to exercise judgment in conducting a kind of inner imaginative work, work aimed at exploring the unique details of our current situation in terms of criteria appropriate to the different dimensions of our concerns, and with gathering them all together into a common focus. Such work involves a process to do both with ways of paying attention (listening, noticing, being open to being ‘touched’, etc.) to contextual details, and with negotiating, in dialogue with others, a line of action recognized by them to be both intelligible, legitimate, and ‘fitting’ in the situation in question.

Attention to such issues as these is not at all easy to sustain, for it entails our trying to capture things ‘in motion’, which means trying to capture them while they are on the way to being other than they already are – in other words, we cannot easily name the things of our concern, for they have the character of, as William James (1890) put it a long time ago, “signs of direction in thought”.
However, although we cannot easily name them, we “nevertheless,” says James, “have an acutely discriminative sense” (p.253) of their direction and ‘shape’. Indeed, as I have outlined elsewhere (Shotter, 2005), they continually give rise both to the happening of “transitory understandings” and “action guiding anticipations.”

Indeed, once we turn in this direction, once we adopt this practice-based approach – and move away from the static thinking subject towards the active, moving around agent – we realize that we can face a kind of difficulty very different from that of solving intellectual puzzles. The image we need is, I think, something like this: It is as if we are living and trying gain our orientation, our ‘at homeness’ in our surroundings, while always living within a thick fog, and we must work like blind persons in terms of ‘touchings’ rather than in terms of ‘seeings’. However, what we have to gain a sense of through our touchings and feelings, is not of what actual objects are there before us, but of the possibilities these actualities present to us for our next possible steps.

In exploring the character of this tense restlessness further – and the way in which it involves the choice of stopping doing something, along with the non-choice, spontaneous emergence of a better alternative to it – I want explore what Wittgenstein (1980) calls difficulties of the intellect, and difficulties of the will (p.17) further – and I want to stick with talk of difficulties instead of talking of problems


: the need to work within a landscape of possibilities, as well as actualities

Knowing by Being-There Making: Explicating the Tacit Post-Subject in Use

some extracts from the original text of Tonkinwise

All making is a gift. As a materialisation, an externalisation, making gives something to the world, the world in which others live. So even if something is initially made just for oneself, it will be there available for others, to notice, to appreciate, to use.

The key difference between the knowing of making and knowing proper is universality. Knowledge not sourced from making is codifiable and thereby transmittable because it is universal; whereas the knowledge of making cannot be extricated from the specificity of its material context. Making might therefore be a type of localised knowing, but as non-abstractable, it must be kept distinct from the knowing that lies at the foundation of the university. If making involves searches and findings, these are not the equivalent of researching truths.

What is so refreshing about Material Thinking is that it explicitly sees its task as the generation of creative metaphors by which to access the research that is creative making.
institutionally delimited language of ‘research’ — much as I have been doing so far for example, with the linguistic chain ‘knowing, new, significant, justified, triangulated, sharable,’ etc.
letting the makingly knowing of each his co-creative cases guide him, theorising from the ground up, rather than fitting making into this or that theoretical frame about research, Carter is able to, and keen to, maintain a certain open-endedness or finitude in the poetics he develops.

Not needing to defend a thesis with regard to the knowing of making, Carter is able to develop more resonant ways of articulating that knowing, resonant in the sense of ringing true to the nature of practice more generally but also in the sense of amplifying those knowings so that they may begin to gain the attention of institutions arbitrating on what counts as practice-based research.
examples I’ve seen of descriptions of creative processes that remains faithful to the non-generalisable specificity of such material practices, using terms firmly located within the particular constraints of each project, whilst nevertheless generating notions that are applicable and extendable beyond the time and place and nature of each project, that are still knowledges in that sense.

Or, it is generative, able to be repeated but with difference rather than replicated; it is reproducible in the biological sense, as opposed to cloning. e., it is a different form of knowing — it is also not that of utter particularities — i.e., it is nevertheless still of the order of knowledge. It is sharable, and it is sharable because it concerns, if not rules, conventions, things that come together, regularly enough to be more than idiosyncratic.
Making can be accepted as research to the extent that it is uncovering things that are useful and insightful for some other situations, for some other places, times and practices.

this sort of general knowledge because his concern is place; not the specificity of place, but what place generates beyond its particulars, what is sharable about places.

It can be made explicit, or more precisely, it can be made less tacit, but such acts of explicitation demand more creativity than mere translation; a poetics is demanded to overcome some inherent resistances.

To know something is never to know something objectively, but to know it subjectively, that is de-subjectively, by being it, experiencing generally what it is by becoming it.

