To Talk of Many Systemic Ambiguity
“With most species of orchids, it is not the fittest but the most deceptive ones that survive.”
In a world in which the primary economic horizon is one of war in its various modalities, including conflict with the irreducible other, the perpetual struggle of all against all or asymmetric warfare, the kind of practical criticism traditionally carried out by intelligence and counter-intelligence operatives becomes a vital necessity. The surprise conjunction of literary criticism and geo-political strategising represented by the Cold War intelligence practices at senior levels of the CIA and its forerunners, allowed for an attentiveness to and cultivation of ambiguity that presented an invaluable means for monitoring, evaluating, manipulating and deceiving the other. Ambiguity and the mental conflict it discloses - or, indeed, creates is at once a diagnostic tool, to the extent that it systematizes potentially antagonistic or threatening intentions, and a critical weapon to the extent that it creates doubts, uncertainties and the possibilities for divergences in the field of action in which it is at work. For the assiduous operative holed up in an office in Langley, in Ludovisi in Rome or in St James's in London, applying the same scrupulous attention to textual detail and the nuances of phrase in a covert operation such as HT/Lingual as would once have been applied to a reading of a poem by Ezra Pound or a letter composed to ee cummings appears as a geopolitical imperative and defense of imperiled imperial values.
See Michael Holzman, James Jesus Angleton. The CIA and the Craft of Counterintelligence (Amhert: Massachusetts University Press, 2008) http://books.google.com/books?id=H8q_zVR_5EYC&printsec=frontcover
Holzman offers some new information on Angleton’s personal life and poetic interests, but his recounting of Angleton’s intelligence career follows the usual well-worn tracks. He does, however, give the earlier years their due instead of hurtling into the 1960s like most other writers. Holzman’s research is reasonably thorough, but for a literary critic he uses secondary sources with a surprisingly unquestioning attitude, and he makes many careless mistakes with dates, organizations, and people. The narrative is cluttered with several pedantic or politically loaded asides and digressions into CIA and FBI activities that Angleton was aware of but not directly involved in, such as anti-Castro plots and COINTELPRO. The extensive treatment of MHCHAOS repeats much of what has been known since the Church Committee report of 1976 and serves as a set piece for Holzman to express his moral outrage at the “STASI-like mentality” (44) behind the US government’s post-9/11 counterterrorism and internal security measures. https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/vol53no4/201ccunning-passages-contrived-corridors201d.html
The movement is from the document to the text and from there, through close reading, to the other and their intentions. With suitably muted ambiguity, Empson argued that the fundamental situation, whether it deserves to be called ambiguous or not, is that a word or a grammatical structure is effective in several ways at once”.
In analyzing the statement made by a sentence (having, no doubt, fixed on the statement by an apprehension of the implications of the sentence), one would continually be dealing with a sort of ambiguity due to metaphors, made clear by Mr. Herbert Read in English Prose Style ; because metaphor, more or less taken for granted (so as to be unconscious), is the normal mode of development of a language. 'Words used as epithets are words used to analyze a direct statement,' whereas 'metaphor is the synthesis of several units of observation into one commanding image; it is the expression of a complex idea, not by analysis, nor by direct statement, but by a sudden perception of an objective relation'. One thing is said to be like another, and they have several different properties in virtue of which they are alike.
William Empson, The Seven Types of Ambiguity 2nd Edition (London, Chatto and Windus, 1949) p.2. http://ia600308.us.archive.org/32/items/seventypesofambi030525mbp/seventypesofambi030525mbp.pdf
Acknowledging the claims of his critics, that almost anything could be considered ambiguous given the expansive understanding of the notion that The Seven Types of Ambiguity exhibits, Empson defends his position by arguing for the [something about scientific certainties]. Incipit New Criticism and the strategy of close reading. Incipit equally James Jesus Angleton and the newly minted position of the CIA's Head of Counter-Intelligence.
