Monthly Archives: November 2011

More notes from Medell??n, Colombia

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The role of the City in Infrastructural Extension

An interesting aspect of the Medellín story in the last post is not just the enormous success of EPM, but also the role of the City.

Among key challenges with respect to the provision of municipal utility services today (in my opinion) is the strong current in the academic, practitioner, and donor agency literature that local government’s role in the provision of utility services is essentially to stay out of the way. The utility is to be as independent from municipal government as possible, and the municipal government should not interfere. I see a couple of problems with this: (1) ensuring access to and the consumption of services like water involves social action that is beyond the scope of utilities; and (2) the success of utilities cannot be made sustainable in municipalities that are not themselves stable, i.e. the health of municipalities has a direct baring of the health of local utilities. I will deal with point (1) below and point (2) in the next post on Canada.

In the case of Medellín, despite the fact that they have 100% coverage (or very close) in water, sewer, and electricity throughout the urban region, they have a significant problem with access to consumption. Due to high levels of poverty and displacement within and to the city, there are also high levels of disconnection from utility services. Several programs at the state, municipal, and utility level try to help to improve the economic access of poor households (as physical access already exists). On the state level, these include nation-wide cross-subsidy requirement from wealthy to poor neighborhoods and price regulation. On the municipal level, programs include a monthly water allowance of 2.5m3 per person per month for poor households (the “minimo vital”) that is paid for by the City, as well as a version of Contratación Social in which the city pays for the infrastructure extension done by EPM instead of the community taking on a loan from the company.

In addition, a probably more interestingly, the City has implemented a range of programs to help raise the standard of living in marginalized barrios. In a presentation on the “minimo vital” at last week’s Interamerican Dialogue on Water, Mauricio Valencia Correa, a municipal representative, discussed the relevance and potential impact of the “minimo vital” as one tool among a series aimed at improving the quality of life and reducing inequality in the City. The “minimo vital” was of no relevance without a host of other programs including, the construction of quality day cares, libraries and colleges in poor neighborhoods, programs to improve mobility and livability (like stairs on the steep paths, paved walkways etc.) and transportation access like the Metrocable (metro by cable car) to the marginalized neighborhoods (see pictures).

I think that this makes a very important point. This is that access to water services is not strictly a technical problem to be solved by utilities. Rather, it speaks to broader social problems that must involve local government in their resolution. These include improvements to social cohesion, social equity and mobility, education, opportunities for women (day care), and quality of life. Without these, access to a “minimo vital” in water means very little. For utility services to be accessible in a meaningful and sustainable way, a holistic approach to the municipality must be taken rather than one that seeks to separate utilities from municipalities and focus on services while ignoring broader social problems.

 

Respecifying infrastructures politically and economically

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As the British government is getting ready to announce a commitment of £5bn of public funding to a massive investment plan in infrastructures over the next couple of days, I am wondering how infrastructures sometimes are respecified in the redistribution of collective resources. The British government has been cutting back on public sector expenditures in almost all areas, including many types of support that would, I think, be included in sociological notions of infrastructure (like subsidies in transport, communication, education etc.). Now the rationale appears to be that some of that spending has to be redirected in order to attract private investment in infrastructures – while most of the cuts of course have remain as they were (and one immediately suspects more cuts will be forthcoming in order to support the “infrastructure boost”).

This is obviously another demonstration of how the scope of what is deemed a collectively indispensable infrastructure is subject of political spin and generally, I suspect, in any case much narrower than an exploration of instructures in terms of hybrid assemblages (or more broadly in STS terms) would have it. In this case, roads and energy are apparently deemed more essential than the “soft” human infrastructures within the collective, even in a service econony like the UK. Still, there is some discretion taken by policy-makers apparent here in defining the scope of the collectively indispensable more or less broadly. It may be worthwhile in exploring states’ contribution to the maintenance of infrastructures to look specifically at the fringes or gray areas where infrastructure policies are regularly accommodated. Political respecifications are also visible in attempts by interested private actors (investors, entrepreneurs, lobbyists etc.) to accommodate this scope, e.g. in the areas of housing and water mentioned in recent postings, particularly in Kathryn’s Medellín reports.

Conversely, there is also the question of how infrastructures are respecified economically in creating something like an infrastructure sector (as mentioned in the article from the Guardian linked above), i.e. as a type of aggregate market.

What are we to make of such political or economic respecifications (or re-assemblings) of infrastructures? Is it a reasonable strategy of sociological exploration confronting such respecifications be to go for the broadest possible understanding of infrastructures in order to effectively re-frame these more specific remediations? At the moment I feel tempted to say yes – but such a strategy would really beg for at least some kind of respecification that is genuinely sociological – if that can (or should?) indeed be re-assembled.

More notes from Medell??n, Colombia

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The Empresas Públicas de Medellín and Habilitación de Viviendas

Medellín is Colombia’s second largest city with a population of approximately 2.3 million. Like many large cities in Latin America, a significant portion of its population lives in extreme poverty. According to Colombia’s most recent census, conducted in 2005, 12.4 percent of the then population could not meet their basic needs (DANE, 2005). Medellín’s Development Plan for 2008-2011, registered the number of informal housing units at 85,168, or nearly 17 percent of all homes in the city (González Zapata, 2009, 129). Surveys conducted in the informal settlements of La Cruz, La Honda and Esfuerzos de Paz Uno, show a high percentage of displaced among their inhabitants (up to 76%), a predominance of female headed households (up to 65%), dependence on work in the informal economy (up to 70%), and a majority of persons earning less than the minimum wage (up to 90%) (Associación Cambiemos, 2010, RIOCBACH, 2010).

