Materiality of Cooperation (Medien der Kooperation – Media of Cooperation) [1st ed. 2023] 3658394676, 9783658394677

Table of contents :
Contents
Contributors
Part I Pre-Face
Materiality of Cooperation— An Introduction
1 Cooperative Media: From Situationalism to Post-Situationalism
1.1 Situationalism in Social Theory: What About Media?
1.2 Post-Situationalism: About Media
2 Temporalising Situations
2.1 Before the Situation
2.2 During the Situation
2.3 Beyond the Situation
2.4 Post-Scriptum: Situating Bodies in Cooperation/Embodying Cooperation
References
Part II Before the Situation
‘Harmony, Not Discord’: Cooperation in the Office of the Larkin Company Around 1900
1 Cooperation in Writing
2 Organised Cooperation
3 Idealised Cooperation
4 Endangered Cooperation
References
On the Infrastructure of the Slaughterhouse
1 Technical Infrastructure
2 Media, Agents, Interfaces
3 Cultural Techniques of Networking
References
Version Control. On the Software-Based Coordination of Co-laboration
1 Controversial Lines of Development
2 Co-laborating with Subversion
3 Co-laborating with Git
4 Git Versus GitHub: Politics of Collaborative Platforms
5 Conclusion
References
Part III During the Situation
Chains of Co-operation in the 1940s: Working on the Air Situation Picture
1 The Initial Situation
2 The Dowding System
3 The Co-operative Chain of the Dowding System
4 The Division Command Post
5 The Co-operative Chains of the Division Command Post
5.1 The Radar-Based Chain of Co-operation
5.2 The Parallel Reporting Service-Based Chain of Co-operation
6 Results
References
On Identification: Theory and History of a Media Practice
1 From ‘Identitas’ to ‘Identification’
2 Media and Social Theory of Identification
3 Identity Documents and Credit Cards
4 Masking, Disguising, Deceiving
5 Bureaucracy in Digital Cultures
References
Routines of Cooperation in Creative Work
1 Cooperation in Labour Research
2 The Case: Cooperative Situations in Advertising Agencies
2.1 Cooperation in the Field of Creative Work
2.2 Cooperation in the Area of Design
3 Conclusion
References
Bodies/Technology on Standby: The Importance of Cooperative Waiting for Digital Work
1 Introduction
2 Temporal Coordination of Digital Cooperation
2.1 Waiting as a Sociotechnical Practice
2.2 Observing Cooperation and Cooperative Waiting
3 Standby: Temporal Incongruences of Cooperative Software Work
3.1 ‘Standby Pose’: The Cooperative Duration of Effects
3.2 ‘Render Queue’: Waiting Online
4 Concatenations of Cooperative Waiting
References
Strapping and Stacking: An Ethnography in Search of a New Medium
1 Inside the Brain: My First Look in 2015
2 Off Up and Down: The “Staircase” and the “Yak Stack”
3 The Early History of Realtalk
References
Part IV Beyond the Situation
Creating Trans-Situativity: Air Travel and Its Media
1 Methods
2 Mobile Participants in Air Travel: The Situational Linking of Bodies and Things
3 Infrastructures of Mobility: Connecting Places
4 Mobile Media Practices: Linking with the Extra-Situational
5 Air Travel and Its Material Links
References
Varieties of Trans-Sequentiality: Diagnostics of Contemporary Capacities for Problem-Work, Developed from Ethnographies of the State
1 Trans-Sequentiality and Trans-Sequential Analysis
2 Varieties of Trans-sequentiality
3 The Procedure as Programmed Trans-sequentiality
4 Comparable Tendencies of the Different Varieties
5 Concerted Trans-sequentiality and Existential Problems
6 Conclusion
References
Ecologies of Media Practices
1 Praxeological Requirements
2 Connective Practices
3 Media Ecologies
4 Media Praxeology of Relations
5 Cosmopolitics of Media Practices
References
Part V Post-Scripta
Socio-Material Practices in Irritating Situations
1 Have We Become Thoroughly Modern? Socio-Material Practices Bring About a Revolution of Waiting
2 Have We Never Been Modern After All? Socio-Material Practices of Waiting Are Subject to Everyday Alterations
3 Have We Become Reflexively Modern? Queues as the Subject of Everyday Media Practices
4 Irritation as a Profession
References
The Irreducibility of Technical Skills: Before and After Science
References

Citation preview

Medien der Kooperation — Media of Cooperation

Sebastian Gießmann · Tobias Röhl ·  Ronja Trischler · Martin Zillinger Editors

Materiality of Cooperation

Medien der Kooperation—Media of Cooperation Reihe herausgegeben von Erhard Schüttpelz, Philosophische Fakultät, Universität Siegen, Siegen, Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany

Digital vernetzte Medien werden als kooperative Werkzeuge, Plattformen und Infrastrukturen gestaltet, die bestehende Öffentlichkeiten transformieren und neue Öffentlichkeiten ermöglichen. Sie sind nicht mehr als Einzelmedien zu verstehen, sondern verlangen eine praxistheoretische Auffassung der Medien und ihrer Geschichte. Alle Medien sind kooperativ verfertigte Kooperationsbedingungen. Ihre Praktiken und Techniken entstehen aus der wechselseitigen Verfertigung und Bereitstellung gemeinsamer Mittel und Abläufe. Darum verläuft die Erforschung digitaler Medien quer zur gängigen wissenschaftlichen Arbeitsteilung und verlangt eine gezielte Engführung von Medientheorie und Sozialtheorie. Digital network media are designed as cooperative tools, platforms and infrastructures which transform existing publics and give rise to new ones. Digital media can no longer be understood as individual media, but demand a practicetheoretical perspective on media and their history. All media are cooperatively accomplished devices of cooperation. Media practices and techniques evolve from the mutual making of shared resources and joint processes. That’s why the study of digital media disturbs our scientific division of labour and remains a challenge for the intersections between media theory and social theory.

Sebastian Gießmann · Tobias Röhl · Ronja Trischler · Martin Zillinger Editors

Materiality of Cooperation

Editors Sebastian Gießmann Fakultät I: Medienwissenschaftliches Seminar Universität Siegen Siegen, Germany Ronja Trischler Fakultät Sozialwissenschaften Technische Universität Dortmund Dortmund, Germany

Tobias Röhl Zentrum Bildung und Digitaler Wandel PH Zürich Zürich, Switzerland Martin Zillinger Philosophische Fakultät: Institut für Ethnologie Universität zu Köln Köln, Germany

ISSN 2520-8349 ISSN 2520-8357 (electronic) Medien der Kooperation—Media of Cooperation ISBN 978-3-658-39467-7 ISBN 978-3-658-39468-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-39468-4 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer VS imprint is published by the registered company Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature. The registered company address is: Abraham-Lincoln-Str. 46, 65189 Wiesbaden, Germany

Contents

Pre-Face Materiality of Cooperation—An Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sebastian Gießmann, Tobias Röhl, and Ronja Trischler

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Before the Situation ‘Harmony, Not Discord’: Cooperation in the Office of the Larkin Company Around 1900 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Christine Schnaithmann On the Infrastructure of the Slaughterhouse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Christian Kassung Version Control. On the Software-Based Coordination of Co-laboration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Marcus Burkhardt

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During the Situation Chains of Co-operation in the 1940s: Working on the Air Situation Picture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Christoph Borbach and Tristan Thielmann

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On Identification: Theory and History of a Media Practice . . . . . . . . . . . Sebastian Giessmann

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Routines of Cooperation in Creative Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Hannes Krämer

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Bodies/Technology on Standby: The Importance of Cooperative Waiting for Digital Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ronja Trischler

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Strapping and Stacking: An Ethnography in Search of a New Medium . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Götz Bachmann

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Beyond the Situation Creating Trans-Situativity: Air Travel and Its Media . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Larissa Schindler Varieties of Trans-Sequentiality: Diagnostics of Contemporary Capacities for Problem-Work, Developed from Ethnographies of the State . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Thomas Scheffer Ecologies of Media Practices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Petra Löffler

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Post-Scripta Socio-Material Practices in Irritating Situations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jörg Potthast

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The Irreducibility of Technical Skills: Before and After Science . . . . . . . Erhard Schüttpelz

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Contributors

Prof. Dr. Götz Bachmann University of Bremen, Department of Anthropology and Cultural Research. Main areas of research: digital cultures, media ethnography, organisational ethnography, promises. [email protected] Dr. Christoph Borbach Research Associate, University of Siegen. DFG Research Training Group Locating Media. Main research topics: media history of locating techniques - radar, sonar, echo sounder, media theory of voice, history of knowledge of delay. [email protected] Dr. Marcus Burkhardt Lecturer, University of Siegen. Institute of Media Studies. Main areas of research: history and theory of digital media, especially digital databases, algorithmic environments and artificial intelligence. [email protected] Dr. Sebastian Gießmann Reader in Media Theory, University of Siegen. Institute of Media Studies. Main areas of research: internet and digital media research, media history, media and practice theory, cultural techniques. [email protected] Prof. Dr. Christian Kassung Professor of Cultural Techniques and History of Knowledge, Humboldt University of Berlin. Institute for Cultural History and Theory. Main areas of research: cultural history of natural sciences, especially physics, history and epistemology of disturbances and accidents, cultural techniques of synchronisation, history and practice of technical media. [email protected] Prof. Dr. Hannes Krämer Professor of Institutional Communication, University of Duisburg-Essen. Institute for Communication Science. Main areas of research:

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work and organisational research, cultural sociology, practice theory, borders and boundaries. [email protected] Prof. Dr. Petra Löffler Professor of Theory and History of Contemporary Media, Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg. Research focus: media ecology, archival politics, image migration, material cultures. [email protected] Prof. Dr. Jörg Potthast University of Siegen, Social Sciences. Main areas of research: ethnographic labour research (workplace studies), technology theory, practice theory, and social theory. [email protected] Prof. Dr. Tobias Röhl Digital Learning and Teaching, Zurich University of Teacher Education, Main research topics: sociology of technology, sociology of education, theories of practice, methods of qualitative social research. [email protected] Prof. Dr. Thomas Scheffer Professor of Sociology with a focus on Interpretative Social Research, Goethe University Frankfurt, Institute for Sociology. Main areas of research: Political ethnography and research on political practice, sociology of the state (apparatuses such as police forces, military operations, immigration authorities), praxeology of procedures (legal, administrative, investigative procedures) and sociology of social capacities (conditional problem solving). [email protected] Prof. Dr. Larissa Schindler Department of Sociology, University of Bayreuth. Main research topics: mobility, body, methods of qualitative social research, theories of practice. [email protected] Christine Schnaithmann, M.A. Freelance cultural scientist. Main areas of research: history of knowledge of the office, material culture, architectural sociology, design research. [email protected] Prof. Dr. Erhard Schüttpelz Professor of Media Theory, University of Siegen. Main areas of research: media anthropology, world literature, language theory, history of science. [email protected] Prof. Dr. Tristan Thielmann Professor of Science, Technology and Media Studies, University of Siegen. Co-Spokesperson of the DFG Collaborative Research Centre 1187 Media of Cooperation. Main research topics: media geographies, ethno- and technomethodologies, media and social history, history of technology, navigation studies, cultural cartographies. [email protected]

Contributors

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Dr. Ronja Trischler Post-Doc Researcher, Department of Social Sciences, Technische Universität Dortmund. Main research areas: cultural sociology, sociology of technology, work, methods of qualitative social research, visuality. [email protected]

Part I Pre-Face

Materiality of Cooperation— An Introduction Sebastian Gießmann, Tobias Röhl, and Ronja Trischler

Cooperation occurs materially. From mechanical tools being passed along in a bicycle workshop to transmitting software updates for a GPS car device, from crammed filing cabinets in a law firm to its vast digital databases, from heated discussions in classrooms to participants whose microphones can be muted in video conference tools, from safe vaults in banks to ransomware on your computer asking for cyber currency, from following signs to the airport gate to presenting a boarding pass on a smartphone: for the process, change and success of cooperation it is not only essential which people are involved, but also which materials. Empirically, this holds true for local interactions as well as digital ones. Thinking cooperation through materiality theoretically addresses questions of production and impact of both media and social order, and, most importantly, their interconnections. Thinking cooperation through materiality also, and this is the central claim of this book, points towards the situation as an important methodological concept for social order and its spatio-temporal organisation—a concept which needs updating if we want to deal with the relation between media and social order adequately. S. Gießmann (B) University of Siegen, Siegen, Germany e-mail: [email protected] T. Röhl Zurich University of Teacher Education, Zurich, Switzerland e-mail: [email protected] R. Trischler Technical University of Dortmund, Dortmund, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 S. Gießmann et al. (eds.), Materiality of Cooperation, Medien der Kooperation— Media of Cooperation, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-39468-4_1

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Linking cooperation and materiality implies a broad theoretical understanding of both concepts. Cooperation in this sense is defined by the participation in a shared situation (and is not limited to its common-sense notion, i.e. as a counterpart to competition). Indicating media’s role in this, Marshall McLuhan understood communication in his early and little-known text “Notes on the Media as Art Forms” as something that generates shared situations: ‘communication as participation in a common situation’ (McLuhan, 1954, p. 6).1 Materiality, on the other hand, is defined as situational—even where it involves infrastructural and practical connections between and beyond situations. This means it is not determined by physical qualities alone, but also by its role in a shared situation and therefore it is also understood to be relational and empirically pluralistic.2 For us, both materiality and cooperation can only be grasped through their situated temporalisations and can only be historicised on this basis. This also allows us to include media in this picture: materiality of cooperation deals with the sociomaterial and cultural-technical reciprocal fabrication and production of media and social order beyond communication and semiotic practices.3 As we will establish in this introduction, methodologically, in order to access the materiality of cooperation through situations it is necessary to update the influential micro-sociological concept of the situation: a ‘methodological situationalism’ (Knorr Cetina, 1981) based on the centrality of the local situation created in situ by physically co-present actors (Goffman, 1964, 1981). In this context, we suggest the notion of a post-situationalism: by starting off from situated practices—rather than an individual situation formed by practices—and by including media practices. The present volume is based on a German anthology (Gießmann et al. 2019) and—like the Siegen Collaborative Research Centre ‘Media of Cooperation’ in which it originated—takes these questions on the situated, cooperative and material constitution of media practices as its starting point for different theoretical and empirical endeavours. It might be obvious to understand online video conferences as situated media practices as they connect 1

According to the rules of transatlantic post-war discourses on ‘media’ and ‘communication’, this definition addresses not so much an everyday understanding of communication as the question of what constitutes media in general (Schüttpelz, 2005). 2 Here, we draw on recent discussions concerning materiality in practice theory (Gherardi, 2017; Schmidt, 2019) and New Materialisms (Barad, 2003; Haraway, 1991) which—while not at the centre of the volume—we also want to contribute to with our arguments on situated cooperative media practices. 3 In contrast to cultural studies research on the materiality of communication (Gumbrecht & Pfeiffer, 1994) which focused primarily on semiotic practices and the symbolic potential of media.