New Criticism, as the practice was called at Yale, concerned itself not with literary history and the personality of authors, but with the specific use poems made of language on the page. If fostered an interest in multiple levels of meaning, ambivalence, paradox, wit, puns and the peculiarities of Sprachgefühl: all devices on which cryptic codes or obscure messages might draw. {..} As Holzman points out, the New Critical methodology indicates that “read with sufficient care, all texts, no matter how throughly encoded, would yield at least two messages: the overt meaning and the hidden meaning; the latter inherent in some larger pattern, visible only to the elect”.
For the gray eminence determined to exercise the strategic calculus of statecraft, it takes but a small permutation of the terms involved in Empson's claim that the machinations of ambiguity are among the very roots of poetry to find an artful beauty in deception.
'To talk of many things: of shoes—and ships—and sealing wax—of cabbages—and kings'. This is a quotation from Lewis Carroll’s famous nonsense poem ‘the Walrus and the Carpenter’, which serves as a useful peg on which to hang much of the discussion of the digital environment and the issues that troubled the Verbindingen/Jonctions meeting in Brussels in November 2009. The poem opens with these two verses:
The sun was shining on the sea, Shining with all his might: He did his very best to make The billows smooth and bright-- And this was odd, because it was The middle of the night. |
The moon was shining sulkily, Because she thought the sun Had got no business to be there After the day was done-- "It's very rude of him," she said, "To come and spoil the fun!" |
The poem is self evidently nonsense; but for it to work as nonsense it must have some reference. The sun does not shine in the middle of the night; but the sun does make the ‘billows smooth and bright’ and we can describe the moon as sometimes shining ‘sulkily’. Reference to the familiar and, if you like ‘authentic’ is important when we consider information in either the analogue or digital format; but especially in the digital where naïve users and sometimes not so naive users seem to be much more trusting and gullible. At a click of a mouse it is possible to make moon shine sulkily and the sun to shine on a midnight scene. There are many opportunities to ‘spoil the fun’ or to have fun, depending on your perspective. With my colleagues James Currall and Susan Stuart, I have explored the whole notion of authenticity in a paper titled ‘Authenticity – A Red herring’ that was published in the Journal of Applied Logic 6(4) in 2008 in which we argue that authenticity is always a retrospective activity dependent on embedded tokens that must have reference to be either valid or to deceive.
However, for literary critics and intelligence operatives working in the nascent era of mass media, with the still unchallenged cultural hegemony of the book and an education in literature as yet untroubled by the tensions to which the presence of minorities would expose the canon, the kind of ambiguity to which their eyes and ears were sensitive could be seen to arise from the intentionality and mental conflict of individuals immersed in a single language, and what is more, a language that could be considered the bearer of largely consensual, but somewhat threatened cultural values. Whilst for Empson the concern was one of bringing language under control exploring and exploiting the covert action of ambiguity, practising New Criticism CIA-style was dependent on the idea that cracks and faults in the use of language systematize an intention that is often undisclosed, betraying a form of mental conflict the disclosure of which matters for the sake of national security. Little matter that the intention could be the much fantasized one of some threat to world-historical destiny, ambiguity (a detail effective in several ways at once, alternate meanings resolved into one, unconnected meanings given simultaneously, combined meanings indicating a complicated state of mind, fortunate confusion, irrelevance provoking interpretation, full contradiction) are indicators of deception and thus indicative of a forthcoming action, that must be thwarted, turned or inhibited, influenced by the production of material that selectively guides. The conviction of Angleton's practical criticism is that the other is always the bearer of a hidden message that close reading can disclose, and if it can't, if ambiguity cannot be resolved, then there are other techniques available for disclosing or producing hidden truths.
Terence Hawkes makes the crucial point that whilst Empson may have thought ambiguity would never be resolvable, this appears not to have been the case for Angleton. See Terence Hawkes 'William Empson's influence on the CIA' Times Literary Supplement June 10th 2009. http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article6469054.ece
Empson's British reflection that ambiguity is the heart of the heart and soul of language offers quite different proposals. Had Angleton misread Empson? Wink's earlier study cites Angleton's animus against “the amateur's tendency to attempt to reconcile conflicting statements, as thought both might be true, rather than both being false”. But Empson {…} identified a kind of universal, all-purpose ambiguity in human relations which melted simple-hearted trust and wrought havoc with lame notions of truth and clarity.