 The Empresas Públicas de Medellín (EPM, The Public Utility Companies of Medellín) is a multi-utility corporation owned by the city of Medellín, its sole shareholder to which it pays a minimum annual dividend of 30 % of net revenue. EPM provides water, sewer, gas, and electricity services in Medellín and in a number of other municipalities in the Department of Antioquia and Colombia. EPM’s net profits in 2010 were US$ 773.4 million of which US$ 450 million was transferred to the City of Medellin (EPM, 2011a). It is among the City’s primary employers with 5,830 employees. EPM is also the majority shareholder in a range of affiliates across utility sectors; the “Grupo EPM” boasts over 10 million clients and 10,644 employees (Empresas Públicas de Medellín, 2011b).

Through a program called Habilitación de Viviendas (rehabilitation of homes), EPM has been extending utility networks to the city’s marginal inhabitants since 1964. This program provides long-term low-interest loans to marginal neighborhoods in order to enable them to pay for infrastructure extension. Today, 35 percent of EPM’s “clientes” have become so through this program.

In 1998, EPM modified the program to “Contratación Social” (social contracting). Instead of contracting to a private construction firm to do the work for Habilitación de Viviendas, EPM contracts to the local community leadership (the JAC), which hires all local labor. The program helps to generate employment, results in a variety of urban improvements (stair cases, reinforcement of walls, paved walkways etc), generates profits in the community, results in better infrastructure, and helps to build the JAC’s capacity to continue acting as a contractor for other projects in the City, thus generating more local employment and income.

Photos @Juan A. Aristizabal 2011

Greetings from the 7th Interamerican Dialogue on Water

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In Medellín this week (November 13 to 19), among a host of other events, is the 7th Interamerican Dialogue on Water (http://d7.rirh.org/). This conference takes place every three years. It is meant to act as a regional conference in order to prepare documents on five core themes as contributions to the World Water Forum in Marseille, France in February 2012. The themes included: water governance, a culture of water, financial sustainability, managing knowledge and information, and confronting challenges and needs.

The conference was organized try to get as much input from all the participants as possible. The first three days were organized along the “world cafe” model. A “mesa” or a round table was held for each core theme and participants (more than 1000) could pick which theme was on interest to them. Over two days the mesas met many times and in each, the group was broken up in nine further sub themes and in groups of 4 or 5 everyone circled the room to discuss themes, come up with key issues, later strategies, and later commitments. The leaders of each mesa worked long hours to develop a synthesis document on the core theme that was presented to large assembly on the last day of the conference.

There were also side working groups according to interest group (utility operators, transboundary issues, governance, rotary…) as well as panel presentations on issues such as water and energy, ecosystems etc.

The model of the conference was extraordinary for facilitating the development of relationships between people within such a large group by given everyone a chance to work together. This was very fruitful.

One of the things that struck me though was the overlap between the outcomes of the working groups on the key themes. Many issues kept popping up that could be said to fall into the governance category (bringing us back to questions of the breadth and utility of the concept). People were often concerned with oversight, accountability and transparency, and the human right to water came up again and again.

One interesting intervention that I heard on this point was from the head of the water division of Medellin’s public utility EPM. In his presentation, he underscored the point that without a definition of what the human right means, it is rather inconsequential. For example does it mean free water in every home? Free water within a reasonable distance (say 100 m)? Does it mean water within a reasonable distance at an affordable price for each socio-economic group? He also made the point that the human right to water must involve the state. That reaching such a goal largely depends on improving people’s lives and socio-economic opportunities, it cannot default to utilities. A final thing he noted was the confusion between 100% infrastructural coverage and the right to water; without the ability to pay, access to infrastructure does not mean access to water.

I think these points deserve some attention. I have attached some pictures of the conference venue (including a concert given by a local band). In the next post, I will attach some pictures from the infrastructure extension projects in the disadvantaged barrios.

On "re-assembling" more than just the social…

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Jan and I, and student of mine, Alexander B. Kinney, wrote a book review of Latour’s “introduction that is not an introduction” to ANT, Reassembling the Social, for Spontaneous Generations.

I was reminded of this earlier today, about reassembling more than just the social, and so I reread this passage:

Even with these newly crafted tools fresh from the ANT workshop, Latour
has still not gone far enough. If we have to Reassemble the Social, then why
not Politics or Economics too? Why not the Law or the State or other modes of
existence Latour simply allows to stand un-reassembled? As an analytical strategy,
dropping the Social as a category of things is a good idea. But if we decide to take
Latour seriously, then we must be equally suspicious of the “political arena” or
“economic climate” too, and it surely does not mean that we empirically ignore
the onto-politics of Law, Politics, Economics, etc., if these are all just ways to
“arrange the collective.” What is missing is an idea of how to draw distinctions
between them analytically without reifying them in the process. The way that
“modes of existences” and “arrange the collective” are introduced in this book
leaves an aftertaste of bitter reification. How are we to distinguish between ways
of juridical, economic or scientific assembling? We are left without an answer,
just with the hint that this would need another book to reassemble each (Latour,
forthcoming). It is a good thing that the book ends trying to be constructive
and not merely de(con)structive; however, if we buy the ticket (the book) and
take the ride (read it), then we deserve more—we must either deconstruct more
in order to rebuild everything as a mere matter of associations or we must
say that anything made of “invisible” “matter” like markets, lawsuits, incentives,
management techniques, etc. is just as guilty as “the social” created by sociologists.