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multiple locally distributed situated practices through media. Yet, it is even more important to look at other, less apparent cases of cooperation, which might seem ‘completely’ local or ‘media-independent’ through the lens of materiality—and therefore as connected to situations before and after. This approach creates new connections between media studies and social sciences—and provokes both sides. As suggested, sociology is asked to question and loosen its micro-sociological understanding of a locally confined situation. A distinct multiplication of perspectives or reports on a situation—which then has always already disappeared—is in itself a socio-theoretical provocation. So, what kind of situation is a situation when it is understood as the basis and nexus of cooperative media practices? Depending on the point of view of the actors and agents from which situations are described ethnographically or historically, this question will be answered differently. On the other hand, if media are understood as media of cooperation, media studies is asked to move away from understanding media as discrete objects towards seeing them as relational parts of situations. If one approaches this question as a media scholar, it becomes clear that it is not so much the media that determine a situation (Kittler, 1986, p. 3), but rather that the situation is produced in actu and in situ cooperatively by and with media. With different variants of a methodological situationism in social theory, one will also arrive at different findings in media theory. Do we trace the media scaling of situations by their actors and agents through participatory observation, in terms of actor-media theory and/or historically? Or do we assume that situations, through their living and built environments, can first and foremost be made accessible ecologically? Which media practices and situations can be followed and how? In this introduction we address these questions by first establishing the concept of post-situationism and connecting it to the chapters of this book, which elaborate its analytical range theoretically and empirically. The chapters follow a heuristic tripartite structure under the categories Before, During, Beyond the Situation that emerged as a result of intensive discussions at the joint conference ‘Media Practices in Cooperative Situations’ and the Siegen Lecture and Workshop Series on Practice Theory. One focus lies on practices that unfold in relation to their location and situation, but also through their mobility. Second, we address the respective conditions of cooperation4 and third, the question of how mediating chains of co-operation proceed trans- and inter-situatively. ‘Before the Situation’, ‘During the Situation’, ‘Beyond the Situation’—section names of this book—refer to the way in which the contributors and we as editors understand 4

On the concept of the condition of cooperation following Alfred Schütz and Harold Garfinkel, see Schüttpelz (2015).

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the materialities of cooperation discussed in this volume. The three sections are followed by a post-scriptum in which two contributions reflect on the role of bodies and embodiment for cooperation.

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Cooperative Media: From Situationalism to Post-Situationalism

1.1

Situationalism in Social Theory: What About Media?

In classical social theory situationalism, the (human) actors under study themselves determine what constitutes a situation and what its limits are. The focus is thus on the emic definitions of situations. Such an attitude can be identified early on in social psychology (e.g. in James, 1950 [1890]). Accordingly, the much cited Thomas Theorem prominently states: ‘If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences’ (Thomas & Thomas, 1928, p. 572). Various social theories are more or less explicitly based on this. Phenomenological sociology (Schütz, 1982 [1962]) and, as a result, the social constructivism of Berger and Luckmann (2003 [1966/1969]) rehabilitate the everyday knowledge of the members of society and its constitutive role for processes of social institutionalisation and objectification. Everyday knowledge—and this also includes religious ideas, superstition and folk wisdom—is relevant for action (see e.g. Knoblauch, 1991). Social actors are guided by this, regardless of whether, from a scientific point of view, it may be a misconception. When millions of people travel to Lourdes to experience healing by the Virgin Mary, this has observable social consequences. With the three premises of Symbolic Interactionism (1986 [1969]), Herbert Blumer emphasises that meaning and definitions of situations are the results of interactions. The ethnomethodologist Harold Garfinkel recommends—in contrast to externalistic explanations—to analyse situations (‘social settings’) only from the activities of the participants: The policy is recommended that any social setting be viewed as self-organizing with respect to the intelligible character of its own appearances as either representations of or as evidences-of-a-social-order. Any setting organizes its activities to make its properties as an organized environment of practical activities detectable, countable, recordable, reportable, tell-a-story-aboutable, analyzable – in short, accountable. (Garfinkel, 1967, p. 33, emphasis in the original)

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The situation even consists of the participants’ efforts to establish such accountability:5 In exactly the ways in which a setting is organized, it consists of members’ methods whereby its members are provided with accounts of the setting as countable, storyable, proverbial, comparable, picturable, representable – i.e., accountable events. (ibid., p. 34, emphasis in the original)

Often the turn towards the concept of situation is accompanied by a microsociological focus on physical co-presence. Prominently, Erving Goffman defines situations as follows: ‘by a social situation I mean any physical area anywhere within which two or more persons find themselves in visual and aural range of one another’ (Goffman, 1981, p. 84). As a result, Goffman’s analyses are at best based on an implicit theory of technology or media (see Pinch, 2010). In a similar way, Bruno Latour sees a deficiency in ethnomethodology in terms of media or technology. Ethnomethodology, he says, has simply overlooked ‘the means of constructing the social world’ (Latour, 1996, p. 240, emphasis in the original).6 This theoretical deficit concerning media and technology is shared by all the ‘classical’ situationalist theories listed here. However, the attention to the participants’ perspective in no way means that the authors mentioned assume a strong—and to a certain extent pre-situational— subject. Goffman, for example, is concerned not with ‘men and their moments’ but rather with ‘moments and their men’ (Goffman, 1967, p. 3). In this way he turns the relationship between situations and actors around and decentres the latter. The situation and its interaction order are in the foreground. Similarly, the above-mentioned situational concepts of the other authors already indicate that they are always concerned with interactively produced definitions of situations and attributions of meaning. Social sense and meaning here—anticipating practice theories to a certain extent (see Reckwitz, 2002)—are not to be found in the heads of the participants, but in the practices they share. Four important points can be made about the ‘classic’ understanding of situations when looking at it from the vantage point of media theory: 5

This already addresses (implicit) possibilities of connecting to media theories (see Thielmann, 2012; Schüttpelz, 2013). Accountability points to the fundamental representational dimension of practices, i.e. their mediality. Doing something means to make it accountable to others by making it visible, hearable, witnessable, etc. 6 Nevertheless, this criticism has not remained unchallenged on the part of ethnomethodology—artefacts and other mediators (such as the temporal order of the laboratory table; Lynch et al., 1983) were dealt with early on (Koschmann 2008, p. 364).

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1. Situations and their boundaries are determined by their human actors and their physical presence. 2. Situations are—for example in Goffman (1964, 1967, 1983)—the actual unit of investigation rather than individual actors. 3. The technical and media aspects of a situation remain under-determined in the social theories presented. 4. Accordingly, for classical situationalists, the limits of physical co-presence are also the limits of analysis. The first two points are addressed by contemporary positions in practice theory (e.g. Hirschauer, 2016; Nicolini, 2017). In the last two points we see the fundamental difference between situationalism and newer currents, which we would like to characterise as post-situationalism.

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Post-Situationalism: About Media

Characteristic of post-situationalist positions is that the situation remains the starting point for the analyses. Such a ‘methodological situationalism’ (Knorr Cetina, 1981) is based on the assumption in practice theory that practice can only be understood as situated events (Schatzki, 2002). However, this does not mean that the analyses stop at isolated situations. Instead, by scaling and linking situations one tries to deal with phenomena that are brought forth beyond individual situations. At least two varieties of such post-situationalism can be identified: 1. An analytical scaling of the concept of situation: This variation is based on the fact that the concept of situation can refer to both the micro-level (faceto-face situation) and the meso- and macro-level (societal situation). Here it is the researchers who scale the term differently. The French sociology of conventions (Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006; Diaz-Bone, 2011) decouples the concept of situation from physical co-presence and exploits the fact that it can be understood on different levels: whether face-to-face interaction, groups and organisations or even societies, they are all socially situated. Against this background, actions and discourses with reference to supersituational normative orders have to prove themselves in each case. Similarly, Anselm Strauss understands the concept of interaction as a scalable one that is not bound to the interaction of co-present persons: ‘Interaction is a key concept here, not in the interpersonal sense but in the sense of conditions leading to consequences

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through interaction’ (Strauss, 1993, p. 231). Any interaction between social actors (regardless of their size) is thus based on previous interactions. 2. Practical scaling and links: Much more consistent is the position of a ‘connected situationalism’ (Nicolini, 2017, p. 101). It is the practical efforts of the participants themselves that create macro-phenomena beyond isolated situations and link up individual situations. Media practices and technical artefacts that enable precisely such scaling and linking play a central role (Schüttpelz, 2013). Instead of co-present situations, we are then dealing, for example, with a ‘synthetic situation’ (Knorr Cetina, 2009) or ‘tele-interactivity’ (Hirschauer, 2014, trans. SG, TR, RT) conveyed via screen media, in which actors are in ‘response presence’ (Goffman, 1983, p. 2) but not in physical co-presence with one another. Here and in other ‘Centres of Calculation’ (Latour, 1987), societies can create a synoptic image of themselves. To do so, they relate local data to one another globally by purifying their differences in common schemes and standards. We follow the latter understanding of a post-situationalism that focuses on linkages and scaling as actors’ performance. Accordingly, we suggest the following shifts or extensions in relation to concepts of situationalism that focus on physical co-presence: 1. Mediations: It is necessary to follow the material mediators and media practices in and between situations. This allows both to maintain the perspective of the actors and to overcome media-blind situationalism. 2. Scaling: Socio-material mediations address different scales, which are performed by actors themselves (Latour, 2005, p. 319). A situation can be resolved through the reciprocity of co-present bodies. But it can also be perpetuated beyond this, connected with other situations and thus be turned into a larger social phenomenon. 3. Temporalisations: Scaling thus also produces different temporalities. ‘Classical’ situationism focuses not only on the presence, but also on the present of a situation. In a post-situationalist approach, however, we also argue for a focus on the before and after of the situation. In the before, there are socio-material preconditions of a given situation (partly unquestioned by the actors). The after points to the fact that situations create the socio-material preconditions of subsequent situations and can themselves have an effect on the future.

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From a practice theory point of view, this approach has the advantage of a ‘flat ontology’ (Schatzki, 2016), which makes no assumptions about the respective influential entities. Instead, with the notion of post-situationalism discussed here we follow an attitude that puts practices before all other explanations (Schüttpelz & Meyer, 2017). A ‘contextualist’ (Schatzki, 2002, p. 65) recourse to the practice of external variables (such as structures, discourses or habits) would then not be permissible. In each case, it must be shown how situations are interlinked and how previous practices are effective in situ. If one focuses on mediations between situations, on their scaling and temporalisations, then one decentres another situationalist assumption. From the perspective of practice theory, it is ultimately practices and their respective situatedness—not situations and their practices—that are the focus of interest. The limits of a situation are the result of practical efforts by various human actors and non-human agents: what is and remains local is as practically determined as the question of how the global enters and leaves a situation (Latour, 1996). This also means that with our temporal division of the book into three parts (‘Before the Situation’, ‘During the Situation’, ‘Beyond the Situation’), we only establish heuristic settings, from which practical links with other situations are then asked for. Every setting of a situation is contingent: the before of one situation is the during or after of another—and vice versa. At the same time, several situations are always connected with each other, each situation has more than one ‘before’ and one ‘beyond’—and even during a situation, several subplots can run parallel at the same time (Goffman, 1974). Methodologically, this involves moving between the micro-analysis of spatio-temporally situated practices (Suchman, 2007) and the synoptic analysis of far-reaching complexes of practices that transcend situations through practical mediation (Shove et al., 2012). In the first case, one asks about the relevant mediations in the situation, in the second case about the mediations between situations. What is decisive here is that it is precisely the media that enable the multiplication of situations within a situation and between situations. This praxeological approach remains dependent on the ethnographic and historical justification of cooperative relationships that unfold across individual situations. A special role is therefore assigned to the infrastructures of situated activity, which enable the achievement of socio-material connections and mediations. In this context, research in media studies has focused primarily on actor-network theory.7 The theory’s ‘flat ontology’, in which all agents of a 7

See Engell et al. (2008), Engell and Siegert (2013), Kneer et al. (2008), Neubert (2013), Schabacher (2013), Spöhrer and Ochsner (2017) and many more.

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network are understood as having equal rights (Callon, 1986), was further developed into an explicitly three-dimensional ‘actor-media theory’ (Thielmann & Schüttpelz, 2013). Among other things, it includes the institutional prerequisites and achievements of media agencies in its analyses (Schüttpelz, 2013). In this theory, media whose provisions of mediation, scaling and temporalisation are realised by actors are precisely the entities through which trans- and inter-situational action can be taken. The ‘flat ontology’ of actor-network theory has thus been corrected to include the material conditions of technical coordination, the requirements of institutional cooperation and communication, and the trajectories of socio-technical black boxing, which stabilises cooperative practices precisely because these practices appear notoriously unstable. Situations are therefore not unconditional, even if they can be analysed as if they were to be managed by the actors in a constantly new way. But how to deal with the preconditions of a materiality of cooperation that unfolds and becomes observable in and between situations?

2

Temporalising Situations

Cooperation can be defined as a practice by which common situations are materialised. This perspective remains bound to a ‘methodological situationalism’ (Knorr Cetina, 1981) but puts practices at its centre. This allows for a different access to social order, which is not considered an abstract structure, but a temporal problem for interaction (Strauss, 1993). Order, then, is not explained by local practices, but practices including their history, anticipation and effects (Goodwin, 2017). Practices do not just link to each other: instead of continuity in situated practices, one will also find instability and rupture (Schäfer, 2013). We heuristically distinguish three modes: ‘before the situation’ planning and anticipation of future practices create conditions of cooperation; ‘during the situation’ the handling of their materialities unfolds; ‘beyond the situation’ new time–space practice regimes and ecologies materialise.