Naturally, if the other isn't behaving deceptively before the adoption of counter-measures, you can be sure that they will afterwards, as the myriad forms of blowback attest.
A reading of the next verse allows us to explore this theme.
The sea was wet as wet could be, The sands were dry as dry. You could not see a cloud, because No cloud was in the sky: No birds were flying overhead-- There were no birds to fly.
Verification of an information object depends on the presence or absence of tokens, such as dates, signatures, addresses, forms of salutation and valediction and so on; but sometimes there may have been no ‘cloud’, no ‘bird’. In other words the tokens are deliberately omitted, often because the parties know each other well and can identify themselves simply from the handwriting. Some commentators tie themselves into knots in trying to decide whether a document that lacks formal tokens is a record or not. It has to be remembered that much familial correspondence was never and is not intended to be used as proof by third parties or those outside the family circle or, if you like, the epistemic community. This is why in the article we wrote, we introduced the notion of different levels of binding depending on the purpose of the document. For example a testament or the title deeds to property need strong binding if they are to be legally admissible, whereas a love letter needs much lesser binding as there is trust between the parties. These analogue practices, which were developed over centuries, have not migrated seamlessly into the digital environment, partly because when networked computers were introduced they encourage informality and many of those who used them were unfamiliar with the processes of record creation and custody. They had had secretaries to do that for them. Consequently many of the tokens associated with analogue practice vanished, such as headers, dates, salutations, valedictions and references. This change is nowhere more apparent than in email. One result of the collapse of record keeping practices is that information objects simply become stand alone objects arbitrarily allocated to so-called files, both by the operator and by the systems.
But the world today is a world of scripts, of databases, of data structures and algorithms, a world of machines as much as of texts or documents. Equivocal language includes not only the semantic richnesses of Shakespearean diction and the stutterphonics of Gertrude Stein but also the arid dryness and obsessively repetitive ordering of assembly language and the fanatical deductive hierarchies of first order predicate calculus. Likewise, the intentional action of an individual is only a limit case of a more general and more dispersed array of forms of agency, working with us, against us, with each other against each other: humans talking to machines, machines talking to humans, machines talking to machines and so on. In such circumstances, ambiguity is more helpfully understood as something that arises not from conflicted or covertly oppositional intentions but from the jarring and clashing, the mutating modulations of media systems, in which problematic zones of indeterminacy arise because no system ever exists in isolation and no system is ever truly 'closed'.
The Walrus and the Carpenter Were walking close at hand; They wept like anything to see Such quantities of sand: "If this were only cleared away," They said, "it would be grand!" |
"If seven maids with seven mops Swept it for half a year. Do you suppose," the Walrus said, "That they could get it clear?" "I doubt it," said the Carpenter, And shed a bitter tear. |
When the Walrus and the Carpenter weep to see such ‘quantities of sand’, they could be speaking for any of us who wants to find information that has been reduced to single objects in a digital morass. We would all agree that if it ‘were only cleared away, then it would be grand’. As the Carpenter observed it is not as easy as that. Digital systems depend on the ability to aggregate and disaggregate data, creating one to many relationships. This happens in two ways; through free text searching as in most search engines and through the addition of metadata to individual objects that allows them to be linked, usually less ambiguously, and is most commonly found in dedicated systems, such as accounts or some, but no means all, electronic data records management systems (EDRMS). When confronted with legacy EDRMS many archivists and curators shed bitter tears, as when viewed retrospectively these independent digital information objects lack either reference or tokens that might give them any useful identity. Unlike analogue scraps of paper there are no embedded referents, such as handwriting, watermarks or marginalia. Forensic investigation might help, but it is expensive. This situation is complicated in the digital by the ease with which it is possible to fabricate tokens that can be used for authentication.