If sociology is now about tracing association, which I consider quite fun, then what is, for example, Political Science about, if properly reassembled?

I am really racking my brain about this and am not sure that reassembling gets us very far outside of sociology. Still, I refuse to say that Geography, for example, is not in need of some reassembling. The key might be “the social” versus sociology in general, hence, “the political” is what is in need of reassembling, or perhaps “the geographic” … hmmm, this is quite messy.

Networked infrastructure and the black box

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Greetings from Montreal, soon Medellín… some thoughts on opening the “black box”.

In the recent article Small technologies, big change (PHG 2011) that Nicolas drew your attention to, I was trying to bring geographical and STS approaches to networked infrastructure into interaction for the specific purpose of moving away from the “black box” metaphor of networked infrastructure.

In the geography literature, a variety of metaphors about infrastructure (e.g. exoskeleton, cyborg urbanism…) place networked infrastructure as stabilized and isolated from users. It supports their daily lives, but they do not interact with it or influence it. Similarly, in the large technical systems literature, LTS are taken as black boxed, and purposefully so. They are built for durability and immunity from users.

However, what I found in my research was that many utility managers actually seek to engage a variety of user groups in the management of the infrastructural network through the introduction of relatively simple technologies into homes and businesses. These technologies, which I dub mediating technologies, can have a significant impact of the network. For example, they can reduce the strain on network capacity and on the environment. The technologies that I examined included a variety of home and business retrofits to improve water efficiency (reduce consumption) as well as different types of software to assist homeowners and large industrial consumers to detect leakage beyond the property line, encouraging them to fix problems themselves.

So, not only was the LTS (in my case, water and sewer infrastructure) malleable rather than rigid, managers actively sought to open up the black box and integrate users into its management, rather than striving for invisibility. All this could be accomplished, not through a gargantuan unearthing and remodeling of the system, but through the addition of relative simple technologies to its peripheral nodes.

Here, STS theory on the interaction of users becomes very important because it tells us that users can interact with technology in a variety of unintended ways, producing results that were not the intention of the developers of that technology. Thus, with the purposeful integration of users into the management of LTS, they become both more malleable and less predictable.

Such a shift, from stabilized black box to malleable and interactive, has the potential to generate a variety of progressive benefits. In Montreal, where I live, for example, there is no water metering and thus very little user information about their relationship to the system. The black box is retained, as are high levels of consumption and leakage. In other communities in Canada, utility managers found that by increasing user information, through metering, and giving users the tools to manage their consumption (e.g. low flow devices), a variety of positive effects resulted. These included reduced consumption (and sewage outflows) and delayed infrastructure expansion.

In Medellín, where I’m heading, users are integrated into the system in a variety of ways. Beyond, the standard mediating technologies that I discuss in the article, users are integrated directly into the construction of the infrastructure. In order to create jobs in Medellín’s low-income barrios, in 1998, the local utility EPM began contracting to the barrio councils (the JACs) to build needed infrastructure. EPM guides the JACs through the process and the JACs hire all local labor. Both residents and EPM staff find that by employing local people to build the infrastructure, it is built to a much higher standard than when the utility contracted the work to private construction firms. The process also develops the capacity in the JAC and the community to monitor the new systems and alert EPM of any problems. Thus, the black box can be opened up in a variety of ways with a variety of interesting consequences.

A good case, and the role of compatibility in theory selection

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All, as promised, I would reveal some early review document about Govind Gopakumar‘s new book on water infrastructure in India named Transforming Urban Water Supply in India.

First, the book’s case selection is quite smart. India has a historical legacy of democratic social involvement of the public (a promise perhaps, between state and society) during the post-independence period. This context emerges, however, beset by global opportunities for growth and supra-state pressures for change. Infrastructure, fittingly, is stuck in the middle, especially when it comes to developing it, expanding it, and restructuring it. The case selection, therefore, becomes a good case to estimate, per the insights gathered by geographers and others interested in the expansion of neoliberal globalizaiton, whether or not the changes taking place in Indian urban infrastructure follow the trend toward “pervasive depoliticalization of public life” (Gopakumar 2012:4). Or, put another way,

Do global efforts erase existing political underpinnings and re-inscribe a fundamentally new political basis, or does the existing social and political environment continue to influence infrastructures in the face of global pressures? (Gopakumar 2012:5).

The question fits quite nicely with what Jan and I were thinking about as the new infrastructuralism. Govind’s research hints in many places, perhaps intentionally or perhaps he’s just feeling his way toward this or another new idea, of a broader theoretical contribution than is presented in the book. In this way, Govind’s book is somewhat bigger than it appears, both theoretically, but also literally, as the book is only 124 pages long.