2.1

Before the Situation

Every situation includes precisely that which is unavailable, that which is already there and thus the condition of the respective practice. What is meant here, however, are not external factors but socio-material conditions. The architecture of

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a square, the layout of a space, the calendrical order of time, the material intricacy of an object, the development tools of some software or simply bureaucratic rules of procedure all function as conditions of cooperation. Even that which is and must be at hand often has elements that are elusive. Socio-technical scripts (Akrich, 1992) are not immutable, but the effort to modify the respective rules of the situation is usually too high for the participants. Given such ‘hardened’ conditions, it is therefore most likely that improvisations, bricolages or—to use a computer science term—‘workarounds’ (Brohm et al., 2017; Gießmann & Schabacher, 2014) will find detours and solutions in the face of overly fixed environmental parameters. Since the 1980s, media studies has repeatedly emphasised the importance of technical preformation—especially with regard to the role of technical media that undermine human perceptual performance and capacity.8 Media were recognised—in a strangely technico-deterministic variant—as that which prefigures all possible mediation processes and which, in Kittler’s sense of the word, determines our situation (1986, p. 3). What was neglected in this process was the production of these very conditions, their literal fabricatedness and constructedness—just as if media, primarily through their aesthetic impact, were forming a cultural unconscious. The recent boom of Production Studies (Mayer et al., 2009) in media research can also be understood as an answer to this long-standing void. Accordingly, Erhard Schüttpelz (2017) has proposed that all media should be understood as mutually manufactured conditions of cooperation, initially produced within specific communities of practice for their own purposes—long before they are recognised as generalised media agencies and systems. But what happens if this proposal is taken seriously and media do indeed unfold as cultural, economic and social agents that create conditions for cooperation and are effective in every single practical situation? The contributions in ‘Before the Situation’ are devoted to this element, which is difficult to underestimate, but also easy to overestimate. What they all have in common is the emphasis on architectural elements of cooperation, which attract particular creative and logistical attention precisely because the actors consider them to be formative. The materiality of architectures as conditions of cooperation extends into digital infrastructures, which enable other programmed infrastructures. Thus, before the situation there is a continuous basis for the fact that during the situation objects can be used that are gradually inaccessible for interaction. In the words of the sociologist Thomas Scheffer: 8

Comparable turns of phrase can still be found today, especially in German-language media theory, as if it were still necessary to emphasise what is common sense anyway.

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materialities are out of reach for direct interaction. This definition has some advantages for empirical studies. It does not carry the common spatial connotations. It does not presume a fixed shape and essence. It avoids the connotation of touch, weight, or distribution. Materialities are rather defined relationally. They appear and work as ‘material’ for the focal setting (the situated hearing) due to their different mode and rhythm of becoming: the drafting of texts, the compiling of files, or the training of bodies. Thanks to their separation from the course of conversation, they turn into the hearing’s co-producers. (Scheffer, 2004, p. 368)9

At the same time, such a situational understanding of materiality can still encompass physical and material varieties addressed in the materiality discourse, which is devoted to the irreducible socio-materiality of things, artefacts, types of matter and textures. Moving beyond the mere participation of non-humans (Latour & Woolgar, 1986 [1979]), in these interdisciplinary discussions concerned with ‘New Materialism’,10 the relational constitution of materiality has been stressed as sensually perceptible (Barad, 2003) and thus as an empirical phenomenon (Gherardi, 2017). For Schmidt (2019, p. 147), a new key question for the sociology of social order in this regard concerns: ‘In what units and entities does the relevant social phenomenon assemble?’ In this context, our understanding emphasises the situation-specific materiality of cooperation, in which architectures, grammars and protocols become effective as conditions of cooperation. They unfold their constitutive effectiveness precisely because they are repeatedly appropriated, modified and transformed by practices. Christine Schnaithmann, for example, with her historical contribution on bureaucratic cooperation in the Larkin Company’s office around 1900, shows the architectural care Frank Lloyd Wright devoted to the work processes within the mail order architecture of the Larkin Building in Buffalo. In the orientation of the interior design towards the principles of systematic office organisation, she recognises a largely hierarchical cooperation that was organised and coordinated by senior management. The optimisation of the flow of information and goods in terms of ergonomics was accompanied by an ideal type of corporate cooperation in the Larkin Building, which materialised in stone on site in the motto of the lettering ‘Co-operation, Economy, Industry’. Schnaithmann draws attention to

9

This points to a pragmatic understanding of stability and instability (Strauss, 1993, pp. 285 ff.). Even apparently stable things can—with sufficient effort or simply after sufficient time has passed—become unstable. And vice versa, unstable things are situationally hardened and appear in the next moment as stable unquestioned conditions of a subsequent situation. 10 See Coole and Frost (2010), van Dyke (2015), Kissmann and van Loon (2019).

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the contradictions of Tayloristic optimisation, which knew how to combine the engineering of people with such harmonious cooperation ideals. Christian Kassung’s history of the infrastructures and networks of Berlin meat production reconstructs the emergence of meat as a common urban food at the end of the nineteenth century. To do so, he follows the material networks of animal logistics—from the site plan of Berlin’s Central Livestock and Slaughterhouse, via its connection to the Prussian railway network, to the timesynchronised rhythms of the stock exchange and cattle market sales. Kassung’s history of the infrastructural conditions of meat production leads all the way to the cooperative media close to the body of the trader himself: the livestock trading calendar, which connected the trader and the market by synchronising them. Plus, the loading ramp of the Central Livestock and Slaughterhouse had a decisive interface function, as all relevant practices were brought together and focused here. Marcus Burkhardt addresses the architectural conditions of cooperation in collaborative software development in an analysis of digital version management systems. To this end, he examines their history as ordering techniques for distributively developed source codes since 1972. Burkhardt emphasises the character of versioning as a support practice in the process of distributive programming. Taking into account the introduction of networked versioning systems since the 1980s (CVS, Concurrent Versioning System) and 1990s (Subversion), he reconstructs the usage controversies surrounding the ‘best system’. Burkhardt uses the currently dominant version management system Git and the platform GitHub based on it to show the options and models of cooperation of different workflows. Version management systems structure collaborative processes by prescribing elementary media forms of handling and circulating documents and machine code. Whether in the office, at the loading ramp or in the management of software repositories, the contributions that emphasise the importance of ‘before the situation’ address architectures used for synchronisation and coordination. Through their installation they become conditions for cooperation, which in turn can unfold affordances (Gibson, 1986) and limitations for agency ‘during the situation’. Conditions of cooperation also require care, maintenance and updating—situations are not possible without their infrastructural facilitation.

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During the Situation

When we speak of cooperation during the situation, we mean first of all the ‘Vollzugswirklichkeit’ (Bergmann, 2000) or the ‘ongoing accomplishment’ (Garfinkel, 1967, p. 11) between two or more participants in a situation who are present for each other. There they work on the ‘mutual realisation of common goals, means or procedures’ (Schüttpelz & Meyer, 2017, p. 157, trans. SG, TR, RT), which in turn can become the pre-situational conditions for cooperation in new situations. Such a minimal, non-consensual understanding of cooperation builds on Susan Leigh Star’s and James R. Griesemer’s concept of the ‘boundary object’ (Star & Griesemer, 1989; Star, 2017). Actors from different social worlds can cooperate with each other by working on a sufficiently vague object without necessarily having to reach a consensus on common goals or a common definition of the object. Recently, Charles Goodwin (2017), in a synthesis of his anthropological research, pointed out the strengths of a minimal concept of ‘co-operation’. Thus, while the assumption of shared intention or even mutual assistance can be dispensed with, actions can still be described in their mutual references: ‘New action is built by decomposing, and reusing with transformation the resources made available by the earlier actions of others. We thus inhabit each other’s actions’ (ibid., p. 1). At the same time, these authors point out that cooperation builds on past cooperation: Boundary objects are the materialised history of their previous creation, use and transformation; Goodwin’s co-operation is the re-figuration of publicly accessible ‘resources’ as a result of earlier actions. Situations are thus characterised on the one hand by an infrastructural background. Pre-situational conditions of cooperation are mostly non-thematic ‘substrate’ (Star, 1999, p. 380) of observable practices. On the other hand, they are characterised by a cooperation which must always be carried out anew. On a methodological level, the latter means focusing on concrete implementations and practices. In the concrete implementation it becomes apparent how participants understand situations and media, what meaning they assign to things and practices, and, in so doing, what problems they try to practically solve in which way, etc. At the same time, they bring to bear the constitutive socio-material conditions of a situation. With this praxeological turn towards the reality of performance, materiality becomes relevant in two respects. Firstly, practices are embodied and thus also rest on pre-linguistic implicit bodies of knowledge (Loenhoff, 2012). Co-present bodies attune themselves ‘intercorporeally’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1964 [1960]; Meyer et al., 2017; cf. Gießmann, 2018) to one another and orient themselves towards

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common goals without necessarily having to exchange a word or ascribe an intentionality to their counterpart. Secondly, the materiality of technical artefacts and infrastructures that frame situations is addressed (Kalthoff et al., 2016). Infrastructures configure practices, make certain forms of cooperation more probable, provide reasons for undermining routines and provide resources for action. Sometimes material infrastructures are made relevant by actors, sometimes they merely provide a background that is transparent in terms of use, and almost always their intermediating capacities only become visible, audible and perceptible through disturbances. In this sense, the contributions analysing practices during the situation work out the tension between given materiality and situated cooperation. Christoph Borbach and Tristan Thielmann accordingly address the different socio-technical design of British and German airspace surveillance during World War II, the associated chains of co-operation and their consequences for co-operative practice. While the British use of radar focused more on human (and thus situated) decisions, the German side relied primarily on technically formalised procedures. In their contribution, Borbach and Thielmann present an approach based on media and practice theory that proposes to understand chains of co-operation through their information-driven elements. Here, the materiality of cooperation is configured and kept in motion by its practical mediality along ‘communicative paths’ (Garfinkel, 2008 [1951]; Thielmann, 2013). Sebastian Gießmann explores the theory and history of identifying as a media practice. In following recent digital identification practices such as face recognition algorithms—and their intersectional critique—he traces the intertwined histories of national identity documents and credit cards to uncover the power relations implied. While the power to identify might have expanded from state to corporate agents, practices of identifying via materials and technology still imply keeping their individual references—faces, language and bodies—identifiable. This leaves room for masking, disguising and deceiving in the practical relations between identifiers and identified—while, as Gießmann shows, an old problem is currently reappearing in new guise. In promoting ‘self-sovereign digital identity’, new ways of making oneself accountable are embedded in app- and blockchain-based infrastructures, including pandemic media of bio-certification. In his sociological contribution, Hannes Krämer examines the role computers and bodies play in cooperative practices in an advertising agency. For this purpose, he reconstructs the formation of the understanding of cooperation in different forms of labour research. In his contribution, Krämer explicitly asks about the routines of cooperation with which practices are temporally coordinated even

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in work settings characterised by creativity. The computer-based work of the creatives is used, among other things, to structure opportunities for cooperation, just as computers act as silent companions in cooperative situations and visualisations are used for common orientation. Krämer can thus show how micro-practices as incorporated processes are able to structure different cooperative situations. Using a sociological ethnography of visual effects production for film and television, Ronja Trischler shows that waiting is not just doing nothing, but is itself an important component of cooperative practice. Although the computers utilised create temporal discontinuities, the examined co-workers use them to coordinate the specialized digital work. Trischler analyses the emergence of visual effects through the concatenation of situations in which synchronisation is not given but must be continually created: rapids and bottlenecks are constitutive of the practice of digital media production, for example in the rendering of visual effects designs. The order of interaction and turn taking between people, agencies and computers is structured by the cooperative, distributed waiting for each other. The materiality of cooperation here arises from the micro-coordinative, situational handling of temporal variances. Götz Bachmann concludes the section with a media ethnographical journey to the digital avant-garde in the San Francisco Bay Area. His field research in Bret Victor’s laboratory explores practices of software development, with which Victor and his engineers connect to Alan Kay’s idea of a ‘dynamic spatial medium’. In this environment Bachmann pursues the imaginary and real ‘bootstrapping’ (Bardini, 2000) of anticipated new digital media. It is characterised to a high degree by a cooperative recursivity—new media are developed dynamically in order to create new dynamic media technologies, which can then rapidly (or disruptively) unfold on this basis. In contrast, Bachmann emphasises the secular practices of collaboration in Silicon Valley: ‘riffing’, by which cascades of prototypes are produced, ‘dropping’, in which prototypes are silently placed in space, and ‘jamming’, in which mock-ups are prepared in a short time. Larger contexts are in turn architecturally negotiated here and built as ‘platforms’, ‘staircases’ and ‘stacks’. Almost all the contributions that follow practices during the situation emphasise their temporality. Cooperation is something that is always already in flux. Thus, the (micro-)coordinative alignment of all cooperating actors and agents requires constant attention. The timing of cooperative practices can serve their concatenation, but also the rhythmisation of work processes—often creating the situations in which cooperation can unfold, anticipating action across the individual situation. In situated action, the infrastructures used usually retreat into the background, which is not further discussed, and thus do not necessarily reveal

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their character as conditions of cooperation, nor their socio-material capacities for connecting and scaling beyond the situation.

2.3

Beyond the Situation

One of the commonplaces of a critique of methodological situationalism is the question of how larger connections could be empirically deduced from the microdescription of individual cases and practices. In fact, there is no ideal type of ‘scaling up from the local to the social’, as Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star envisaged in Sorting Things Out (1999, p. 317), neither in media nor in social theory. Rather, the question of how such an act of mediation can take place is not only an issue of ethnographic empiricism in all its potentials and limitations, but concerns ‘scale’ and ‘scope’, range and applicability and thus the mediality of situated practices. Or, in the words of Marshall McLuhan: ‘For the “message” of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces in human affairs’ (McLuhan, 2011 [1964], p. 20). Michel Callon and Bruno Latour already claimed in 1981 in a literally megalomaniacal text on the dismantling of the Great Leviathan that the body politic is now determined by many small socio-technical mediations and scaling (Callon & Latour, 1981). In fact, the micro–macro discussions in the social sciences have challenged media research to dissolve the duality of global structure and local agency by bringing to the fore all those mediators and media with which changes of scale are made, which mark and realise spatio-temporal ranges and scopes (Döring & Thielmann, 2009; Köster & Schubert, 2009). The medium thus becomes that which allows for situational scaling, navigation and action linking, think for example of analogue and digital maps (Abend, 2013; Richterich, 2014) or Knorr Cetina’s (2009) analyses of screen usage in stock market trading. The attempted, successful or unsuccessful switching between small, medium and larger scales, ranges and areas of application thus becomes a phenomenon, especially with digital media, that can only be analysed along and with the practices of actors, i.e. actor-media theory (Latour, 2005; Thielmann & Schüttpelz, 2013). This also and especially applies to digital information systems, which could hardly realise their functionality without the algorithmic data practices of actors: search engines, digital maps, cloud computing, big data analyses and social media platforms. Data-intensive infrastructures have thus been able to establish themselves as new conditions for cooperation—because they enable participation in a common situation that goes beyond the individual situation. This extends far into mobile usage practices, in which the use of smartphones allows a linking

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back to the last communicative situations in the relevant apps, while at the same time being infrastructurally situated: ‘apps have built-in tendencies to be situated and to situate themselves within different operative situations’ (Dieter et al. 2018, p. 2, emphasis in the original; Magaudda & Piccioni, 2019). But how can a post-situationalist ethnography be developed from a position in-between situations? Larissa Schindler, with her contribution to the sociology of mobility, moves along the typical stations of a flight journey, which she describes here in a trans-situational way. She understands media as mediators between situations that enable passage through transitions and the generation of trans-situativity in the first place. Schindler emphasises the materiality of linking situations through things, bodies and spaces. Crucial to this are mobile media practices, which the text follows autoethnographically and via travel logs in which travellers recorded their impressions during or shortly after the flight. Thomas Scheffer proposes a methodology for trans-sequential analysis (TSA) that traces how transitions in and between situations become possible through and with ‘formative objects’. Scheffer demonstrates this in his work on political ethnography and combines the methodological introduction to TSA with an urgent question of contemporary analysis. The bureaucratic apparatuses that (supposedly) ‘held’ over the course of the twentieth century seem to have long since exceeded the limits of their capacity for factual processing. Current escalations, such as ignorance towards climate change and the rise of right-wing populisms, can also be explained by this infrastructural-bureaucratic background. From the perspective of media studies, Scheffer’s method and practice of analysis can be understood simultaneously as a central element of a theory of procedure that focuses on its formative objects. Petra Löffler’s concluding contribution on media and practice theory shows how cooperative practices are embedded in media ecologies. To this end, she draws on Isabelle Stenger’s many years of work on an ‘ecology of practices’— in particular the concept of ‘reciprocal capture’ or entre-capture (Stengers, 2010 [1997], p. 35), with which the relationships between actors are continually brought into relation. Media practices appear here to be conditioned both by options for action and by constraints, requirements, obligations. They thus become part of a media ecology that understands media as environments through which the materiality of cooperative practices is unfolding. Löffler pursues this through the digital practices of photo sharing on Flickr and a project by the Canadian artist Perry Bard that is dedicated to the distributed appropriation of Dziga Vertov’s film classic Man with a Movie Camera. Her contribution ends with an outlook on a media praxeology of relations that considers how relations inform cooperative practices.