The explicit deductive orderings of formal languages may well have presented the advantage of avoiding the evil that Tarski felt to be inherent in natural languages, but it is never quite possible to eradicate the interaction of formal systems with natural languages whether that be in the objectlanguages that formalisms seek to ground and explicate, or in the now mundane interactions between programmed machines and their human users. When systems interact, the patterns of behavior that they exhibit, their potential for mutual misinterpretation, grows from something arising between them, a crack, a fault or a translation failure, which then becomes a critical factor composing their internal states and evolutionary dynamic. Gilles Deleuze, borrowing from Leibniz, the genial philosopher of mathematical systems, theorizes the central role of ambiguous signsin their relationship with the bifurcations that emerge around the singular points of a system. They are, he says, no longer faced with an individuated world constituted by means of already fixed singularities, organized into convergent series....we are now faced with the aleatory point of singular points , with the ambiguous sign of singularities....”.
And no less than the form of the personal, the transcendental field of sense must exclude the form of the general and the form of the individual. For the first characterizes only a subject which manifest itself; but the second characterizes only objective classes and properties which are signified; and the third characterizes only denotable systems which are individuated in an objective manner, referring to subjective points of view which are themselves individuating and designating.
Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, p.114 http://books.google.com/books?id=PKfBPrRda4sC&printsec=frontcover
But far from reducing the opportunities for manipulation and deception, the new situation of systemic ambiguity opens up and extends the scope of counter-intelligence operations for the astute media operative. Of course, under such circumstances, maintaining the prerogatives of a dominant imperial center becomes a considerable challenge, which is perhaps one reason to be thankful that many of the tools and techniques for detecting and tracking the ambiguities that portend mental conflict and social antagonismNOTE can be provisionally conferred on the algorithms and data structures of dataveillance and forensic computing technologies. Notwithstanding, in a period in which it is difficult to trace patterns of conflict and the emergence of antagonisms back to a single binary opposition with any degree of plausibility, the gray zones of gray media call for new forms of investigation and a more nuanced approach to the kinds of tensions and patterns of interference that arise. If the operatives of the cold war could reserve for themselves the position of l'éminence grise, the distant advisor to the executive power, the new spaces of collectively intelligent networks and the asymmetrical relations these put in place demand instead the more difficult position of l'immanence grise.
A specific characteristic of the systemic ambiguity whose mise en stratageme we are mapping out here is that it is the expression of an objective indeterminacy. Ambiguity is not the merely subjective form of mental conflict, as it is in Empson. See Deleuze ibid and equally Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, where the ambiguous sign is linked to Henry James as much as to Leibniz.
"O Oysters, come and walk with us!" The Walrus did beseech. "A pleasant walk, a pleasant talk, Along the briny beach: We cannot do with more than four, To give a hand to each." |
The eldest Oyster looked at him, But never a word he said: The eldest Oyster winked his eye, And shook his heavy head-- Meaning to say he did not choose To leave the oyster-bed. |
This is the subject of the next two verses of the poem where the naïve and innocent baby oysters are seduced by the Walrus into taking a ‘pleasant walk’ along the beach that can have only one outcome. In the analogue world it is much easier to recognize inauthentic tokens than in the digital. There is a kinesthetic encounter with the physical object that extends beyond the content itself to its physicality – the feel of the paper, its smell, its size and shape and so on, which is entirely lacking in the digital. You have only go to think of the fishing scams that inundate our email accounts, which have become increasingly more sophisticated and often borrow templates, logos and other ingredients from genuine sites. Although the majority of users approach such scams with caution, some do not and get caught, like the baby oysters in a web of deceit. The problem does not, of course stop there as in the digital, because of the lack of tokens that provide the necessary binding, objects can easily be taken out of context and made to appear to purport to be something that they are not. In other words they possess a dangerous ambiguity. However the processes and procedure required to provide reference and context are expensive and need to be balanced against risk. James Currall and I explored the issue of managing information in the digital environment in a report on Effective Records Management, which can be found at http://www.gla.ac.uk/InfoStrat/ERM/. Much of the thinking about managing information confuses keeping records for administrative efficiency and for purposes of external accountability. These are not one and the same and it would be possible to imagine a situation where all the resources of an organization were devoted to accountability that no other business was transacted. It is never cost effective to create information regimes that would save all the baby oysters from their fate.