Second, and here is a little more critique and a little less review, the book draws on David Harvey’s work, the Marxist geographer, Feenberg’s insights about technologies being designed to promote the interests of the powerful/influential, and Winner’s old (but still good) insight that technology shapes political life/reality in a way akin to how legislation does. What is sort of odd is that Pinch and Bijker’s piece on the social construction of technology (SCOT) plays a pivotal role in the theoretical build-up, especially insights about “relevant groups.” Now, SCOT has often been criticized for being apolitical or for ignoring issues related to power and politics (mainly, who is powerful enough to be “relevant,” if we must use the term power). For Govind, SCOT is nice because it allows him to distance himself from explaining infrastructural development and revision as merely moves toward purely technological or economic efficiency. However, this become a bridge to Winner, and wasn’t it Winner who wrote, famously, about the third step in SCOT analysis, of “opening the black and finding it empty” …

Govind Gopakumar on Water Infrastructure

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At the 4S meeting, Jan and I met Govind Gopakumar, who recently published a book on water infrastructure in India named Transforming Urban Water Supply in India.

The abstract:

The absence of water supply infrastructure is a critical issue that affects the sustainability of cities in the developing world and the quality of life of millions of people living in these cities. Urban India has probably the largest concentration of people in the world lacking safe access to these infrastructures.

This book is a unique study of the politics of water supply infrastructures in three metropolitan cities in contemporary India – Bangalore, Chennai and Kochi. It examines the process of change in water supply infrastructure initiated by notable Public Private Partnership’s efforts in these three cities to reveal the complexity of state-society relations in India at multiple levels – at the state, city and neighbourhood levels. Using a comparative methodology, the book develops as understanding of the changes in the production of reform water policy in contemporary India and its reception at the sub-national (state) level. It goes on to examine the governance of regimes of water supply in Bangalore, Chennai and Kochi, and evaluates the role of the partnerships in reforming water supply. The book is a useful contribution to studies on Urban Development and South Asian Politics.

I’ve made arrangements to review the book for the Social Studies of Science, and I’ll post some preliminary comments here on the blog. Welcome aboard, Govind…

Hello from Montreal!

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Thank-you Nicolas for the introduction and thanks to Endre for his interesting posts over the last month. I like the idea of following a theme. So, taking my inspiration Endre, I’m going to focus not parliaments but on underground infrastructure. Given that this is admittedly a very broad topic, I’m going to try to hone in on a couple of themes that Nicolas has suggested are of interests to followers of Installing (Social) Order.

So, in short, over the next few weeks, I will endeavor to get us into a conversation on the following issues related to how we conceive of infrastructure as people who study it, who use it, who build it and who manage it.  First, following up on Nicolas’ poste regarding the Small technologies, big change article, I will take another look at the concept of the black box and the relationship of the users to infrastructure. In subsequent posts, I will look at scale and the role of municipalities in questions of infrastructure management, users and the politics of infrastructure, the idea of “differentiated” infrastructures for low-income users, and infrastructure as “sunk cost” versus infrastructure as a “base” for community investment. Having, focused mostly on the municipal scale, in my final posts at the end of the month, I would like to take a look at other scales (including different kinds of scale not based on administrative boundaries) in thinking about infrastructure.  

I’m looking forward to your reactions and feedback on these issues.

Before, getting started, I think that it would be great to try to keep in mind some of the ideas that are being discussed on the blog as we think through questions related to infrastructure. Following up on the Endre’s statement with respect to parliaments that “the legislative machine should operate smoothly, but not too smoothly” and the recent posts on Foucault, I would draw your intention to the work of James Ferguson. In his book The Anti-Politics Machine (1994), he asks us not to focus on why development projects don’t work, but why they do work the way they do, i.e. whose or what purposes does it serve? Ferguson, draws this notion from Foucault’s analysis of the prison. On page 254 of his book he writes:

 In a situation in which “failure is the norm”, there is no reason to think that the Thaba-Tseka [a development project in Lesotho] was an especially badly run or poorly thought out project. … But it may be that what is most important about a “development” project is not so much what it fails to do but what it does do; it may be that its real importance in the end lies in the “side effects” … Foucault, speaking of the prison, suggests that dwelling on the ‘failure’ of the prison may be asking the wrong question. Perhaps, he suggests,”one should reverse the problem and ask oneself what is served by the failure of the prison; what is the use of these different phenomena that are continually being criticized; the maintenance of delinquency, the encouragement of recidivism, the transformation of the occasional offender into a habitual delinquent, the organization of a closed milieu of delinquency.” (Foucault 1979: 272).

These ideas have a lot of resonance in infrastructure, the management of which has been heavily criticized leading to a host of solutions which themselves seem to create other types of problems, but also other types of benefits. Good ideas to keep in mind.

 

What behaviorism might tell us about Post-Foucauldian or "New" Suveillance Studies

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I once asked what the “knowledge myth” might mean for STS, but this was really just a ploy to raise the issue of what it would take to generate a post-humanist form of behaviorism in STS.

How might we talk about the behavior of humans and non-humans parsimoniously without getting too bogged-down with endless debates of “who/what is congizant?” and “what role do intentions play?” This well-drodden issue was raised once again during our 4S sessions on the state.

One of the primary issues in behaviorism regarding the knowledge myth is “do you need to know how to do something to do it?” with the important follow-up that “if you do it, then you have shown (a) that you know how to do it, by benefit of doing it, or, if not that, (b) then knowing and doing are not nearly as related as we might otherwise demand in our social science accounts.”