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Material mediations, scaling and temporalisations that point beyond the situation show that a new methodological approach has taken the place of a distinction between micro- and macro-analyses. Media practice creates situations that can always be linked to other situations. Thinking ‘beyond the situation’ then means investigating these actors’ achievements and their conditions of cooperation. This can be achieved in three ways. Firstly, situational analyses become mobility studies in which the reduction to the individual situation already shuts down mobile practices that still need to be pursued. Secondly, the materiality of cooperation is realised by means of formative objects, which are processed by actors and agents across situations. Scripts and standardisations of cooperative practices arise from the procedures that generate formative objects. And thirdly, location- and situation-based analysis remains an option, for example when reconstructing the mediations, temporalisations and scaling of communities of practice. David Ribes, for example, has shown with his ‘Ethnography of Scaling’ (2014) how an entire national research infrastructure is kept visible by its actors by means of ‘scalar devices’—be it conferences, surveys or metrics. There is no guarantee of success, neither for the actors nor for those who follow their practices. On the contrary: for all the approaches outlined here, Before, During, Beyond the Situation, socio-material frictions, disturbances, improvisations and repair work are constitutive. They also require embedding in an ecology of relations and ‘situated knowledges’ (Haraway, 1991).

2.4

Post-Scriptum: Situating Bodies in Cooperation/Embodying Cooperation

In the postscripts of the volume, two contributions discuss the material conditionality of situated practice. Jörg Potthast’s sociological contribution reviews Stefan Hirschauer’s proposals for trans-situative analysis and re-reads his ethnographic analysis of an elevator ride, which has become a classic, in order to contrast it with his own alienations and irritations from research on airports. Potthast’s considerations are devoted to queues in airport terminals, in which human bodies are exposed to a special socio-material rite de passage. His interest here is less in the practical reflexivity of this situation than in the template for a sociology of critique that emerges from its irritations. In the critical mode, Potthast sees a possibility of linking irritating and tilting situations via their alterations. The motto for this is: not less, but more situational analysis. In his concluding media-theoretical contribution, Erhard Schüttpelz asks about the status of media between ‘cold’ and ‘hot’ techniques. Media require cultures to

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make massive investments in the training of the respective cooperative ‘skills’— such as the mastery of bureaucratic recording systems, of body, language and ritual techniques. While these ‘cold’ techniques, which can hardly be automated, bear the longue durée of media history, ‘hot’ techniques have developed their own dynamics since industrialisation, which has produced a multitude of infrastructural media and standardisations. The ‘hot’ techniques are characterised by their material intervention in environments, their modularity, accumulation and combination of co-operational chains. In modernity, both ‘cold’ and ‘hot’ techniques in the form of techniques of the body and material techniques are subjected to multiple standardisations. Even under these conditions, however, as Schüttpelz shows following François Sigaut, the materiality of technical cooperation continues to be based on the learning of ‘cold’ techniques and the irreducibility of technical skill. Cooperation can be understood as more than—as suggested at the beginning— participation in a common situation and its mediation. In a slight modification of McLuhan’s aphorism, cooperation can be defined as a practice by which common situations are materialised. Before the situation, above all, conditions of cooperation arise (especially in the form of architectures); during the situation the handling of their materialities unfolds; beyond the situation new time–space practice regimes and ecologies materialise. The challenge of praxeological analyses remains to do justice to the reciprocal production of all mediations, scalings and temporalisations. Acknowledgements Collaborative volumes are not obsolete if they use their format sensibly. With this in mind, we have deliberately given the contributors room for longer texts that would go beyond the scope of common journal publications. The intensive readings and collaborative criticism, both during and after the Siegen conference ‘Media Practices in Cooperative Situations’ in December 2016, can be considered a separate, collaborative form of peer review. The editors would like to thank all authors, who have responded to our constant questions and enquiries. The contributions of Thomas Scheffer and Petra Löffler were made possible by evening lectures and workshops of the Siegen Lecture and Workshop Series on Practice Theory. We would like to thank Anja Höse, Thomas Blum, Jenny Berkholz, Sina Bär, Christiane Böker, Damaris Lehmann and Esra Otto for organising the conference, guest lectures and workshops. We would like to thank Thomas Blum, Christiane Böker, Esra Otto, Simon Czech, Nina Selbach and Eva Müller for their help in proofreading the texts. For their work on the English translation of this volume, we thank Mark Schreiber and Julene Knox. We would like to thank Carolin Gerlitz, Bina Mohn, Erhard Schüttpelz and Nadine Taha for critical questions and further comments during a panel discussion at the German Society of Media Studies’ (GfM) annual conference ‘Industry’ in September 2018.

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Springer Publishing House reliably looked after this book thanks to Vivek Gopal and Dagmar Kern. The financial and contractual matters were excellently handled by Susanne Kokel of the Collaborative Research Center Media of Cooperation. The volume was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) – Project-ID 262513311 – CRC 1187 Media of Cooperation. The CRC’s subprojects A01 (Digital Network Technologies Between Specialisation and Universalisation), A04 (Normal Operating Failures: Structure and Change of Public Service Infrastructures), B04 (Digital Publics and Social Transformation in the Maghreb) as well as the CRC’s Lecture and Workshop Series on Practice Theory contributed to its production.

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Part II Before the Situation

‘Harmony, Not Discord’: Cooperation in the Office of the Larkin Company Around 1900 Christine Schnaithmann

Autumn 1924. The German architect Erich Mendelsohn is on a study trip through the north-eastern United States of America. A visit to the administrative building of the Larkin Company in Buffalo, completed in 1906 under the direction of the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright, is ‘a great experience’ for the German architect (Mendelsohn, 1991b, p. 64, trans. CS).1 He admires the ‘almost complete renunciation of external decorative forms’ and the careful use of colour, light and material, the ‘clear organisation of the components’ and ‘the spatial interlocking of the individual wings, their confluence’ (Mendelsohn, 1991a [1926], p. 65, trans. CS). However, this recapitulation alone is not enough to understand the special fascination that the Larkin Building exerts on Mendelsohn. For him, the Larkin Company’s administrative building in Buffalo is not only an important step on the way to a modern language of form, but it also realises the utopia of creating a cooperative relationship by means of architecture. Mendelsohn describes an ideal office community in which each individual counted as much as the whole: I sit in the atrium, in the great hall […]. Four floors, illuminated from all sides, lead to this hall. A thousand people work here. You do not hear a single reverberation. The

1 This contribution contains results from my dissertation project ‘The Knowledge Architecture of the Modern Office: An Approximation to Frank Lloyd’Wright’s Larkin Administration Building’. Some of these findings have already been published in other papers: (Schnaithmann, 2012, 2013a, b, 2015, 2019). In the interest of better readability, I have generally refrained from referring to these texts in detail.

C. Schnaithmann (B) Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 S. Gießmann et al. (eds.), Materiality of Cooperation, Medien der Kooperation— Media of Cooperation, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-39468-4_2

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C. Schnaithmann harmony of the thousand individual and almost silently working typewriters, calculating and counting machines is only the background noise of the common sphere of activity and the obligatory quantum. […] The directors are separated from the employees only by a parapet. Mutual supervision, incentive, democracy. (Mendelsohn, 1991b, p. 64 f., trans. CS)

The cooperative situation that Mendelsohn describes here is of course by no means exclusively attributable to the achievements of the architect Frank Lloyd Wright. It is also the result of a collective reflection on the organisation of complex work processes around 1900, which today is often reduced to the stereotypical term ‘Taylorism’. An emerging professional group—managers— developed and orchestrated cooperative practices and routines and elevated cooperation to an indispensable ideal of everyday work. The workspace and the things that were in it were seen as instruments through which the efficient interaction of specialised work steps could be achieved. In this context, cooperation was characterised by the fact that it was increasingly based on the written form; office work thus became an essential basic condition of modern work organisation.

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Cooperation in Writing

In 1924, when Erich Mendelsohn visited the Larkin Building in Buffalo, the Larkin Company was looking forward to its fiftieth anniversary. During this time, the company had grown from a tiny soap manufacturer to a nationally operating company (Adams-Webber, 1997; Hubbard, 1914, p. 4 f.; Quinan, 2006 [1987]; Stanger, 2000). In the first years after its foundation in 1875, the Larkin Company produced only soaps and detergents. Until 1885, when the company switched to mail order sales, it sold its products mainly through so-called ‘soap slingers’, who travelled around and advertised the goods directly on people’s doorsteps. During this time, the number of employees increased from seven to about 100 people. As the company grew, so did the amount of office work. In 1879, the founder of the company, John D. Larkin, who initially kept the books himself and corresponded with his business partners by hand, hired his first office employee. Two years later, the company already had fourteen office employees; around 1900 there were 400, around 1910 a thousand and more, who no longer did their work by hand, but with the help of typewriters, Dictaphones and other office machines (Anonymous, 1903; Griffith, 1910, p. 250 ff.; Harland, 1913, p. 14). The heavy books had largely been replaced by a card index system, and the office moved

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to one of the most modern office buildings of its time. It was now divided into different functional areas, which were run by managers. The development of the Larkin Company is typical for its time. Its successful beginnings coincide with the decades following the American Civil War, when the United States of America underwent a transformation from an agricultural to an industrial society. Until the late nineteenth century, the American economy was characterised by small companies with manageable corporate structures. As a rule, the owner managed the business alone, by doing the bookkeeping and correspondence by hand and giving verbal orders to his subordinates. With industrialisation and the associated division of labour and specialisation, not only did the companies grow in size and complexity; more and more office work became necessary in order to connect and coordinate the spatially distributed and specialised work processes (Beniger, 1986; Chandler, 1993 [1962]; Mills, 1953 [1951], p. 190 ff.; Sivulka, 2001, p. 71 ff.; Yates, 1993 [1989]). In 1920, the office expert Lee Galloway characterised the importance of the office as follows: ‘The production and distribution of goods today would be greatly handicapped, if the coordinating activities which bind our enormously complex business systems together had not expanded into what we call the modern office’ (1919, p. vii). The change to which he refers was reflected, for example, in a sharp increase in the number of employees: according to the American censuses, in 1870 only just over 1% of all non-agricultural employees worked in offices; in 1920 this figure had risen to almost 10% (Rotella, 1981, p. 51 f.). The numerous office buildings that increasingly shaped the architecture of New York, Chicago and other trading cities around 1900 are further evidence of this development, which brought with it new technologies—typewriter, phonograph, hanging files—and new methods of business management. These innovations mark a historical turning point which between 1880 and 1930 changed not only the way offices functioned but also the material and spatial location of the office, and which is historically referred to as the ‘Control Revolution’, ‘Managerial Revolution’, ‘Administrative Revolution’ or ‘Révolution de Papier’ (Beniger, 1986; Chandler, 1977; Gardey, 2008; Lowe, 1987; Yates, 1993, p. 21 ff.). During this time, documents such as letters, memoranda and forms developed into a central means of communication and work. Since Weber (1976 [1923], pp. 124 ff., 551 ff.) declared bureaucracy to be the dominant form of rule in modernity a little more than a hundred years ago, his thesis—despite all criticism—has lost nothing of its topicality. Böhme (1998, p. 99, trans. CS) also sees the office as the decisive power that defines our entire living environment. ‘The modern world is’, he claims, ‘inasmuch as the office is.’ In the office, he argues, our confusing reality is translated into orderly processes

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to make it manageable. In order to illustrate the multitude of ways with which the bureaucracy seizes all our lives, the American architecture critic Lewis Mumford coined the image of a ‘tentacular bureaucracy’ (1938, p. 226). He located its headquarters in the large office buildings, which he described as ‘a sort of human filing case’ (ibid., p. 228). From this metaphor, the American sociologist C. Wright Mills developed one of the most famous characterisations of modern bureaucracy: Each office within a skyscraper is a segment of an enormous file, a part of the symbol factory that produces the billion slips of paper that gear modern society into its daily shape. From the executive’s suite to the factory yard, the paper webwork is spun; a thousand rules you never made and don’t know about are applied to you by a thousand people you have not met and never will. The office is the Unseen Hand become visible as a row of clerks and a set of IBM equipment, a pool of dictaphone transcribers, and sixty receptionists confronting the elevators, one above the other, on each floor. (Mills, 1953, p. 189)

On the one hand, this passage highlights the materiality of the office; on the other hand it refers to the fact that modern everyday life is organised in offices. The fact that the metaphor of the ‘invisible hand’ does not go far enough in this context is already evident here. Smith (1922 [1776], p. 421) introduced this image into the field of economics in the eighteenth century to illustrate the self-control of the market via supply and demand. Based on this, Chandler (1977) coined the idea of a ‘visible hand’ and emphasised the power of administrative control and management. In his view, this did not cancel out the self-controlling forces of the market but took over essential coordinating functions. At least since the office revolution of around 1900, targeted control by the ‘visible hand’ has enabled not only a more intensive interaction of people and things, but also a more reliable and faster flow of information, money and goods. There are two essential characteristics that explain the effectiveness of modern bureaucracy: rationality and written form—or ‘Aktenmäßigkeit’, to use Weber’s official German (1976, p. 126). Böhme describes the world outside the office as an ‘opaque chaos of teeming matter, things and bodies’ (1998, p. 98, trans. CS); this hyper-complex dynamic is ‘transubstantiated’ in the office into ordered sign processes—so-called ‘acts’. Customers and goods, finances and transport routes are translated into a written form in the office. This not only makes them easier to transport and archive, but also makes it possible to assess them rationally and to relate them to one another. Like the researchers in Bruno Latour’s case studies, office workers dominate the world outside only to the extent that it ‘comes

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to them in the form of two-dimensional, superposable, combinable inscriptions’ (1999, p. 29). Latour underlines the ‘connective quality of written traces’; through it, the office becomes ‘a small laboratory in which many elements can be connected together just because their scale and nature has been averaged out’ (1990, p. 54). According to him, the often underestimated paperwork is an effective instrument of power: ‘By working on papers alone, on fragile inscriptions that are immensely less than the things from which they are extracted, it is still possible to dominate all things and all people’ (ibid., p. 60). Office experts were well aware of this powerful quality of documents in the early twentieth century. Lee Galloway, who published a comprehensive handbook on the subject of office management around 1920, emphasised the importance of written communication for the interrelationship of work processes organised by the division of labour: ‘The connecting link between the various activities is an order or report of some kind. […] These documents link department with department’ (Galloway, 1919, p. 4 ff.). Forms, letters and memoranda, circulars, reports and statistics not only circulated within the office, but also served the people in the office to cooperate with the world outside.