Understanding that ambiguity is as dispersed as the forms of mediation that make up agency and that confer a consistency on the links and connections of power relationships is crucial to the development of an adequate strategic calculus. Of course, the best course of action in many circumstances is to condense these links and to focus on the ways that they sometimes converge in and on individuals the proverbial hypothesis of the weakest link in the chain is often valid. But it is a bit too easy to mistake the patterns of behavior of nodes in a network for the intentions of a subject: pattern recognition provides a comfortable resolution of the problems that systemic ambiguity poses. However, if all you end up with when planning out your strategic calculus vis a vis others is the undisclosed intentions of subjects, then you have missed the collective, the mechanic, the practice, and you have likely turned the ambiguities of the other to the balance sheet of the moral account. As the orchid grower knows, the deception is not intentional, it is vital.
In the most banal of interactions, systemic ambiguity typically manifests itself as user error”.NOTE The erroneous ways of the user, like the bugs that our immersion in natural languages produce when brought into conjunction with formal systems, testify to the evil that an open semantics, a semantics that can't be parsed in a finite series of deductively closed steps bears within it. The explicitness of the rules according to which formal systems operate in this way works to pass judgment on the transparency of the actions and statements of whatever those systems are brought to bear against whether that be in the form of the quantifiable cataloging of actions in an audit trail, the policy and procedures painstakingly and minutely enumerated in the documents of corporate governance, or the more mundane actions involved in producing an electronic document. The script that is followed in a call center confers a metric on the movements of persuasion and influence in a conversation, providing an external measure on the joy of speech which works its way into the mental devices used to parse language. The caller adjusts tack accordingly and the pragmatics of the speech situation twist subtly: have a nice day now means that the supervisor can stop listening in to the conversation. Actions which might once have been performed as if they were second nature, judgments that may once have been formulated as a routine element of local knowledge, are accomplished haltingly, the uncertainties that emerge where one system decodes and recodes another generate patterns of behavior that conflict with the newly framed norm.
cf. Marvin Minsky, 'Jokes and their Relation to the Cognitive Unconscious'
User error increases to the extent that divergences from the norm increase: conflicted mentality, easy to blame on stupidity and a failure to internalize new norms of production (what do you mean, you haven't read the manual?) is more a sign of the tense bifurcations that are brought into play in a shifting ecology of media forms. Beyond a certain threshold, persistent user error may be cast as deviance, motivational deficit, a lack of adhesion to the creed expressed in the mission statement, a failure to meet the requirements specified in the job description, a failure of the education system, a weakness in the labor market. You just can't get the staff these days....”
But four young Oysters hurried up, All eager for the treat: Their coats were brushed, their faces washed, Their shoes were clean and neat-- And this was odd, because, you know, They hadn't any feet |
Behavior in the on-line environment is puzzling, as unlike in the analogue users seem much more willing to suspend their disbelief or let down their guard like the young oysters and behave uncharacteristically – doing things, such as walking and washing their faces in the case of oysters, which they either cannot do in the analogue or would not do. We can see that very clearly in the case of avatars in second life where people can take on personas that they do not possess in reality. Such behavior is not confined to avatars but extend to social network sites sometimes with distressing and even disastrous consequences. The explanation is complex; but must include the absence of tokens and associated processes familiar in the analogue and the very tractability of the Internet that inhibits the reflection and reflexivity which prompts questions about authenticity and veracity in the analogue. This still does not explain fully why people are willing to disclose very personal information on the web in a way that they would never dream of doing in the analogue environment. It is inconceivable that anyone would divulge their bank account details, their passport number or sexual preferences to someone who came knocking at the door; but this is just what happens on the web and in social network sites. Such behavior is as incomprehensible as the young oysters ‘hopping though the frothy waves’ on their way to be eaten.