Gary Marx, who wrote a great paper in Surveillance & Society, insists that surveillance in our high-tech age is different in non-trivial ways from traditional Foucauldian imagery of the somewhat distant past of “white hot pincers” during torture or the grand Panopticon. In particular, Marx’s analysis focuses on “unintended” data collection that is likely to be amassed by automated machines; think: data about data, for example, the location of a purchase, or the time stamp of a facebook post (Marx 2002:15). He goes into a, upon first glance, cool example: there is suspicion that a university building was going to fall prey to arson after a gatorade bottle full of explosive material was found on site. By cross-listing the keycard entry registries and the shipping code on the gatorade bottle, the culprit was found, and upon being found, s/he confessed. This seems like a straightforward case where data was collected and then used to capture a miscreant, but these data were never collected with the direct and explicit intention to be used for the purpose of catching criminals or criminal acts. These data were not intended to result in this end (I’d prefer a different term than “unintended,” but that will be another post).

Drawing on these materials liberally is Michalis Lianos (2003:412), in another paper in the same journal about Post-Foucauldian studies, who adopts and develops the idea that diverse technologies at “points of use” (let’s call them) result in data, which then contributes to what is referred to as “unintended control” which is not really intended to promote any values in particular, but that can be used in matters of control after collected.

The technologies so often utilized in Post-Foucauldian analyses are many and diffuse, but they rarely have any intentional politics, according to Lianos.This was quite a surprise, as I had always read these Post-Foucauldians as having an almost unanimous position that armies of little technologies were “out there” doing the dirty work of making neoliberalism a reality.

Back to Lianos: The data these automated machines collect might be used in political ways, big and small, but in a shrewd move, Lianos demands that in studies of control and surveillance, we must “break this correspondence between motive and outcome” or, put more exactly, “the intention to control is not a necessary precondition for effectively producing serious consequences for the sphere of control” (424). And, thus, we are left with an odd behaviorial post-humanist vision of technology where the “intentions” of the designer or user drift from primacy in analysis, and instead we observe what is collected or made, what is done with it, and what this contributes to  local levels and beyond.

Bravo, Lianos.

For us in STS, I have always been concerned that Foucauldians place so much emphasis on dispotif and governmentality when their analyses so often hinge on diffuse, micro-levels of technological use for the purpose of voluntary self-regulation. I am not referring to micro-physics or the art of government either. Instead, we get a nuanced view from Lianos of how the, to borrow a beloved phrase from Bruno, the “missing masses” do all the hard work in Post-Foucauldian Governmentality studies … although not intentionally.

Thank you, Endre Dányi Welcome Karthryn Furlong!

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Endre Dányi, a student of Lucy Suchman and John Law at Lancaster University’s Department of Sociology, joined the blog for the month of October into November wherein he shared six great posts about what I suppose we could call “the Parliament multiple.” A real highlight for me was Endre’s point about Parliamentary efficiency: “There’s a double demand here: the legislative machine should operate smoothly, but not too smoothly.” That is an idea worth developing in this age of hyper-efficiency and transparency! Bravo!

So, from Installing (Social) Order, thank you for your detailed and throught-provoking posts, and we hope you stay engaged in the discussions here on the blog.

Kathryn Furlong is the project director the “Water, Urban, and Utility Goverance” and assistant professor in geography at University of Montreal. She was first mentioned on the blog as a “new scholar to watch” because of her paper “Small technologies, big change: Rethinking infrastructure through STS and geography” published in Progress in Human Geography. The paper illuminates a few ways that STS might learn from geography, and the inverse is also presented. After our meeting at 4S a few days back, I am not convinced that STS has a ton to learn from geography on the topic of infrastructure. She is currently attending a conference, and will hopefully tell us a little about it and other topics over the next month or so.

Karthryn, welcome aboard!

Endre’s sixth (and last) post

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This is the last post, and as I promised in the beginning it’s about political subjects, but before addressing the topic let me very quickly summarise what I’ve done so far. In the second post I argued that focusing on the construction of the Hungarian Parliament in the end of the 19th century is a good entry point to examine liberal democracy as a historically and culturally specific political reality. Although this political reality was challenged and transformed in numerous ways in the 20th century, the Hungarian case nicely illustrates that we’re still (or once again) inhabiting the ruins of the Gründerzeit. At least this is what I claimed in the third post. One of the main characteristics of this less-than-two-hundred-year-old political reality is that it consists of multiple modes of doing politics — if it seems to be singular, then it’s an ongoing achievement in which the parliament building plays a crucial role. Not only does this peculiar place help to define the boundaries of a political community, regulate the ways in which that community handles political issues, and establish certain connections among those issues, but it also maintains that the material practices associated with these very different processes are simply different aspects or components of the same model of governance.

This is when things get complicated. If a parliament effaces multiplicity, then — following John Law & Annemarie Mol’s train of thought — revealing this multiplicity, making it visible, is a political act. But how does such an ontological political exercise relate to other ways of doing politics? How does it relate to other ways of being political?

It took me a long time to realise that it’s actually possible to think about the Hungarian Parliament as a disciplinary apparatus — a device that produces both political objects (symbols, laws, ideologies) and political subjects (citizens). Based on the three modes of doing politics outlined above, the political subject of a liberal democracy could thus be defined as an individual who belongs to a political community (the Republic of Hungary), who is well-informed about a wide range of political issues (from animal rights protection to trade agreements with New Zealand), and who knows how to participate in politics (voting). To be sure, this figure is as fictional as that of the rational consumer, but the work it does should not be underestimated. Here’s why.