These are new ways of understanding a place, or a culture, or some texts, or some media or art practices. To this extent, Carter’s job of articulating knowing-in-making is actually easier than if his collaborations had been with designers, where the knowing at play concerns more ‘uses’ than meanings


An affordance is an ‘actual possibility’, a ‘promised action opportunity.’ Affordances are the result of interactional perceptions, seeing not just a feature, but a future way of making use of that feature. I do not see a shape, but a handle, or rather a 'handable'. I am here already interacting with what I am still only sensing from a distance.

Affordances are literally articulations, or joinings, material conjunctions of the capacity of tools and the skills of bodies. But for this very reason, they are constitutionally resistant to being articulated. To attempt to explain what a product knows about a body in such and such a situation, what it knows a body knows about what can and cannot be done with the things about it, is to either semiotise affordances, or to become mired in animistic relativisms.

On the Consequences of Post-ANT

extracts from
Gad, C., & Bruun Jensen, C. (2005). On the consequences of post-ANT. Centre for STS Studies, Department of Information and Media Studies. Århus: University of Århus.


To Mol, a conception of reality as multiple calls for metaphors other than perspectives and points of view. Reality is manipulated in many ways and does not lie around waiting to be glanced at. It does not have ‘‘aspects,’’ ‘‘qualities,’’ or ‘‘essences,’’ which are shed light upon by a certain theoretical perspective. However, when doing ontological work, different versions of objects appear. These, in turn, may relate and shape partially linked versions of reality. Concepts such as ‘‘intervention,’’ ‘‘performance,’’ and ‘‘enactment’’ highlight the attempt to approach reality as ‘‘done’’ rather than ‘‘observed.’

The idea that reality exists in multiple related versions lends itself to the notion that one can ‘‘choose’’ freely between them. However, if one tries to locate the outside position from where one is supposed to evaluate and make such choices, one finds that such a place simply does not exist. Mol points out, that one consequence of this situation is that possibilities seem to exist everywhere. Important normative moments and decisions therefore often appear as originating elsewhere and feel as if out of reach. However, Mol’s analysis also shows why it is in fact impossible to identify, evaluate, and compare discrete perspectives. For as her analysis of the versions of arteriosclerosis indicates different enactments do not necessarily exclude each other but may be in various ways entwined: ‘‘What is other is also within’’ (Mol 1999, 85). This is why objects such as arteriosclerosis are characterized by fractality. They are ‘‘more than one but less than many’’ (Mol 2002a, 82).

It was also sustained by the belief that more perspectives would allow social science to move closer to a ‘‘completion’’ of its knowledge. Yet, this belief in progression is challenged as perspectivism becomes explicit: it facilitates a critical questioning of whether we really learn more about the world by exploring it from different angles.

‘‘Methods’’ simply provide different kinds of access to the nooks and corners of reality, explored with any given theoretical perspective. So, while knowledge appears to be constructed through the production of more perspectives, it is also produced as each perspective elucidates different ‘‘subject matters’’ or ‘‘parts of the world’’ through the application of a variety of methods. Yet, as pluralism and perspectivism are challenged, the idea that methods provide clear and coherent guidelines must also be questioned.

Sociomaterial Practices: Exploring Technology at Work

Extracts from the original text of Orlikowski.

Materiality, on this view, is a special case, and this is problematic because it loses sight of how every organizational practice is always bound with materiality. Materiality is not an incidental or intermittent aspect of organizational life; it is integral to it.

The other difficulty associated with organizational studies of technology adoption, diffusion, and use is their tendency to focus either on technology effects (a techno-centric perspective) or on interactions with technology (a human-centered perspective). Both perspectives are limited and limiting for a number of reasons. The techno-centric perspective is interested in understanding how technology leverages human action, taking a largely functional or instrumental approach that tends to assume unproblematically that technology is largely exogenous, homogeneous, predictable, and stable, performing as intended and designed across time and place. Yet, as critics have pointed out, this perspective reifies technology, ignores how technology is bound up with historical and cultural influences, and thus produces technologically deterministic claims about the relationship of technology with organizations (Barley 1988; Kling 1991; Suchman 1994; Thomas 1994).

The human-centered perspective focuses on how humans make sense of and interact with technology in various circumstances. Here the technology is not black-boxed but understood to be different based on the different meanings assigned to it and the different ways in which people engage with it. Furthermore, such interpretations, interests, and interactions are seen to vary by time and place, entailing a more dynamic and situated view of the relationship of technology with organizations. While this grounds use of technology in particular socio-cultural and historical contexts, it tends to minimize the role of the technology itself. By focusing primarily on the human side of the relationship, the technology — as commentators such as Button (1993) and Berg (1997) have argued — vanishes from view in the preoccupation with the social.