The resolution of systemic ambiguity through the attribution of user error is itself fraught with anxiety. It is difficult to escape the assumption that the shape of actions that takes form in media systems must ultimately be understood in terms of what computers still can't do,NOTE implying that there is ultimately a human element that takes ultimate responsibility for the warps and shifts in a techno-social environment. Likewise, it proves difficult to conceptualize formal and natural systems without practically introducing some hierarchy between them. The three C thinking that pervades the architectures of corporate accountability offers the classic double-edged sword here: to be in charge of and take responsibility for a system, equally means accepting a level of responsibility for its failure: if your staff really are that stupid, the suspicion may of course arise that you are a cretin too. But equally and the recent problems in the financial markets offer the most obvious example here it is in the sedulous dedication to conform one's actions and judgments to the letter of what a complex technological support systems tell you to be the case that the most catastrophic stupidity arises. Once again, legacy systems from a earlier era of conflict provide the best pointers. The case of Kim Philby, frequently thought of as the 'perfect' spy, shows that it is in the most exemplary, the least ambiguous behavior, the most dedicated adherence to norms and the most admirable professionalism, that the greatest danger lies, ultimately giving rise to the recurrent concern "who - or what - is running who?" In a world where the problem has changed and ambiguity has become systemic, it is perhaps in the Zen-like fluid adaptation to the perfections of Code, the seamlessness of flowing work, in the tireless dedication to the commands of the machine, in the willed closing of any gap between user and algorithm, that the greatest danger lies, because the absence of uncertainty, signals that the compliant user is being used and code, as they say, has become law.
The debates over artificial intelligence are a useful indicator of terms of reference of corporate power structures. If machines do all the work, the human command structure provides a convenient mechanism for apportioning responsibility. See Harry Collins and Trevor Pinch, The Shape of Actions, Hubert Dreyfus, What Computers Still Can't Do.
The Walrus and the Carpenter Walked on a mile or so, And then they rested on a rock Conveniently low: And all the little Oysters stood And waited in a row. |
"The time has come," the Walrus said, "To talk of many things: Of shoes--and ships--and sealing-wax-- Of cabbages--and kings-- And why the sea is boiling hot-- And whether pigs have wings." |
Here the little Oysters have a moment for reflection while the Walrus addresses them in a rhyming nonsense. These very associations present some intriguing conjunctions. It may not be accidental that kings are associated with sealing wax as their authority was and is often certified by elaborate waxen seals appended to decrees. Seals are not of course confined to kings; but extend across the social scale. In Japan today for all its high-tech, everyone has a seal from the humble, cabbages if you like, to the Emperor. Their size and shape reflect the status of the user. Size and grandeur are more apparent in an analogue encounter than in the digital where everything can be made to fit the screen or some discrete template, such as a thumbnail. The fact that the sea is more often than not freezing cold, can only be discovered by physically putting your foot in it. In the worlds of second life and gaming it can easily become boiling hot and pigs can indeed have wings, negating the whole purpose of an adynaton as a figure of speech. It is not just that the world can be turned upside down; the danger is that users can come to believe that it has.
Somewhat late in the day, management theory discovered that within organizations, ambiguity can have a useful strategic function. As a 'strategy in organizational communication', ambiguity fosters 'unified diversity' (what the Ancient Greeks would have called homonia we don't agree but it sounds like we do), maintains positions of privilege, promotes plausible deniability and facilitates organizational change. Now, quite aside from giving the scheming executive an efficiency-based rationale for his or her power games and the invaluable addition of an extra equivocation in his or her action (a point that is not usually considered in communication and organization theory), management theory focus somewhat exclusively on verbal (written and oral) communication, precluding a more complete appreciation of colours in the operative's palette.NOTE Indeed, the research focus on linguistic communication can itself have useful strategic outcomes, since it removes attention from the shifting environment in which that communication operates.NOTE
Typically, consideration is given to 'symbolic action'. See Eisenberg ibid.
But by the end of the 1980s, a rapidly growing body of action-oriented research had emerg. The core constructs of this actionist cluster are culture, meaning/messages, symbolism and ambiguity. Some applications of his cluster focus on the ways in which organizational communication practices and cultural artifacts articulate and reflect the shared meanings of a social collective (Cheney & Vibbert, 1987; Smirch & Calas, 1987; Triandis & Albert, 1987). Others examine the processes through which meanings become shared and cultures and subcultures are formed and sustained through symbolic action (Eisenberg & Riley, 1988; Huber & Daft, 1987; Krone et al., 1987; Tompkins, 1987). http://books.google.com/books?id=6fumvnF6BsEC&pg=PA55&lpg=PA55&dq=symbolic+action+eisenberg&source=bl&ots=E2JAp_5F-y&sig=Vi4ltYtGBMS2xDDpErH5yJT1D_k&hl=en&ei=ilzJTenQNMqDOuDs9eEH&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&sqi=2&ved=0CBUQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=symbolic%20action%20eisenberg&f=falsecf. 'Knowledge Creation' and discussion of tacit knowledge.