In the beginning of my fieldwork, I decided to follow the tried-and-tested STS strategy and research representation practices as if I knew absolutely nothing about the technologies, persons and places that were involved in those practices. This, I thought, was a terrific way to problematise taken-for-granted concepts and open up seemingly natural procedures associated with liberal democracy. However, as I soon discovered, even this strategy had its limits. While it would have been perfectly fine for me as a researcher from Lancaster not to have a clue how the Hungarian Parliament worked, it was not at all fine for me as a Hungarian citizen. Asking basic questions about history, constitutional law, party politics in the legislature turned me not into a curious analyst but an ignorant member of the political community. An idiot, as Isabelle Stengers would put it.

My initial response to this strange situation was rather panicky. Whenever I stumbled upon something interesting, I had the horrible feeling that I ought to have known it from school, the newspaper, or my friends and family. But after a while I realised it wasn’t the lack of knowledge that was causing me trouble. It was the clash of different kinds of knowledges — the clash of histories with personal memories; of abstract regulations with everyday encounters; of sophisticated analyses with emotional readings of recent political developments. To use Helen Verran’s words, what I experienced were moments of disconcertment, which had to be privileged and nurtured, valued and expanded upon. But how?

I could have possibly written something about this — a chapter on the genealogy of citizenship in Hungary, for instance. But that would have been too impersonal. For, and this is my point, I as a political subject was as much implicated in the production of a particular political reality as the Holy Crown or the Parliament’s Information System. And if I wanted to interfere with this reality, I had to find ways to perform things differently. To perform the Hungarian Parliament differently. So, in my dissertation I decided to juxtapose the empirical chapters with semi-fictional texts called Walks, which aimed to show (rather than explain) multiple orderings at work. (Major sources of inspiration were W.G. Sebald’s books, especially Austerlitz and The Rings of Saturn) What’s more, by exposing the limits of these orderings, they aimed to create some space for being political without fixing the categories of politics. It’s difficult to tell whether I was successful or not, but if you’re interested, you can have a look at an earlier version of these Walks here:

Walk 1: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4496011/danyi_walk1.pdf
Walk 2: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4496011/danyi_walk2.pdf
Walk 3: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4496011/danyi_walk3.pdf
Walk 4: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4496011/danyi_walk4.pdf
Walk 5: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4496011/danyi_walk5.pdf

(Please do not cite or circulate them without permission!)

 

***

I really hope you enjoyed reading these posts about the Hungarian Parliament as much as I enjoyed writing them. Many thanks to Jan-Hendrik, Nicholas, Hendrik and Antonia for inviting me — I’m looking forward to continuing our conversations on this blog, and hopefully in person.

Jan-Hendrik Passoth and I’s (Nicholas Rowland’s) comments at 4S

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Jan and I organized Sessions 201 and 222 back-to-back on the topic of states, state measurement, and state theory. These talks and our comments were presented at the Annual Meeting of the Social Studies of Science in Cleveland, OH, November 05, 2011.

Session 201: Counting and Measuring

The relationship between science, technology, and governance is a relationship that shapes and is shaped by contemporary states. While this relationship has been influential in STS research on how contemporary modes of governance influence scientific practice and technological innovations, the converse question of the influence of both on governance is relatively underrepresented.

These sessions, therefore, take-up the task and explore this relationship and its depiction in history and social and political theory. The first session (session 201) is presenting a series of five case studies on the role of conflict, measurement and performativity for the enactment of stateness, drawing from rich empirical projects. The second session (session 222) is focusing on conceptualization and theoretical approaches, dealing mostly with the mechanisms and techniques of creating, maintaining and shifting the multiple ontologies of stateness.

Anat Leibler will show us the traditional science-state relationship, but from a new angle wherein the science of population measurement is embedded in states of conflict, in this case, being Israel and the Occupied Territories.

Hector Vera also emphasizes the central role of measurement, in his case; however, it is about measurement standards adopted by Mexico and the US, in a historical comparative case study approach.

Michael Rodriguez brings together the dual-tasks of counting and countings of populations, but on the level of micro-practices in his work on the role of “partnerships” with Latino communities that are often “undercounted” by traditional census techniques.

Keith Guzik returns our attention back to Mexico where rather than counting techniques or practices, he emphases the role of techno-infrastructure in his historical account of national security programs.

Daniel Barber also provides a historical view, but one more fine grained, drilling-deeply into the 1940s US Department of the Interior where two models of future energy use were evaluated quite openly; however, as we can all see, one of these methods has obviously become taken-for-granted.

 

Session 222: Theory and Ontology

Patrick Carroll shows us, through a detailed but theoretically oriented case study, how diverse, seemingly unrelated issues of water and water infrastructure became a – read, grouped or combined – political object of state governing.

Hendrik Vollmer describes another transformation which invokes the state; this time, however, through micro-measurement for sake of global comparison and regulation.

Erich Schienke grounds his paper in the fertile fodder of Ecocities in China, which do not yet fully exist (other than in discourse), showing how aggregated environmental indicators will be used, we think/he thinks, to re-position the Chinese state as an ecological civilization in the global theater of political action.