2

Organised Cooperation

In the Larkin Administration Building, the paper flows were translated into an architectural order. The spatial organisation of the building was so well adapted to the work processes of the Larkin Company that Galloway chose the office as a prime example of successful office organisation. Under the title ‘The layout of a modern office’ he commented on a photograph of the building’s atrium (Fig. 1): ‘The clerical work is so arranged that there is a continual flow of work from desk to desk, and from department to department’ (Galloway, 1919, frontispiece). Trucks brought the mail bags from the local post office to the basement of the office building; from there they were transported by elevators to the upper floors. Most of the incoming mail consisted of orders that were systematically processed (Quinan, 2006, p. 44 ff.). ‘[R]apidly, quietly and with an accuracy almost mechanical the order passes through several hands’ as an article that was intended to make the office workflows understandable to the company’s customers tells us (Anonymous, 1909, p. 7). It is no coincidence that this description of the Larkin office evokes associations with an assembly line. While Henry Ford did not introduce his famous ‘assembly line’ until 1913, the principle of assembly line production was already

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Fig. 1 Larkin building, atrium (Galloway, 1919, frontispiece)

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practised during the nineteenth century (Giedion, 2013 [1948]). New practices for the systematic organisation of work were first tested in individual companies from 1870 onwards; best practices then spread mainly through trade journals such as the American Machinist or Engineering Magazine. Around 1900, not only factory work but also office work was increasingly subdivided, and the individual work steps were standardised and reassembled into routine procedures (Litterer, 1986 [1959]; Vismann, 2000, p. 288 ff.; Yates, 1993, p. 1 ff.). Today, the Larkin Building is regarded as one of the first buildings to comprehensively integrate the principles of systematic office organisation into its architecture (Bradley, 2004, p. 73; Duffy, 1980, p. 266 ff.). A small handbook published by the Larkin Company in 1900 as an ‘office manual’ and distributed to office employees proves that the procedures in the Larkin office were also the result of careful planning—‘a business system which is of the first magnitude’, as the author emphasised in his foreword (Anonymous, 1900, n. p.). In addition to general rules of conduct, the dress code and information on regular working hours, the handy booklet contained, above all, standardised schedules for the various departments in the office. The principle of separating planning and execution was just as decisive for the routinisation of work processes as the division of work into the smallest steps. These principles shaped the modern company at various levels. Initially, the office had a monopoly on planning the work and evaluating the results, while the factory was the place where the instructions were implemented. However, this changed to the extent that office work was also subjected to rationalisation. In the words of Harry Braverman, who took a critical stance towards the increasing disintegration of work, ‘[t]he functions of thought and planning became concentrated in an ever-smaller group within the office, and for the mass of those employed there the office became just as much a site of manual labor as the factory floor’ (1998 [1974], p. 218). If one studies the extensive specialist literature that dealt with the systematic organisation of office work around 1900, it also becomes clear that work at the desk, analogous to work in the factory, was understood quite essentially as physical work (Schnaithmann, 2012, p. 329 ff.). The ideal of an optimal working method and speed, which the ergonomists Gilbreth and Gilbreth (1921) grasped with the term ‘One Best Way’, determined not only the temporal but also the spatial organisation of work. ‘When speed is of first importance’, Leffingwell emphasised, ‘the allotment of space and its arrangement become most essential’ (1927 [1925], p. 63 f.). According to him, the arrangement of the rooms, the departments and the desks had to be designed so that distances were as short as possible; after all, the papers were to

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be transported quickly and smoothly from desk to desk or from department to department. Galloway outlined the practical implementation of efficiency thinking in the office space: The office manager visualised the floor plan on a large piece of cardboard (Fig. 2). Walls, room dividers and parapets were represented by coloured cords, tables and other furnishings by small pieces of cardboard. Coloured drawing pins marked the different departments. Analysis of the original order routine (Fig. 2, dotted line) showed an inefficient zigzag path criss-crossing the entire office. By shifting the pieces of cardboard representing the tables, the transport distances could be shortened in a model-like manner (Fig. 2, solid line) without having to move a single piece of furniture in the actual room (Galloway, 1919, p. 69 ff.). Diagrams such as that in Fig. 2 had a double function for the management of the company around 1900: they served both for illustration and abstraction; the complex three-dimensional sequence of movements became analysable, operable and communicable through the simplifying projection onto the paper surface. As an instrument of the office manager, diagrammatic representations on paper, which followed the written logic of the office, bridged the gap between planning and execution (Hoof, 2015; Pai, 2002, p. 163 ff.). Although no comparable diagrams have survived for the organisation of the Larkin office, the floor plan fulfilled a diagrammatic function for Wright: ‘it is a map, a chart, a mere diagram, a mathematical projection before the fact’ (Wright, 1975, p. 153). The blueprint of the Larkin Building served as the basis for the organic integration of stair towers and walls, window bands and galleries, desks and sculptures. Behind this was Wright’s philosophy of organic architecture, whose goal was to combine the architectural elements into a harmonious whole. This ideal also shaped the architecture of the Larkin Building: unlike most office buildings built around 1900, it presented itself—from the floor plan to the heating system to the design of the office chairs—as a well-thought-out unit. ‘The Larkin Building is different’, Francis Duffy therefore emphasises: ‘Just as it is one building externally, so internally it is one space proclaiming the unity of organisation. Within this organisation everyone takes his place’ (Duffy, 1980, p. 266). This statement is not only applicable to the straight-line arrangement of the desks. The surviving photographs from the interior of the Larkin Building (Fig. 3) clearly demonstrate the use of control techniques for workspaces, as described by Fritz (1982, p. 95 ff.) as characteristic of the rationalisation of the office: the large and homogeneously arranged workspaces made it easier to monitor employees; the function-related organisation of the space, the routinisation of work processes

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Fig. 2 Diagrammatic floor plan (Galloway, 1919, p. 70)

and the design of the furniture limited their freedom of movement; windows above the viewing height prevented them from straying from working at their desks (Duffy, 1980, p. 266 ff.; Quinan, 2006, p. 56 ff.). Fritz explicitly refers to Michel Foucault, according to whom work discipline is supposed to ‘increase skills, speed, output and profits’ (1994a [1975]). Its function is to direct human behaviour towards a common goal; it is supposed to ‘integrate the bodies into a machinery, the forces into an economy’ (ibid., p. 270, trans. CS). This disciplinary dispositif shaped office work around 1900: the planning and supervising managers at one end of the hierarchical structure were confronted at the other end with an ever increasing mass of ‘teachable

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Fig. 3 Larkin building, gallery floor (The Buffalo History Museum, Larkin Company Photograph Collection, ‘Picture.L37’, Image 2–19)

bodies’. For each activity—and this was the widespread basic assumption—standard procedures could be developed which laid down in detail the ‘economy and efficiency of movements and their innermost organisation’ (ibid., p. 175, trans. CS). The concept of efficiency was characteristic of the period around 1900, and by the middle of the nineteenth century it had become established in the thinking of physicists and engineers to determine the economics of machines (Alexander, 2008). Following the approaches of engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor, Lee Galloway and William Henry Leffingwell transferred technical thinking to the planning of office routines (Braverman, 1998, p. 211 f.; Rabinbach, 1990). By analysing human work as a complicated mechanism, they carried out ‘a shift of focus from the engineering of things to the engineering of people’ around 1900, as Noble (1977, p. 263 f.) emphasises.

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Idealised Cooperation

The Larkin Building realised the idea of the office as a machine in a remarkable way, as an enthusiastic description in The Business Man’s Magazine in 1907 shows: One is reminded of nothing so much as of a mammoth watch. There are the departments each steadily, quietly rotating about its own axis, yet in perfect coordination with the rest [...]. It is enterprise [...] that drives the wheels; carefully methods and systems are the jewel bearings; good will the lubricant. (Twitmyer, 1907, p. 49)

This statement suggests that people and their motivation were already considered essential for employee cooperation before the emergence of the Human Relations movement. So-called ‘welfare capitalism’, which can partly be traced back to the paternalistic company organisation of the nineteenth century, was in no way at odds with the mechanistic thinking of Taylorism (Brandes, 1974; Tone, 1997; Uhl, 2014). In the same way that a machine was protected against dirt and corrosion, the organisation of an office also took into account the specific human weaknesses: susceptibility to illness, eye fatigue, exposure to bad air, heat or cold. According to this logic, the fair treatment of employees was comparable to the regular lubrication of the machine (Leffingwell, 1927, p. 36 ff.). The Larkin Building embodied the realisation that rationalisation alone was not the ideal way to achieve cooperation (Schnaithmann, 2019; Stanger, 2005). According to Quinan (2006, p. 53 f.), the special care that both the Larkin Company and its architect devoted to the physical and mental well-being of the employees served to balance the monotonous and strenuous everyday working life. The Larkin Building provided employees with a canteen, a library, and washrooms and lounges. The company management also organised picnic trips, weekly concerts and training seminars (ibid., p. 53 ff.). Cooperation was the central motto that shaped the company’s philosophy: customers as well as employees were regarded as part of the Larkin family and accordingly referred to as ‘Larkinites’ (Stanger, 2000, p. 407 ff.). Even the arrangement of the workplaces was geared towards this ideal. The manager’s desks, for example, were located in the atrium of the office building—a placement that, although extremely unorthodox around 1900 because it denied men the status symbol of their own office space, corresponded to the image of the open and familiar corporate culture that the Larkin Company wanted to convey (Quinan, 2006, p. 53). The view from above into the atrium, which was also described by Erich Mendelsohn, revealed the company’s impressive cooperative

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performance, which a contemporary witness compared to a ‘busy beehive’: “Tis then, only then that you glimpse the soul of the Larkin business, for the teeming hive of industry below is intent on service’ (Martin, 1925, n.p.). This intimate and stimulating insight into the inner workings of the Larkin Company was also part of the programme for the groups of visitors who were regularly guided around the company premises. One of the company’s employees explained the many advantages that the Larkin Building offered the office workers: fireproof steel furniture with leather upholstery provided comfort and safety, the large skylight and windows allowed for sufficient daylight, the ventilation system ensured clean and pleasantly tempered air. He concluded his presentation—according to the official guidelines—with the words: ‘All these things Larkin Co. does to promote the spirit of love and cooperation among its employees even to the character-building qualities written between the pillars of the court on this floor’ (Anonymous, 1927, n.p.). He was referring to the inscriptions that adorned the balustrades of the gallery on the fourth floor. On the long sides, between the columns, there were fourteen groups of words, each consisting of three inspiring terms, such as ‘Thought/Feeling/Action’ or ‘Integrity/Loyalty/Fidelity’ (Fig. 4). The decorative typography harmonised with the shape of the building. The golden letters effectively shimmered in the daylight. The transverse walls showed quotes from the Sermon on the Mount: ‘All Things Whatsoever Ye/Would That Man Should Do/To You Do Ye Even So To Them’, for example, was written there—a sentence with symbolic meaning and suggestive power (Quinan, 2006, p. 102 ff.). The Larkin Company propagated this ‘golden rule’ as the ethical-religious basis of economic cooperation: The Golden Rule is there because it is the simplest, the wisest, the greatest rule of conduct, man to man, employee to employer, employer to employee, company to customer, customer to company, in all the world. Obedience to it is the essence of co-operation for which we stand. It is the epitome of our business ideal; it is what we want to do. It is what those who work in our great buildings, offices and factories, want to do. (Anonymous, 1907, p. 1)

The inscriptions were among the few forms of ornamentation that Wright designed for his Larkin Building. Together with the incoming light in the atrium, they led to the office space being perceived as a quasi-sacral place that motivated the pursuit of common ideals (Lipman, 2005 [1991], pp. 264, 267 ff.; Quinan, 2006, p. 85 ff.). The architecture of the Larkin Building impressively demonstrates that not only the functionalist conception of space, which we commonly associate with

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Fig. 4 Larkin building, inscriptions (The Buffalo History Museum, Larkin Company Photograph Collection, ‘Picture.L37’, Image 2–21)

‘Taylorism’, can be traced back to the time around 1900, but also ‘operationalized aestheticization’ (Prinz, 2012, p. 246, trans. CS), which is intended to appeal to a sense of belonging among managers, customers and employees. Both aspects are based on an instrumental understanding of space, which not only motivated Taylor and his students to investigate the effect of spatial planning, furniture and tools on human (collaborative) work. Etzemüller (2009) recognises in approaches such as these a larger movement dedicated to social engineering. Behind this was the utopian ‘design imperative of being able to model the world as a “community”’ (ibid., p. 25, trans. CS), which also motivated Erich Mendelsohn’s hymn to the office of the Larkin Company quoted at the beginning of this chapter. Erich Mendelsohn was impressed by the Larkin Building precisely because of the interweaving of mechanical efficiency and quasi-religious spirituality. He and others of his progressive European colleagues—among them Walter Gropius— followed a vision according to which modern factories and office buildings should develop into monumental objects, which, like the Greek temple and the Gothic

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cathedral, ‘will rise to the abstract purity of sacred acts’ (Mendelsohn, 2000 [1919], p. 44, trans. CS). This vision was not only of artistic interest to them but was also a necessary step on the way to answering the ‘social question’ (Gropius, 1987 [1911], p. 31) that had been raised by the catastrophic living conditions brought about by industrialisation and urbanisation. Gropius reacted to Marx’s characterisation of the factory as a ‘house of terror’ (1998 [1890], p. 292, trans. CS) in this context with the demand: ‘Palaces must be built for work, which not only give the factory worker, the slave of modern industrial work, light, air and cleanliness, but also let him feel something of the dignity of the common great idea that drives the entire whole’ (Gropius, 1987, p. 31, trans. CS). This ideal of harmonious interaction is also found among management experts in the early twentieth century. ‘Harmony, not discord. Cooperation, not individualism’, postulated Taylor (1913 [1911], p. 140). Leffingwell also emphasised the importance of cooperation in a society based on the division of labour: ‘Without the cooperation of other human beings, modern industry is unthinkable, and the fullest, freest, and most intelligent cooperation of others is a necessity if the highest effectiveness is to be obtained’ (1927, p. 33). Since neither Taylor nor his students believed that the will to cooperate came naturally, they developed their comprehensive instructions for organised cooperation. The decisive figure here was the manager, whose task was to get people to work together efficiently. Leffingwell spoke of the necessary ‘ability to win cooperation’ (ibid., p. 34). The manager proved his ability by creating a well-organised work environment that gave well-trained workers the opportunity to work towards a common goal through meaningful activities. By doing so, he encouraged employees to cooperate of their own free will and by acting wisely. Leffingwell regarded this voluntary cooperation as an indicator of effective organisation: ‘their will to work for that common end […] is the test and criterion of the most effective organization’ (ibid., p. 34).