But systemic ambiguity suggests that it is in the subtly shifting composition of the techno-social environment, the media ecology, that the really efficacious operations of uncertainty, equivocation, hesitation and other forms of deviation and deception occur. For digital technologies, the introduction of a new piece of software produces a new enunciative 'situation', a style of statements and the engendering of particular forms of interaction. Not unreasonably, the perplexed user, at a loss to deal with a machine that doesn't easily disclose its intentions (it rarely says 'work harder' or 'think less'), frequently raises the question of what the machine wants, and in an extension of transferential dynamic, repairs the gaps in the discourse of the machine ceding authority to a machine, which is thus assumed to somehow know better.NOTE But as critics of both analysis and artificial intelligence have suggested, the assumption that in such situations the appearance that one thinks that the other has some profound knowledge is itself a ruse, a game.
The concept of 'repair' comes from ethnomethodology. It is used by Collins and Pinch in their work. The use made of it here is slightly different. See Collins and Pinch The Shape of Actions op.cit.
"But wait a bit," the Oysters cried, "Before we have our chat; For some of us are out of breath, And all of us are fat!" "No hurry!" said the Carpenter. They thanked him much for that. |
"A loaf of bread," the Walrus said, "Is what we chiefly need: Pepper and vinegar besides Are very good indeed-- Now if you're ready, Oysters dear, We can begin to feed." |
This was to be the little oysters’ undoing as they failed to comprehend that pepper and vinegar meant only one thing for them. As we have already seen context is present in the analogue in the way that it is more often than not in the digital, but providing it comes at a price. Our work in the Effective Records Management project confirmed that users will only add contextual metadata if they are confident it will add value to their working practices, such as reducing the chance of being eaten. If it simply imposes another chore it will either never get done at all or be done carelessly. The problem is that analogue practices do not transfer easily into the digital environment. There has to be substantial business process re-engineering which combines the power of digital utilities with an understanding of the function of analogue processes. Too often digital systems have been redesigned with no attention to existing practice in the mistaken belief that the new technology has rendered the analogue obsolete and nothing can be learned from it. Information of itself has no value and, as we all know from the Dotcome bubble. My colleague James Currall in a pioneering project looked for ways of arriving at some approximation of value of such an intangible assets in the espida project by drawing on the balanced scorecard methodology. Details can be found at http://www.gla.ac.uk/espida/documentation.shtml.
It is not surprising then that in a complex ecology of human and non-human agents, in which unstable mediators mediate unstable media that systemic ambiguity is resolved by prompt territorialisation on one or other of the systems in relation: the philosopher's view, that anyone who tries to say more than one thing at once is a two-headed monster or a talking plant could equally be the position of software application in relation to the end user, requiring that s/he interact with it on a step by step basis. But too prompt a resolution of ambiguity precludes an understanding of the machinations that it accomplishes for philosophy, that meant a decisive misunderstanding of politics, which would continue in its sophisticated ways to the dismay of critical rationality.
Crucially, systemic ambiguity is as much about the production as it is about the deciphering of signs. Becoming able to read the shifting balance and distribution of forces in fluctuating patterns of uncertain signs is one thing. Being able to produce such signs, to turn them to your advantage, is another. Granted, the introduction of a new technology in the workplace (or the home little difference here) often gives rise unintentionally to the ambiguities inherent in uncertain translations from one language to another, one technology to another, one coding system to another. In these circumstances, actions which might otherwise be interpreted as malevolent powerplay can easily be recast as something else. Reskilling or modernizing a workforce can be accomplished by exploiting the hesitations that arise over the interpretation of a new system (get rid of these expensive, technophobic old timers). Equally, a more adaptable, more flexible generation, anxious over the cultural privileges that accrue to older media systems, can easily be persuaded to find in the imperfect translation from one system to another, a failing and a weakness of a code or a language that lacks the familiarity of the easy acquisition. What appears truly difficult in such circumstances, is to maintain and affirm the ambiguity as such. This is because the risk associated with operating with and within the ambiguous is the risk associated with the instability and reversibility of power relationsNOTE as such. Uncertainty can communicate with the perception of a lack of power and an inability to act decisively. Prolonging the indeterminacy that ambiguous signs express means, almost by definition, increasing the likelihood of contestation. When one system does not succeed in subordinating another, the translation failures that symptomatise this fault or disturbance, whether glossed as user error, bugs, bad design or system unavailability or indeed something more insidious point to aberrations in the mediation process and a trial of strength gone wrong.NOTE In a sense this is the problem of the early convergence on a solution by the intelligent algorithms of connectionist systems.