Kelly Moore’s (not in attendance) work challenges us to say “how does the state get into our bodies?” the answer to which turns out be a neoliberal story of government intervention into bodies through what she calls the promulgation of “pleasured self-discipline.”

 

Concluding Comments (once presentations end, and before questions):

All of the papers tackle the crucial, which we will crudely frame here as the classical concern over the relation between micro processes and macro entities. For example, the micro processes seen in Michael Rodriguez’s work on the day-to-day, on-the-ground counting of the undercounted, or Patrick Carroll’s work on water infrastructure where many seemingly distinct matters relating to people, land, and water where lashed-together and inverted to become one concern over water for some manner of macro entity usually referred to as the state. The relation between micro processes and macro entities is a debate worth studying.

And these presenters do much justice to this enduring debate by taking much more nuanced interpretations into their analyses, especially of counting practices, and their theoretical approaches to understanding where the state is and is not, and its multiple purported effects.

We observe empirically, and we all have seen this here today, that there are important similarities too between what we “see” on-the-ground and the conceptual tools we have inherited from our respective disciplines in sociology, history, geography, political science, and the like. The perhaps surprising link we speak of is between (a) the historically-embedded, highly-contingent, ongoing-accomplishments that we observe in our empirical investigations and (b) the conceptual apparatus that we invoke, as scholars.

To our minds, and this is our closing remark, which is perhaps c
ontroversial: it is of the utmost importance for scholars to remember that the concepts we make and their appearance and use in our field-sites are linked together. These are not merely opportunities to verify or reject our theories. Instead, they are valuable analytical opportunities to critically and empirically engage them.

Whether or not “the state” exists is a waste of our time; rather, it is precisely these ephemeral moments when, by whom, and how the state is brought into existence or invoked as a partner that we should direct our analytical and empirical attention to …  as we consider this a fertile site for STS’s group contribution to state theory.

ANT and Ethnography

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Michael Rodríguez-Muñiz just alerted me to the fact that Qualitative Sociology is going to host a special issue on ANT and ethnography called “Reassembling Ethnography: ANT beyond the
Laboratory“!

Details:

Deadline for submissions: March 31, 2012 submitted directly to the journal.
Word Limits: 10,000 words (maximum) including bibliography
Queries: Gianpaolo Baiocchi (Gianpaolo_Baiocchi@Brown.edu), Diana Graizbord
(Diana_Graizbord@Brown.edu), and Michael Rodríguez-Muñiz
(Michael_Rodriguez@Brown.edu).

Check out the full solicitation here:

CFP_ANT_Ethnography_QS.pdf

4S in Cleveland, a first couple of notes

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Since I am the only one of our little outfit to be still left in Cleveland I might just as well start off reporting from the 4S meeting with a couple of quick Sunday morning impressions.
As usual, the meeting as a whole was well attended, and the organizers did a good job of providing a well-balanced mix of themes and issues.
Before I get to the sessions organized by Nicholas and Jan, I should say that the “author meets critics” panel with Marion Fourcade and with Daniel Breslau, Mary Morgan, and Ted Porter discussing Fourcade’s book about “Economists and Societies” somewhat stood out for me. For one thing, the discussants provided excellent commentary, but more generally speaking, I just love this format. Rather than having four+ different papers cramped into 90 minutes, you actually get a couple of very smart people discussing the same piece of work. Maybe the organizers could think about making this format a still bigger part of the overall schedule.
Then, of course, the two sessions about “Seeing states and state theory in STS”, organized and hosted by Nicholas and Jan, were surely the place where things were happening with respect to the interests represented in this blog. The powers that be provided one of the finer rooms and a good crowd of people was present, despite the fact that it was Saturday afternoon. If I should pick a presentation that impressed me the most, it was the presentation by MIchael Rodriguez-Mu??iz. He is studying the work of census representatives in getting the cooperation of people whose data have to be collected. What I liked so much about this study is that it nicely illustrates the work that has to be done at the periphery to make a technology that is historically highly crucial for establishing state power work in actual practice. It turns out that sometimes, rather than the state being summoned as an authority to implement a certain obligation, the actual exercise of state power benefits from being dissimulated. Fascinating stuff right there.
Thanks to Nicholas and Jan for making it all happen! I sense an STS field in the making here and maybe a continuous series of sessions for future 4S meetings. And one more reason to look forward to next year’s 4S in Copenhagen.

Endre’s fifth post

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A Parliament can be regarded as a centre of calculation in a liberal democracy, but it’s a rather strange one at that: on most days it’s completely empty, and even when it is full of politicians, one has the feeling that the debates that take place in the richly decorated chambers are mere perfomances. At least this is what a journalist told me once, complaining that all the decisions on the Hungarian National Assembly’s agenda had already been made somewhere else — in party meetings, closed committee sessions, or one of the proverbial smoke-filled rooms of politics. He said he felt cheated whenever he had to report on a plenary sitting, and when he learned about my interest in the material practices of political representation, he immediately thought I was on a mission to find out what was going on behind the curtain, in the backstages of the Parliament.

Sometimes it was a bit like that, but now — more than three years after the beginning of my fieldwork  — I think it’s more appropriate to say that I was interested in staging processes, rather than the front-stage and the backstage(s) of democratic politics as such. Let me unpack this.