[A]n alternative view asserts that materiality is integral to organizing, positing that the social and the material are constitutively entangled in everyday life. A position of constitutive entanglement does not privilege either humans or technology (in one-way interactions), nor does it link them through a form of mutual reciprocation (in two-way interactions). Instead, the social and the material are considered to be inextricably related — there is no social that is not also material, and no material that is not also social.


Towards a view of Constitutive Entanglement:
to figure out how to take seriously the recursive intertwining of humans and technology in practice.

A number of particularly interesting ideas for doing so have been emerging in sociology and science and technology studies over the past decade: for example, actor-networks (Callon 1986; Latour 1992, 2005), sociotechnical ensemble (Bijker 1995), mangle of practice (Pickering 1995), object-centered sociality (Knorr Cetina 1997), relational materiality (Law 2004), and material sociology (Beunza et al. 2006).

Latour (1987, 1992, 2005) has long argued that agency is not an essence that inheres in humans, but a capacity realized through the associations of actors (whether human or nonhuman), and thus relational, emergent, and shifting.

Suchman (2007: 261) similarly emphasizes the importance of reconceiving ‘capacities for action … on foundations quite different from those of a humanist preoccupation with the individual actor living in a world of separate things’.

 In particular, this requires replacing the idea of materiality as ‘pre-formed substances’ with that of ‘performed relations’, in order to characterize the recursive intertwining of the social and material as these emerge in ongoing, situated practice (Pickering 1995; Latour 2005). As Pels et al. (2002: 2) observe: ‘it is not so much what materials … symbolize within social action that matters but their constitutive agentic effects within the entangled networks of sociality/materiality’.

>>>>>
The notion of constitutive entanglement departs from that of mutual or reciprocal interaction common in a number of dynamic social theories. Notions of mutuality or reciprocity presume the influence of distinct interacting entities on each other, but presuppose some a priori independence of these entities from each other. Thus, for example, we have tended to speak of humans and technology as mutually shaping each other, recognizing that each is changed by its interaction with the other, but maintaining, nevertheless, their ontological separation. In contrast, the notion of constitutive entanglement presumes that there are no independently existing entities with inherent characteristics (Barad 2003: 816). Humans are constituted through relations of materiality — bodies, clothes, food, devices, tools, which, in turn, are produced through human practices. The distinction of humans and artifacts, on this view, is analytical only; these entities relationally entail or enact each other in practice.
‘This is a thoroughgoing relational materiality. Materials – and so realities – are treated as relational products. They do not exist in and of themselves.’ (Law, 2004:42)
>>>>>


Instead, seeing organizational practices as ‘sociomaterial’ — to borrow a term given recent currency by scholars such as Mol (2002) and Suchman (2007) — allows us to explicitly signify, through our language, the constitutive entanglement of the social and the material in everyday organizational life.

>>> Google Search and Blackberry usage examples.!!! <<<

Law and Urry (2004) argue that contemporary social science is ill-equipped to address issues of ephemerality, multiplicity,  dispersion and mobility.


Ephemerality: phenomena that are ‘here today and gone tomorrow, only to reappear the day after tomorrow’. search results of google...

Multiplicity: that which takes different shapes in different places’. results are multiple and shifting acc to conditions and contexts.

Dispersion and mobility: the distribution and movement of ideas across time and space may be manifest in many ways.

to forgo perspectives that treat materiality as either invisible or inevitable, or that abstract, black-box, and separate technology from human affairs. Instead, we need perspectives that are grounded in ontological and epistemological sensibilities that take seriously the sociomateriality of organizing.

Material sociology and science and technology studies offer useful vocabularies and guidelines for exploring the deep intermingling of materiality within practice. These can help us reconfigure our taken-for-granted notions, assumptions, and practices of organizational research, and allow us to recognize and investigate the multiple, emergent, and shifting sociomaterial assemblages that constitute organizations.

Strange familiarity on the material turn in feminism and HCI

Some extracts from the original text by Anna Croon Fos

the paper focuses on the question concerning how feminism can assist interaction designers with productive ways to generate new insights and influence the design process based on modest witnessing of digital physical blends (Haraway 1997).

Some cornerstone concepts (figures, scripts) that lays the grounds for this text among others; situated knowledges (Haraway 1991), design from somewhere (Suchman 2002), partial translations (Ibid) and modest witness(Haraway 2006), companion species (Haraway 2003), diffraction and agential realism (Barad 2007).

Agential realism is a theory that intra acts with philosophical and ontological questions concerning humans and nonhuman. For instance in agential realism it is affirmed that reality is not only socially constructed, but also materially constructed/configured/figured (Haraway 1997, Barad 2007).