That power relations are inherently reversible is a point that Foucault, often considered intolerably pessimistic, makes with humour. Maurizio Lazzarato has extended this insight in his work on 'les intermittents du spectacle'. However, Lazzarato prefers to see ambiguity as something separate from the techniques, technologies, practices which are used to codify and regulate behaviour. On the contrary, if power relations are formed and (literally) formatted through technologies, holding to and exploiting their reversibility entails exploring the ambiguities created by those regularising technologies themselves. See Maurizio Lazzarato Expérimentations Politiques
On trials of strength and the problems of generalized translation failure, see Bruno Latour 'Irreductions' in The Pasteurisation of France, Science in Action and the first half of Graham Harman, Prince of Networks. Bruno Latour and Metaphysics.
"But not on us!" the Oysters cried, Turning a little blue. "After such kindness, that would be A dismal thing to do!" "The night is fine," the Walrus said. "Do you admire the view? |
"It was so kind of you to come! And you are very nice!" The Carpenter said nothing but "Cut us another slice: I wish you were not quite so deaf-- I've had to ask you twice!" |
Trust is the nub of the poem. It is an overworked expression that is enjoying a considerable currency as a result of the financial crisis. In many information exchanges trust is implicit and provides the foundation for the economy to function effectively. An erosion of trust leads inevitably to market dislocation. Trusted relationships are in some sense contractual. The little oysters trusted the Walrus and the Carpenter to take them for a walk, whereas the eldest oyster had no such illusions. He, perhaps, had a moral obligation to warn the little oysters; but they may have had only themselves to blame. Contracts used to be based firmly on the principle of caveat emptor; but this is now much less the case particularly when a provider knowingly enters into a contract that the purchaser cannot discharge, for example by making mortgages available at unrealistic multiples of annual earnings. This is equivalent to the Walrus and the Carpenter taking the little oysters for a walk with the only intention of eating them. In addressing the question of trust in the digital environment, we need to be careful to draw a distinction between trust and trustworthiness. The little oysters were very trusting; but neither the Walrus and the Carpenter nor the eldest oyster can be described as trustworthy. Many users of the Internet are trusting; but many providers are not and this raises important ethical issues, particularly as the technology has the ability to capture and store so much information about user behavior and preferences and distribute it globally.
"It seems a shame," the Walrus said, "To play them such a trick, After we've brought them out so far, And made them trot so quick!" The Carpenter said nothing but "The butter's spread too thick!" |
"I weep for you," the Walrus said: "I deeply sympathize." With sobs and tears he sorted out Those of the largest size, Holding his pocket-handkerchief Before his streaming eyes. |
This moral dilemma is very apparent in the reaction of the Walrus and the Carpenter to their meal. In the digital environment the contrast is not so sharply drawn; but the consequences can be just as devastating for people, who through no fault of their own, have their identity stolen or misappropriated, have their credit ratings downgraded or are bombarded will all sorts of unwelcome email as a result of disclosing preferences and personal details. Many providers simply regard this as fair game and can argue persuasively that by harvesting personal data they can improve user services. If it is, should it not come with some form of health warning?
"O Oysters," said the Carpenter, "You've had a pleasant run! Shall we be trotting home again?' But answer came there none-- And this was scarcely odd, because They'd eaten every one.
There is no more to say – this is systemic risk to a fault and all that is left for providers to do is to provide for themselves, as the users have all fled or possibly become providers.