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Endangered Cooperation

Today, this thinking is seen as the answer to a problem that had only arisen through the rationalisation of work—a form of resistance that factory and sometimes office workers put up against the fact that management from above deprived them of the original authority over their work (Noble, 1977, p. 262 ff.). While on the one hand managers were working on an ever more radical fragmentation, routinisation and hierarchisation of work processes, on the other hand they were

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trying to restore cohesion by systematically responding to human needs. Behind this effort stood the realisation that the exploitation of workers and employees was not helping the company either (Schnaithmann, 2012, p. 349 ff.). An employer could not afford to alienate laboriously trained employees, as the ergonomists Frank and Lillian Gilbreth emphasised: ‘They must cooperate, or both pay an awful price’ (1916, p. 275). In addition to dismissal and strikes, it was mainly smaller forms of resistance—being late, frequent trips to the water cooler, an untidy desk—that stood in the way of the ideal of efficient work organisation. Particularly dangerous for a company was the unwillingness of those workers who because of their expertise and competence were difficult to replace. An anecdote from the everyday working life of the Larkin Company shows how conflicts between the organising and controlling top-down management and the appropriating and transforming powers of the employees could play out: In February 1914, a senior office worker, Mr. Whitney, wrote a note to office manager William R. Heath complaining about his uncomfortable office chair (Whitney, 1914). This chair, like almost all the furniture in the Larkin Building, had been specially designed for the building by Frank Lloyd Wright. Mr. Whitney, however, wanted an ordinary wooden swivel chair, as offered in numerous furniture catalogues. This matter was so important to him that he even offered to pay for the chair out of his own pocket. Whitney’s request triggered a discussion that, over time, spanned several levels of the corporate hierarchy. The initial reaction of office manager Heath makes it clear that his declared goal was to have complete control over the office and to nip any recalcitrance, however small, in the bud: The Office Manager has endeavored to hold this building and its equipment intact. If we didn’t, nothing would stand still very long. Desks would be moved, desks would be exchanged, lights would be changed, ventilation would be changed, air would be changed, and I am not quite sure that we would not build the building over again. (Heath, as cited in Puffer, 1914, n.p.)

The considerable tendency to exaggerate that is evident here can be explained by the great concern that the approval of new chairs could be the first step towards far greater upheavals in the office. ‘[I]f reseating’, Heath complained, ‘then remost-anything-else’ (Heath 1914, n.p.). At the same time, the office manager grudgingly admitted that there were limits to his power—especially since some departments of the office had already purchased new chairs on their own authority. ‘I have no power to prevent it, and

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if it is not prevented in some departments, I hardly see how it can be prevented in others’ (ibid.), he wrote to the company director John D. Larkin. There is no record of how the office chair problem was finally solved. Regardless of this, however, the debate shows that—as Foucault put it—resistance can be regarded as a ‘chemical catalyst’, ‘which makes power relations visible and shows where they can be found, where they start and with which methods they work’ (1994b [1982], p. 243, trans. CS). In this particular case, the power relations ran within the boundaries of bureaucratic cooperation, the game rules of which— written form, adherence to the prescribed official channels—were followed by both Whitney and Heath. However, the resistance that took place beyond these boundaries, where employees or entire departments unbureaucratically presented the office manager with a fait accompli by purchasing chairs of their own accord, could not be countered by him. Here the employees forced him to cooperate. The discussion regarding the Larkin Company office chairs shows that while cooperation in the office was largely organised and coordinated from the top down around 1900, the rigid image we usually have of the Taylorist office falls short of the mark in that it leaves out the numerous loopholes that were open to the office worker, who was usually depicted as grey and faceless—‘the small creature who is acted upon but does not act’ (Mills, 1953, p. xii). The Larkin Company office staff proved that not only cooperative docility was part of their repertoire; they also mastered cunning tactics that ‘escape discipline without leaving their sphere of influence’ (de Certeau, 1988 [1980], p. 187, trans. CS). For the office around 1900, therefore, not only top-down organising, but also appropriating and transforming processes of use must be taken into account when speaking of ‘cooperation’. The complex interplay of stabilisation and willingness to change, which makes cooperation in this sense possible in the first place, could be examined even more closely using the example of the Larkin Company and its office building. From the mid-1920s onwards, the company saw itself increasingly less able to adapt to the changing conditions of the working world and the market. The inability to persuade ‘recalcitrant’ customers and employees to cooperate eventually led to economic bankruptcy. Wright’s Larkin Administration Building, which had once embodied the cooperative spirit of the Larkin Company, was left to its gradual decay and was finally demolished in 1950 (Quinan, 2006, p. 123 f.; Stanger, 2008, p. 150 ff.).

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On the Infrastructure of the Slaughterhouse Christian Kassung

If one examines the relationship between animal and machine at the end of the nineteenth century, there is one figure that cannot be ignored: between 1883 and 1913, the amount of pork consumed in Germany tripled (cf. Achilles, 1993, p. 254).1 Just as clear as this statistical caesura seems the narrative underlying it, in which the mechanisms of industrialisation also become effective in the culinary system of the time. Thus, Western industrial societies were inundated by an unprecedented wave of protein because, firstly, animals had become functionless due to the development of machines and, secondly, these machines could in turn take over the transport and processing of animals. In this narrative meat thus becomes a secondary product of the steam engine with a clear causal link (cf. e.g. Macho, 2001, p. 158 ff.). In the following, I would like to contrast the narrative of a reconstruction of modern meat consumption that is strongly determined by technology with a symmetrical analysis in which animal and machine become culturally effective as mutually interdependent actors (cf. König, 2009, p. 67 ff.). I start from the simple question of what function meat consumption itself had in the process of industrialisation. From this perspective it can no longer be maintained that dead animals 1

Over the same period, the share of the population’s expenditure on food remains almost the same at around 40%, while absolute per capita expenditure rises by 70%, reflecting the profound cultural shift in consumption towards products with a higher symbolic value. In the following, this contribution will frequently argue with figures and calculations in order to directly understand the media practices of the livestock trade: expedient rational behaviour is based on the numerical modelling of processes. C. Kassung (B) Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 S. Gießmann et al. (eds.), Materiality of Cooperation, Medien der Kooperation— Media of Cooperation, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-39468-4_3

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are the result of their replacement by machines. On the contrary, they have made it possible to literally keep the machines and thus industrialisation running. In this network of actors—animals, people and machines—the slaughterhouse becomes a hub of industrialisation. With this contribution, using the example of the Berlin Central Livestock and Slaughterhouse, I will show that in the transformation of the animal into meat not only are modern technologies used, but that they are also tested, improved, discarded and replaced (cf. Kassung, 2021 for a comprehensive history of the industrialisation of meat production). Thus, the slaughterhouse is not only a central site of industrialisation; as an infrastructural node it is also directly interwoven with the spatio-temporal organisation of industrialisation, because the synchronisation of a product that systematically evades its storage is only possible if this product is also consumed en masse.2 The infrastructure of meat thus presupposes meat as a mass product, which it at the same time produces in the first place. By this circular structure meat becomes a modern product: possibly even the first modern product—namely a mass product that generates itself as a commodity, because product and infrastructure are indispensably linked. Synchronisation thus becomes a cultural technique of spatio-temporal coordination. In the following I would like to unfold in detail which media and practices enable and maintain the coupling of place and time and immunise it against disturbances.

1

Technical Infrastructure

Looking at the 1886 site plan of Berlin’s Livestock and Slaughterhouse, it initially appears that this location has been the central and centrally controlled hub of a technical infrastructure that supplied Berlin until the Second World War with the necessary pork (Fig. 1). The heart of the control system was located in the exchange, which was situated exactly in the middle between the sales halls for the respective animal species and which could be entered through a ‘pillar portal and vestibule’. This is what you read in the guide through Berlin’s municipal Central Livestock and Slaughterhouse: The 73.3 m long, 13 m wide and 11.2 m high exchange hall (1026 sqm), decorated with the coats of arms of the countries and provinces supplying livestock, also serves 2

In this respect, the present contribution follows that direction of research into the history of industrialisation which does not reduce the state to its function within the market economy, but at the same time understands it as a specific material structure (cf. Ziegler, 1996, p. 10 ff.).

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as a restaurant hall, where on the main market day the crowds of people interested in the market crowd from the east and west of the Empire, because the Berlin livestock market is also an export market. [...] The main clock above the portal of the exchange is the moving force for the clocks hanging in the sales halls that are connected to it by electric wires, using a Hipp synchronisation system. (Anonymous, 1886, pp. 10–11, trans. MS)

I would like to emphasise three points that seem remarkable in this description. First, there is the association that is evoked by the building’s architecture: it resembles the reception hall of a train station (cf. Tholl, 1995, p. 326 ff.). Similar to the Hamburger Bahnhof in the north of Berlin, the main entrance is flanked by two towers, but in this case the entrance does not have an even number of round arches, but an odd number. Other architectural elements that are recognisable, at least to the contemporary observer, are the two allegories Day and Night—here Athena and Hermes—of Anhalter Bahnhof and the central clock of Potsdamer Bahnhof. The message of the design is thus clear: all the threads come together in the exchange; the meat seems to have been ordered, processed and distributed from here.

Fig. 1 Site plan of Berlin’s central livestock and slaughterhouse (Blankenstein & Lindemann, 1885, plate 1)

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Secondly, the exchange is not only the central hub of the immediate area enclosed by a wall, but also the hub of the flows of goods, money and people, which are interconnected here via the medium of the railway. This networking is symbolised inside the exchange by the coats of arms of the countries and provinces. These form the connectors without which centralised meat production is not possible: namely on the basis of a reliable and closely synchronised transport system. A third point from the guide through the city’s Central Livestock and Slaughterhouse should be highlighted. For in addition to the strong reference to the railway, another closely related network is called upon—that of time. It was realised by the German inventor Matthäus Hipp by means of so-called electric clocks (cf. Galison, 2000, pp. 366–367). The exchange set the pace for all market activities. Apparently, the need to synchronise humans and animals was extremely high, because the Hipp system has been a highly innovative technology at that time. In 1881, by the year of the opening of the livestock market it was not yet available. Instead, the market times had to be rung in by means of a bell, which was often overheard by the market traders, so that experiments were then carried out with red baskets and colours, until, finally, visible to all, the electric ‘slave’ clocks of the Hipp system transmitted the time of the ‘master’ clock without interference. By means of this electrical network everything seemed to form an organism, the controlling centre of which was the exchange. Against this background, let us now take a closer look at the railway network into which the slaughterhouse was woven. As is well known, Germany lagged considerably behind the European development of industrialisation, due to the fragmented nature of its political organisation. It was only with the formation of the German Customs Union in 1833/4, and the founding of the North German Confederation and the Wars of Unification in 1866/7 that a unified economic area was created in which the railway could be transformed into a railway network. Accordingly, until the middle of the century, animals for slaughter were driven overland to Berlin, with pigs mainly coming from Mecklenburg, whereas the Prussian provinces, which were simply too far away, did not matter (see Königlich Preußisches Ministerium der öffentlichen Arbeiten, 1982 [1896], p. 317, hereafter: BusEb). The foundation of the German Empire in 1871 united at least 40 million inhabitants of the thirty-nine formerly sovereign German individual states in an area of about 500,000 km2 to form a new nation state. Ten years earlier, in 1860, the total length of the German railways was about 11,000 km. By 1890 this length had quadrupled, to a total of almost 43,000 km. Prussia provided some 60% of the total lines, a third of which were branch lines. In the corresponding maps,

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this is reflected above all in the form of enormous compaction. For example, as early as 1860 it was already possible to get from Berlin to Danzig without any problems. Thirty years later, however, there were three different main lines with numerous, finely subdivided branch lines for the same connection. The underlying process was that of a strategically planned network formation: the territory of the Empire was made accessible via a system of railway lines in which the nodes were connected redundantly. Whether this caused the space to vanish is an open question (cf. Krajewski, 2006, p. 58). What is decisive here is that the railway network generated new market forms that operated beyond the difference between global and local. Within the long and intense political debates this had been one of the decisive arguments for the nationalisation of the private railway companies. Despite this, Bismarck’s plan threatened to fail around 1870, but then gradually took shape under the initially unsuccessful president of the Reichseisenbahnamt, Albert von Maybach, as Minister of Trade and thus de facto Minister of Railways (cf. Schultze, 1900, p. 48). At the beginning of 1884, the nationalisation of the Prussian private railways was as good as accomplished—i.e. exactly one year after the completion of all the buildings of the Berlin Central Livestock and Slaughterhouse. The few remaining private railways were no longer competitive with the ‘rampant state railway network’ (Klee, 1982, p. 176), and Berlin had become the most important hub in the German Empire. In this respect, one could completely accept the aforementioned thesis of a centrally controlled, ‘coherent and interacting’ network (Meurer, 2014, p. 68), in which the railway is seen as the material infrastructure that first and foremost enables the slaughterhouse and thus the increased production of meat. Such a connection, which of course is again strongly conceived in terms of technical determinism, could also be confirmed statistically. For example, the transport capacity in the entire network of the German Empire increased to 3033 kt of animals by 1883, only fluctuating sharply downwards in the following fifteen years, and raised to almost 5000 kt by the beginning of the First World War (cf. Fremdling et al., 1995, pp. 522 ff.). Of the more than three million tons of animal transports in the overall network in 1883, 1.7 million were transported by the Prussian State Railways alone, whereas only 0.8 million tons were transported the year before (cf. ibid., p. 400). We are therefore dealing with a virtual leap in the number of meat transports in Prussia, whereby everything indicates that this simply requires a corresponding technical infrastructure.