"“Diffraction is the production of difference pattern in the world, not just of the same reflected – displaced -elsewhere.” Donna Haraway 1997, p. 268"

“Particular possibilities for acting exist at every moment, and these changing possibilities entail a responsibility to intervene in the world’s becoming, to contest and rework what matter and what is excluded from mattering.”Karen Barad, 2003, p. 827

feminist generative contributions Bardzell (Ibid) suggest such feminist theories, methods and results can contribute explicitly in decision-making and design processes to generate new design insights and influence the design process tangibly.

Sheridan writes; “Feminist theory is not just about women and gender but, of necessity, it is also about epistemology and ontology.” (Ibid, p. 24)

As such one common concern within the Scandinavian setting has revolved around issues on how to participate in the generative practices that digital designs embody (Mörtberg et al. 2003).

This in turn resembles the strategy advanced by Suchman (2005; 2005b) attending to the specificities of knowing subjects, multiple and differentially positioned, and variously engaged in reiterative and transformative activities of collective world making. Being in a position in-between, transgressing boarders (Mörtberg 1997), sitting on the fence Sefyrin (2010), imploding the inside and outside Elovaara (2004) making visible the invisible Jansson (2007) and/or concerned with the production of different patterns (Alander 2007). The insistence on keeping several heterogeneous and parallel stories alive enable multiple and ambiguous accounts of the relationships between the real and the not-yet existing crucial for exploring alternative ways of becoming human as well as non-human. Hence, throughout the years a readiness to think, feel and account for digital designs has evolved as a majestic strategy of using situatedness (the real) as a resource for transformatory projects (not yet existing).

the material turn redirects the perceived ground for design away from objects themselves, as independent, toward the demand for new conceptual characteristics of wholes that seems necessary in an increasing gathering of digital materials. Therefore HCI in its designerly aspirations needs to move away from finite, fixed objects of interaction and practical use contexts to physical/digital textures co-existing with humans, and non humans and increasingly comprising and redefining our collective and individual environments (Croon Fors and Wiberg 2010).

“The process is nothing less than our way of bringing the familiar [real] to bear on the unfamiliar [not-yet existing], in such a way as to yield new concepts while at the same time retaining as much as possible of the past” Donald Schön 1963, p. ix)

Remembering the motivations of cultural probes

Some extracts from the original text by Gaver et al.

• Probes embodied an approach to design that recognizes and embraces the notion that knowledge has limits. It’s an approach that values uncertainty, play, exploration, and subjective interpretation as ways of dealing with those limits.
• None of these tasks (or any of the others we used) produced returns that were easy to interpret, much less analyze. How could you compare two photographs, even if you knew both were meant to show “the spiritual centre of the home?”
• Our Probe results are impossible to analyze or even interpret clearly because they reflect too many layers of influence and constraint.
• When we finally receive the results it is clear that they are incomplete, unclear, and biased. We do not ask volunteers to explain their responses. Instead, we value the mysterious and elusive qualities of the uncommented returns themselves. Far from revealing an “objective” view on the situation, the Probes dramatize the difficulties of communicating with strangers.
• We are forced into a situation that calls for our own subjective interpretations. We have to see our volunteers in terms of our own experiences, understanding their responses empathetically, not intellectually.
• Rather than producing lists of facts about our volunteers, the Probes encourage us to tell stories about them, much as we tell stories about the people we know in daily life. They give us a feel for people, mingling observable facts with emotional reactions.
• the returns are layered with influence, ambiguity and indirection, demanding that we see the volunteers through ourselves to make any sense. This tension creates exactly the situation we believe is valuable for design, providing new perspectives that can constrain and open design ideas, while explicitly maintaining room for our own interests, understandings, and preferences.

• Asking unambiguous questions tends to give you what you already know, at least to the extent of reifying the ontology behind the questions. Posing open or absurd tasks, in contrast, ensures that the results will be surprising. 
• Summarizing returns tends to produce an “average” picture that may not reflect any individual well, and that filters out the unusual items that can be most inspiring. 
• Analyses are often used as mediating representations for raw data; they blunt the contact that designers can have with users through Probe returns. 
• Seeking for justifiable accounts of Probe returns constrains the imaginative engagement and story-telling which can be most useful for design.

We like this analogy. If Probes are collections of materials posing tasks to which people respond over time, then “probology” is an approach that uses Probes to encourage subjective engagement, empathetic interpretation, and a pervasive sense of uncertainty as positive values for design. We accept that Probes, the technique, may be appropriated for a variety of different ends. We hope, however, that other researchers and designers will embrace “probology” as well as Probes in pursuing design for everyday pleasure.