On Monday, 31 March 2008, which was incidentally the first day of my fieldwork in Budapest, the parliamentary faction of the Alliance of Free Democrats announced that it wanted the party to quit the socialist-liberal coalition, which by then had been governing the country for six years. The main reason for this was that two days earlier the socialist Prime Minister unilaterally decided to sack the liberal Minister of Health, blaming her (and her party) for a failed healthcare reform. Being the smaller partner in the coalition, the Alliance of Free Democrats was suddenly confronted with a dilemma: either they swallowed the insult, stayed in Government, and risked becoming politically irrelevant, or they joined the Opposition, and lost whatever power they still had in various ministries and other public institutions. The parliamentary faction believed the latter to be the better option, and this was supported by the party’s Executive Committee. However, the decision to quit the governing coalition could only be made by an exceptional party congress, which was quickly convened for 27 April 2008.

This was a full-blown government crisis, and I was right in the middle of it. In the end of March 2008 I travelled to Budapest to examine how political representation worked in practice by shadowing a Member of Parliament for three-four weeks. The MP who agreed to participate in this strange exercise happened to be the deputy faction leader of the Alliance of Free Democrats, whom I knew from early undergrad times — we studied sociology together at the Eötvös Loránd University. In 2002, the same year I finished my degree, he became one of the youngest MPs in the Hungarian National Assembly, and in 2006, the same year I began my PhD in Lancaster, he was re-elected. He was the only person I knew in the Parliament at the time, and so I was incredibly happy when in the end of 2007 he agreed to become part of my research. Neither of us would have thought back then that the shadowing period would be so intense.

How much biographical detail is required to make my story interesting and credible? Should I disclose the MP’s name, age, and place of birth? His marital status? His favourite hobby? His view on religion, human rights, and climate change? I don’t know. STS has not been very good at dealing with persons — after all, doing away with ‘great men’ narratives has been one of the most important aims from the outset. One of the few — and often misinterpreted — examples for how a person could be analysed as one of many entities is Bruno Latour’s work on Louis Pasteur, which is about a drama that took place on several stages. (The reference here is not necessarily The Pasteurization of France, but Chapter 4 of Pandora’s Hope) The first (part of the) drama was an ontological one: a nonentity had to be turned into a character. The second was an epistemological one: Pasteur had to  claim the authority to make claims about that character. As Latour says, the experiment was

‘a story tied to a situation in which new actants [underwent] terrible trials plotted by an ingenious stage manager; and then the stage manager, in turn, [underwent] terrible trials at the hands of his colleagues, who test[ed] what sort of ties there [were] between the first story and the second situation’ (p. 124).

While the stages Latour focuses on are laboratories and academic settings, I think the concept of staging works really well in the realm of conventional politics. (For a similar argument see Lisa Disch’s fascinating paper here.) It is possible to say that in the spring of 2008 the Alliance of Free Democrats faction — including the MP I was shadowing — conducted an experiment that took place on several stages, including TV studios, street demonstrations, the party headquarters, and the Parliament. Their task was simultaneously to make liberal voters distinguishable from socialist voters, and to make the claim that the liberal party was their true representative in the National Assembly. Although the experiment ended with a single decision — at the exceptional party congress about 80 percent of the delegates voted in favour of quitting the coalition — it could not be reduced to a single moment. None of the stages were irrelevant to the other. The reason why the Parliament could be thought of as the front-stage of democratic politics was not because the performances in the debating chamber were more important than in other places, but because between the elections in 2006 and 2010 it was the only place where the sovereign could be seen.

Imagining infrastructures the corporate IT way

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A couple of days ago a video made by RIM (the manufacturer of blackberry) cropped up on youtube. It shows RIM’s vision of the future of work and, of course, of its own role in it. The two videos which you can see here and here were supposedly leaked from within RIM. Surprisingly though, they are still on youtube for anybody to see, so RIM does probably not feel shamed by them (to say the least). Some of the blogosphere has already been reacting, calling the video, for example, “depressing as hell”.
The insight the videos provide into imaginations of future infrastructures probably informing the setting of corporate strategies in the development of communication devices is interesting – and transcends the character of this particular video as a somewhat desperate life sign of a company currently under some pressure to make a show of itself. About time for the role of fantasies in the development of infrastructure to move up a bit on our list of research topics?

Teaching STS: Geographic Diffusion of Facebook

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The diffusion of innovations is a common topic worth discussing in basic courses in sociology, usually on the topic of cultural diffusion, as well as STS courses. While it is often not a problem to spread the good word about diffusion, a contemporary example, the spread of facebook, provides some interesting fodder for in-class discussion and student exploration.

2004-12

Here is a website, inside facebook, with some interesting images that students, in my experience, will be interested in using, discussing, and perhaps hazarding a few hypotheses. The images are US-focused, which is not ideal; however, explanations for some of the geographic distribution of facebook will help students to really understand how ideas like this spread.

What’s nice about it, in my opinion, is that it provides some opportunitites to discuss the various explanations for diffusion. For example, was facebook expensive to adopt early on as compared to later on? Was facebook an obvious improvement on technologies that preceded it? How did one “adopt” facebook? Do people “use” facebook differently? Is it analytically meaningful to count every “personal facebook page” as an adoption, even if it is rarely or never used? Why did facebook spread geographically first and then how do we explain further developments in adoption patterns?

I am contemplating an in-class assignment where students break into groups, assess the images and then present their conceivably competing understandings of why facebook spread the way it did, and, importantly, not the way it didn’t…