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Media, Agents, Interfaces

The technical infrastructure of the railways thus constitutes the material condition for an ever increasing compression of space and time in Europe at the end of the nineteenth century. In the case of animal transport, arguing solely on the example of Prussia, and more precisely Berlin, it seems to be a centralised infrastructure, an organism beating to the rhythm of the heart of the exchange, whose main artery connects the eastern provinces and which was used to transport five-sixths of all livestock imports. So far, however, I have only dealt with the material level of this infrastructure, i.e. the purely technical conditions for concrete exchange processes of data and goods. From this perspective, the network has a smooth and homogeneous surface, below which the local and the global are so closely linked that there is little need to worry about interfaces and connections. However, to quote Bruno Latour, underneath the continuous lines of the railway connection maps one will find ‘bumpy paths’ (1993, p. 118): we have to reconstruct the everyday life of livestock trade and transport in its dazzling diversity. Indeed, a closer look at actions, implementations and practices in this sense reveals a much more differentiated and, above all, much less centralised picture. The abstract connections are now replaced by concrete junctions and interfaces. These form the border zones where animals turn into meat. And it is the equally diverse and massive disturbances at these transitions that make a broader cultural-historical discussion necessary rather than a purely technical-historical one. Parallel to this shift in perspective, i.e. away from the exchange as the head and motor of meat production and towards the transformation processes taking place throughout the network, the thesis of central control must be reassessed. For, as will be shown in the following, the disruptions between the nodes of the meat infrastructure can no longer be negotiated as a side effect to be minimised by strict timing. Rather, the specific productivity of disruptions must be understood as an essential moment of the animal–meat transformation. What exactly happens at the interfaces and connections of this network? The railway as a technology is part of a very specific media network. As the two most important media, I will examine in the following the railway timetable books for the transport of livestock and horses by German railways and the livestock trade calendar, which both enable the concrete communication and spatio-temporal interlocking of agents. In doing so, these two media must, of course, be related to the level of agents and interfaces, whereby I assume that the interfaces in turn produce the agents: which cultural practices are possible, which actions become

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real and which remain imaginary is defined by the interfaces at which they are carried out. As an overarching thesis, it could be posited that these practices of meat production at the respective concrete location of an interface thus become (decentralised) cultural techniques of synchronisation. As an example, the most important interface in my view, the ramp, could be mentioned. It connects the railway with the livestock yard. At the same time, the livestock dealer mutates from buyer to seller at this location. It is a specific practice of synchronisation in that the serial flow of goods from the railway transport is transferred to the parallel processing of the animals. It is precisely in this interplay of technology, media and practices that meat as an industrial product is created. In the following, I will first turn to the media network and then to the interplay of agents, interfaces and practices. Until about the middle of the century, travellers were dependent on the newspaper: it published the timetables, but this meant that information was only given about individual lines, not the potential connections. The first steps towards a networked timetable were taken by post office secretaries in 1845, followed by the first imperial timetable book in 1878. If the railway timetables communicate the cycle of passenger and goods transport, the railway traffic regulations with—in the case of the slaughterhouse—the regulations on the transport of live animals contained therein are located one level below: II Transport. § (2) Livestock trains on lines with regular heavy livestock traffic must run on certain days to be announced by the railway – regularly or only as required – in accordance with the timetables to be laid down at each change of timetable book; they must be laid out in such a way that the stopover for livestock arriving and departing on the connecting lines is limited to the absolute minimum necessary. (quoted from the Bundesorgan Allgemeine Viehhandels-Zeitung, 1914, pp. 43–44, trans. MS)

Now what does ‘regular’ traffic mean? First of all, we can assume that the connections were set up according to needs, as reported in the anniversary publication on the occasion of the centenary of the German railways: ‘In close cooperation with agricultural organisations, traders and consumers, these connections are thoroughly prepared’ (Hauptverwaltung der Deutschen Reichsbahn, 1935, p. 309). If we now switch back to the level of the railway timetable book, whereby I will take the 1902 timetable book for the transport of livestock (cf. Schmidt, 1902) as an example, after printing the most important transport regulations it lists the schedules for all main lines including connections to the secondary lines (Fig. 2). Thus, the timetables contain all the information needed to plan the

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transport of pigs from the respective provincial railway station to Berlin without having to rely on any authorities or third parties. Or in other words: the medium of the railway timetable book does not suggest that a certain number of animals from the provinces are called up by telegraph, but rather that as many animals arrive at the slaughterhouse as are sold, slaughtered and processed in the following days. In such a networked market, any discrepancies between supply and demand are regulated on a decentralised basis, i.e. at the respective provincial stations and at the expense of the local actors. For example, for the village of Wiekowo (Alt Wieck) in the Pomeranian region of Poland, which was connected to the Szczecin railway in 1870, it is reported that rural carts waited in long queues for the livestock traders to collect the animals (cf. Vollack, 1989, p. 1272). What is not sold simply goes back into the barn. The example of Wiekowo thus gives a first indication of the function of the interfaces in the network of modern meat production. Local relay and branching processes can be implemented via timetable books, which simultaneously make

Fig. 2 Railway timetable book for the transport of livestock (Schmidt, 1902, pp. 10–11)

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the overall system more flexible and stabilise it. Neither does the exchange order specific quantities of animals from the provinces, nor are predetermined quantities of goods delivered in the rigid rhythm of the railway connections. Rather—and this considerably complicates the relationship between centrality and decentralization—we are dealing with a flexible timing of strongly interlocking processes. The timetable books and, as will be shown in a moment, the livestock trading calendar, generate this rhythm just as non-autonomously as the clocks in the exchange. But they allow for flexible and decentralised participation in these processes and thus stabilise them. In his late text ‘An Essay on Time’ the sociologist Norbert Elias describes how the ‘knowledge of calendar time […] as means of orientation in relation to oneself […] is taken for granted to the point where it escapes reflection’ (1994, p. 6). It could hardly be more clearly formulated that the mediality of the calendar becomes invisible in its everyday use. For the media of meat production this means that the livestock trade calendar is first and foremost a calendar. Beyond all the logistics of animal exploitation, the livestock trade calendar is a medium whose obstinacy is a promise of the profession and practice of livestock trade. For what a calendar primarily prescribes is the ‘unchanging recurrence of the same sequence patterns’ (ibid., p. 7). In Nietzsche’s sense, the calendar is a symbol of the eternal return of identical constellations, and, in this case, these are simply the market times of the coming year. The entire metabolism of meat production and consumption takes place in the cycle of the seasons, which is why those who use the medium of the livestock trade calendar cannot avoid inscribing themselves in its temporal order: next year, everything will follow the same plan. If one argues in this way from the stubbornness of the medium of the calendar, the security, reliability and predictability of the livestock trade is not a matter of the livestock trade itself, but an effect of the media associated with this practice. But the livestock trade calendar is not only a calendar; it is also a vade mecum in the literal sense of the word. It accompanies the livestock dealer as an individual who enters his personal information on the very first page, from the cheque book number to the cuff measurements and life insurance. It is bound in leather and comes with a pencil case, an organiser of the livestock dealer. In turn, a rough silhouette of the livestock dealer can therefore be sketched from the data structure of this medium: He is a male, well dressed and middle-class person with a cheque book and savings bank book. One entry is particularly striking, namely the ‘number on the case/movement of my watch’ (Bundesorgan Allgemeine Viehhandels-Zeitung, 1914, p. 4, trans. MS). The cattle trader is dependent on privatised timekeeping in his profession, because the time given by

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the timetable books must literally be carried all the way into the stalls. Connectivity to the slaughterhouse is therefore achieved mainly in a temporal and again decentralised manner. The further you flip through the handbook, the more the image of the livestock dealer gains in contour. He has joined a professional association that supports his interests and, among other things, produces this very handbook. If one takes the term ‘vade mecum’ literally, the livestock dealer constantly calculates prices and costs on his way between producers and buyers. For example, he buys the pig from the breeder not according to live weight, but according to slaughter weight. This must be estimated on the basis of breed, age, physique, etc., with the aid of appropriate tables (Fig. 3). If one now adds the corresponding multiplication tables, the handbook becomes a calculating medium. Another characteristic of the livestock dealer can be derived directly from the structure of the handbook: He is either not particularly solvent or the financial risk of his business is not insignificant. Thus, a large part of the information relates to legal fees, legal costs, the associated correspondence and interest calculations for borrowed money. In the medium of the livestock trading calendar, the image of a nomadic middleman is thus created, a constantly mobile entity with few personal resources and yet with the apparent security of constant or at least easily calculable market transactions. The second part of the approximately 100-page vade mecum is followed by the actual livestock trade calendar. Its function is the spatio-temporal interconnection of traders and market. Thus, for each day of the year the calendar records where the respective markets take place in Germany. The locations are divided into four groups and the corresponding provinces—apparently these are closed systems which define the operating radius of the individual livestock trader. Access is also possible via a specific location, for which the respective markets are then listed. Rather matter-of-factly, it is said for the Berlin police district that the ‘livestock market (for cattle, calves, sheep and pigs) […] is held there every week on Wednesday and Saturday’ (Bundesorgan Allgemeine Viehhandels-Zeitung, 1914, p. 181, trans. MS). Because the livestock trade calendar communicates the necessary knowledge about the local conditions of the livestock-producing provinces, the connection seems guaranteed. The risks and disturbances disappear behind the media, and from the slaughterhouse’s point of view they are peripheralised: disturbances can occur, they do occur, but the animal–meat transformation in the slaughterhouse itself is not much affected by them. This brings me to the concrete interfaces at which the technical infrastructure, media and actors interconnect. I am particularly interested in the ramp as the zone at which traders and butchers meet, i.e. where the rigid exchange cycle of the slaughterhouse and the soft transport cycle of the livestock trade must

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Fig. 3 Tables included in the livestock trading calendar (Bundesorgan Allgemeine Viehhandels-Zeitung, 1914, pp. 68–69)

be synchronised with each other. In order to be able to reconstruct the practices of this interconnection as concretely as possible, I first take the summer timetable 1895 and then focus on the Prussian Eastern Railway. On weekdays, the central livestock yard was mainly supplied by four livestock train lines: the Berlin Northern Railway from Stralsund, the Berlin-Szczecin line from Szczecin, the Prussian Eastern line from Küstrin, and the Lower Silesian-Markish Railway from Frankfurt (Oder)/Wrocław. The resulting flow of goods thus has a clear structure: While the bulk of the livestock comes to Berlin from the eastern and northern districts, where agriculture and livestock breeding predominate, the western lines, especially the Hamburg lines, export a lot of livestock. (BusEb, 1982, p. 475, trans. MS)

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The first special train, which brought livestock to Berlin, ran on the Eastern Railway between Dirschau, today’s Tczew in Poland, and the station Schlesischer Bahnhof (Silesian Station) on 1 March 1862. Once a week, on Fridays, this train left Dirschau at 12:48 p.m. to arrive in Berlin after a journey of about eighteen hours (cf. ibid., p. 321). The average speed was thus almost 25 km per hour. Since 1883, the Royal Prussian Ministry of Public Works published statistics on the movement of goods on German railways—a side effect of the nationalisation described above (cf. Statistik 1883). For transport district No. 1, i.e. East and West Prussia, 34,981 pigs were counted in the month of May in the direction of Berlin, but not a single one in the opposite direction. By multiplication, this would result in about 420,000 pigs for the year 1883. If we now break down this annual transport capacity of around 400,000 pigs from West and East Prussia to the specific railway lines, we can assume that these same quantities of animals were fed into the slaughterhouse by the Eastern Railway via the LichtenbergFriedrichsfelde marshalling yard. The standard work Berlin und seine Eisenbahnen 1846–1896 (BusEb, 1982) lists a total of three regularly arriving freight trains, which are transferred to the slaughterhouse in fourteen trains at the marshalling yard (Fig. 4). Let us try to get a first picture of the everyday practice from the interpretation of these numbers. Firstly, animal transport took place mainly at night. Both loading at the exit stations and unloading at the slaughterhouse were limited to the so-called night hours between 6 p.m. in the evening and 6 a.m. The reasons for

Fig. 4 Routes of livestock trains in Berlin (BusEb, 1982, p. 475)

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this are mainly to be found in the logistical separation of passenger and goods or animal transport. As an effect of this separation, the animals and their transport became invisible to the urban population, which only saw them again as meat or on their plates. This disappearance of the animal is an essential element of meat production, in which meat becomes one industrial product among others.3 Secondly, of the three livestock trains, only the one with the longest route, from Eydtkuhnen, did not run on Sundays, otherwise the timetable applies daily. This means that at least twenty regular livestock trains per week arrived in Lichtenberg-Friedrichsfelde. If this is broken down linearly, the 400,000 pigs imported annually on the Eastern Railway would be distributed over about 8000 animals per week or 400 per train. Then the trains arriving in LichtenbergFriedrichsfelde would be divided in a ratio of 3:14, in order to continue on from there to the central livestock station. Obviously, this calculation makes no sense, because it leads to completely unprofitable workloads. It therefore seems once again that the continuity of the flow of goods, which can be deduced from the timetable, cannot be found in the reality of animal transport in this way. Let us therefore make a second approach from another source. Market day in Berlin, as in Paris and London, was initially on Monday, and since 1 March 1893 it has been on Wednesdays and Saturdays to ensure Sunday rest. According to Berlin und seine Eisenbahnen 1846–1896, up to 3000 people gathered at the Central Livestock and Slaughterhouse on Market Day itself, including 800 traders, 130 exporters from the West, 700 butchers from Berlin and 300 butchers from the neighbourhood spread over the week (cf. BusEb, 1982, p. 330). According to this source, we are therefore not dealing with a continuous, tranquil influx of animals spread over the whole week, which would also enable the small trader to integrate into the market without harm or risk. Instead, the livestock influx accumulates strongly before the two market days, namely in an average of twenty extra trains per week with 600–700 wagons, mainly from the eastern provinces of Prussia. Apart from a few farmers, it is primarily livestock traders who are involved in the loading process, with about 700 of them operating at the market (cf. Anonymous, 1902, pp. 17 ff.).4 It is unclear what exactly the cattle and slaughterhouse guide of 1902 refers to as ‘extra trains’. What is certain, however, is that an accumulated influx of animals occurred on Tuesday and Friday nights. According to this, about ten 3

On the topos of becoming invisible within Human-Animal Studies, see for example Krauthausen (2007). 4 The Livestock and Slaughterhouse Guide of 1886 lists about 500 wagons with the same number of arrivals, which is quite consistent with the information from 1902 (cf. Anonymous, 1886, p. 5).

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trains with 350 livestock wagons arrived on each of these nights, with almost half of them carrying pigs.5 Since about half of all pigs are imported from the eastern provinces, we can roughly assume two to three trains of the Eastern Railway with about seventy wagons per market night, or 120 pigs per wagon.6 If one tries to condense these numerical estimations into one picture, then twice a week around 400 pig dealers and 400 pig slaughterers gather on the ramp to organise the sale of around 8000 pigs along this interface—with a financial volume of around half a million marks.7 In the worst case, a trader had set off from Eydtkuhnen the day before and spent the last twenty-seven hours on the train. However, this longest connection has the advantage of an arrival time in the evening hours, so that the trader can allow himself a short night’s rest—or a visit to a brothel—before the central Hipp clock strikes seven in the morning to ring in the market. The market activity itself can be roughly described as follows. The traders sell the animals to the butchers. The slaughterhouse transforms them into meat—for a certain fee consisting of different services from feeding to the trichina inspection and within a maximum of three days. The butchers then sell the meat at the respective locations in Berlin, for example in the central market hall on Alexanderplatz. So, the purchase must be realised from the turnover of the sale. As the butchers do not normally have the necessary capital to purchase the animals, this results in a considerable credit requirement of around one million marks a week for the year 1887—for the municipal meat supply alone. Given the scope of this contribution, I cannot develop the resulting disturbances any further at this point; I will only say that here credit becomes the medium of synchronisation (on the mediality of credit in a broader context cf. Gießmann, 2018). Let us now return to the ramp as the concrete interface where transport and processing meet and a fold between life and death is formed (Fig. 5). From a purely technical point of view, the ramp forms the so-called cattle station with 13.5 km of tracks and platforms. The layout of the halls, their location, size and orientation follow the logistics of the track route: the more difficult

5

Of the approximately 8000 pigs arriving on market day, almost a quarter are exported, the remaining 6000 animals are slaughtered in the following three days (cf. Anonymous, 1902, p. 17). 6 This allows the following control calculation: if about half of the pigs are imported via the Eastern Railway, this results in the above-mentioned total quantity of 400,000 pigs from East and West Prussia at about 100 market days per year. 7 What is not taken into account here is the seasonal, not inconsiderable fluctuation in the number of pigs raised between a few thousand in summer and up to a five-digit number in winter (cf. Blankenstein & Lindemann, 1885, p. 55).

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Fig. 5 Freight station at the central livestock and slaughterhouse (Pankow District office of Berlin, archive number FA033394)

the animals are to drive, the closer the respective halls are to the track. Accordingly, the pigs are given their own railway connection, which runs from the north directly to the south and marks the border between the western slaughterhouse and the eastern livestock yard. Parallel to this, the track for the wholesale operations is also located in the market hall. The pigs thus arrive symbolically and logistically exactly on the borderline between the livestock yard and the slaughterhouse, between life and death. It is also a hygienic border: only those pigs that have passed an initial veterinary inspection and have thus undergone a further transformation to meat enter the slaughterhouse. Within this topography, the ramps follow a clearly parallel logic: At the livestock station, five trains can be unloaded simultaneously over a length of 400 m—equivalent to thirty-four trains arriving and departing daily. Unlike cars, buses, planes or ships, the train opens and closes along its entire length. On the ramp, all pigs arrive at the same time, regardless of the distance they have travelled before. If we now add to this the fact that it takes about one hour to unload a livestock train with eighty to 100 axles or 1600–2000 pigs, the radically changed time regime is immediately noticeable (cf. BusEb, 1982, p. 328). The translation

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of a serial transport into a parallel flow of goods via the ramp corresponds to an enormous acceleration of the processes. Not the individual animal, but always many animals at the same time—balanced with the quantity of human actors available—are either fed into the rhythm of the meat-producing slaughterhouse machinery or sorted for further transport.

3

Cultural Techniques of Networking

In contrast to grids, networks do not exist as real, technical things. Rather, they are cultural products in the best sense of the word, namely the result of certain practices which, on the one hand, presuppose physical grids such as the railway, but, on the other hand, require the media—which at the same time produce them—in order to become capable of action in the real world (cf. the large-scale study by Gießmann (2014)). The decisive place where the reality of the technical and the symbolism of the media interconnect has been described in this contribution as an interface. It was particularly important to show that the technical things and the cultural practices of modern meat production are brought together by their own media, namely the railway timetable book and the livestock trade calendar. Thus, at these interfaces, of which I have examined the ramp as an example, three instances interact: the technology, the media, and the actors, which in the case of the slaughterhouse are human and non-human animals, to use a variation of Bruno Latour’s well-known formula. This also means that all actions in the network inevitably become interactions, or that, in the network, basically only interactions are possible. Crucial for the success of this interaction or the evaluation of disturbances is the synchronisation of the processes, more precisely of the goods, the data and the actors. Within this theoretical context, my main aim with this contribution was to reconstruct the extremely diverse forms of interaction associated with the emergence of a completely new product at the end of the nineteenth century: meat as a common, urban food product. One main interest in this context was the symmetrical argumentation. Meat as a consumer good is not just generated by a technology or a complex network of a certain kind, but it is always also the meat as a consumer good that makes this network possible, stabilises and modifies it. At first it seemed as if the synchronisation or spatio-temporal coordination of the flows of information and goods in this network were centrally controlled—as if the entire network of meat production was beating to the regular rhythm of the normal clock. The exchange would thus be the control centre of a gigantic machine that stretches its arms to the deepest eastern provinces of the German

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Empire in order to stock up on the supplies that Berlin’s belly craves. However, the more precise the analysis of the various actors became, the more clearly it emerged that the numerous nodes and interfaces of this network are subject to massive interference, that they tend to vibrate and tremble with high intensity rather than oscillate in the uniform rhythm of the slaughterhouse. It is therefore precisely the complex interplay of nervous vibration and controlled oscillation in which this network functions and produces meat as a new, modern product.8 From this new, analytical perspective, which also examines the concrete actions of the respective actors at significant interfaces—here the figure of the livestock trader in particular was highlighted—an explanation for the change in meat consumption taking place in Berlin at the turn of the century based on technical determinism can no longer be maintained. What is decisive is rather the synchronisation of data and things in a network that is sufficiently stable and flexible, calculable and resilient, global and local at the same time (cf. Siegert, 1999, pp. 179 ff.). A network can only have these contradictory functions if and when there are different degrees of coupling at the interfaces. Thus, the slaughtering as well as the trichina examination are timed in the strictest conceivable manner, with the closest coupling of the actors in a tightly regulated disciplinary regime. On the other hand, the everyday life of the livestock traders is characterised by a high degree of necessary flexibility in order to be able to thread themselves into the slaughter cycle at all. The livestock trader is a disruption-absorbing figure who thereby stabilises the slaughter cycle: tight and loose coupling are mutually dependent. The need for this decentralised, network-based synchronisation is particularly high because the slaughterhouse itself has no relay function due to the lack of cooling technology, which was initially deliberately avoided for hygiene reasons. Relay and synchronisation are therefore, as Bernhard Siegert has already pointed out, closely linked: ‘The technology used to accomplish that goal was the relay and its attunement to the entire network—timing’ (1999, p. 55). In the case of the network, one could even trenchantly state that, from a purely technical point of view, there is no difference between synchronisation and relays. Rather, the network, which enables the synchronisation of data and things, becomes a relay at the same time. The relay function cannot be reduced to a certain technology of storage or a special group of actors. Rather, it is one of the possibly decisive characteristics of modern networks themselves, namely their ability to receive a central rhythm decentrally, whereby possible disturbances are cancelled out 8

On the analysis of man and industrial society as media, see for example Giedion (1948) or Asendorf (1989).

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rather in the area of loose, peripheral couplings, i.e. in the provinces. It is not the centrally controlled, but the self-synchronising network that enables the Central Livestock and Slaughterhouse in Berlin to function. Thus, the network becomes the decisive cultural technique for the synchronisation of modern production processes. This also provides the explanation for why central slaughterhouses were not built until the end of the nineteenth century, although most technologies were already available at the beginning of the century: they only became culturally effective through their networking.

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Königlich Preußisches Ministerium der öffentlichen Arbeiten. (Ed.). (1883). Statistik der Güterbewegung auf deutschen Eisenbahnen nach Verkehrsbezirken geordnet. Carl Heynmanns Verlag (cited as: Statistik 1883). Königlich Preußisches Ministerium der öffentlichen Arbeiten. (Ed.). (1982 [1896]). Berlin und seine Eisenbahnen 1846–1896 (Vol. 2). Verlag Ästhetik und Kommunikation (cited as: BusEb). Krajewski, M. (2006). Restlosigkeit. Weltprojekte um 1900. Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag. Krauthausen, K. (2007). Schlachten. Anmerkungen zu Rainer Werner Fassbinders ‘In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden’. In A. von der Heiden & J. Vogl (Eds.), Politische Zoologie (pp. 355–371). diaphanes. Latour, B. (1993). We have never been modern. Harvard University Press. Macho, T. (2001). Lust auf Fleisch? Kulturhistorische Überlegungen zu einem ambivalenten Genuss. In D. Matejovski, D. Kamper, & G.-C. Weniger (Eds.), Mythos Neanderthal. Ursprung und Zeitenwende (pp. 145–162). Campus. Meurer, A. (2014). Industrie- und Technikallegorien der Kaiserzeit. Ikonographie und Typologie. Verlag und Datenbank für Geisteswissenschaften. Schmidt, O. (Ed.). (1902). Kursbuch für den Viehverkehr enthaltend die Fahrpläne der Vieh-, Eilgüter- und gemischten Züge, der für den Viehfernverkehr in Betracht kommenden Güterzüge und der zur Viehbeförderung freigegebenen Personenzüge im Deutschen Reiche. Ernst Siegfried Mittler und Sohn. Schultze, W. (1900). Deutschlands Binnenhandel mit Vieh. Deutschlands Vieh- und Fleischhandel. Atlas. Arbeiten der Deutschen Landwirtschafts-Gesellschaft (Vol. 52). Siegert, B. (1999). Relays: Literature as an epoch of the postal system. Stanford University Press. Tholl, S. (1995). Preußens blutige Mauern. Der Schlachthof als öffentliche Bauaufgabe im 19. Jahrhundert. Europäische Food Edition. Vollack, M. (Ed.). (1989). Der Kreis Schlawe. Ein pommersches Heimatbuch, Volume 2: Die Städte und Landgemeinden. Husum Druck- und Verlagsgesellschaft. Viehhandels-Zeitung, B. A. (Ed.). (1914). Deutscher Viehhandels-Kalender 1914 (Vol. 6). G. Kühn. Ziegler, D. (1996). Eisenbahnen und Staat im Zeitalter der Industrialisierung. Die Eisenbahnpolitik der deutschen Staaten im Vergleich. In Vierteljahresschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte. Beihefte (Vol. 127). Franz Steiner Verlag.

Version Control. On the Software-Based Coordination of Co-laboration Marcus Burkhardt

The observation that digitally networked media allow their users participation is now little more than a commonplace. Yet sharing—of discoveries, events, observations, news, opinions, evaluations, beliefs, information, data, secrets, time, developments, resources, etc.—has become an imperative in the economy of digital platforms. In his novel The Circle, Dave Eggers has his female protagonist, Mae, proclaim that ‘[s]haring is caring’ (2013, p. 301) and it is exactly that which is asked of all users. As infrastructures of participation, however, digitally networked media in general and social media platforms in particular open up different, more or less established spaces of sharing and participation, in the context of which the often praised and increasingly cursed potentials of digital participation unfold in practice, i.e. in diverse, heterogeneous and sometimes unforeseen medial practices. At the same time, the free and open source movement promises the opportunity to participate in the technical design of the digital world, for example by co-developing software applications or co-authoring documentation. Over the past decade, the GitHub platform became the centre of gravity for co-laborative1 software production. Based on the version management software Git, GitHub offers an online service for hosting and (co-laboratively) working on software projects. Originally designed as a platform for source code management, GitHub is also used in other areas: be it as a hosting platform for 1

In inserting the hyphen between ‘co’ and ‘laborate’ I follow Niewöhner (2014). This is intended to take the emphasis away from the concept of collaboration and to focus on the forms of organising participation and teamwork.

M. Burkhardt (B) University of Siegen, Siegen, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 S. Gießmann et al. (eds.), Materiality of Cooperation, Medien der Kooperation— Media of Cooperation, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-39468-4_4

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websites (GitHub, n.d.), as an archive of German legal texts (Bundestag2 , 2012) or as a tool for collecting holiday recommendations (Egan, 2012). Nevertheless, the focus of GitHub remains on software and its development. And even though many open source projects are hosted, maintained and developed on the platform, GitHub itself is not a free and open source software service. Rather, the platform develops and promotes a model of ‘open collaboration’ as suggested by Balter (2014), GitHub employee and open source evangelist. The idea of a collaborative social practice is articulated within the framework of the platform as a problem of coordinating (co-)work on digital artefacts, such as the source code of programs. GitHub as a platform of digital co-laboration is part of a history of techniques and practices of (co-)creating, editing, commenting on, revising and updating media constellations.3 These range from improvised to highly formalised procedures that are mediated by media technologies, such as the manual correction of paper manuscripts, techniques of record keeping, the exchange of text variants via email, the manual versioning of digital documents and also the software-supported administration of source code with version control systems (VCS). In this chapter my aim is to discuss how software systems for version management structure the handling and circulation of documents in different ways and through this create specific conditions of cooperation. These conditions result in different models, forms and formats of co-laboration, i.e. the parallel, partly coordinated and/or uncoordinated, partly planned and/or unplanned creation of source code. However, version control systems do not determine co-laborative practices, but rather suggest certain forms of use, which are codified in practice by standards, guidelines and codes of conduct. Software codes and codes of conduct give way for diverse practices of coordinating cooperative work without consensus. Despite this practical diversity, it is important to ask how version control systems, as logistical media, frame and structure (co-laborative) work on code.4 The focus here is on the controversies, 2

This is the organisation ‘Bundestag’ on GitHub, which is not maintained by the German Federal Parliament, but by seven developers and data activists (as of 26/02/2018). 3 Matthias Vogel proposes to understand media constellations as those ‘states of the world or events that arise or are brought about by the performance of elementary media practices’ (2001, p. 220 f., trans. MB). Compared to similar terms such as ‘media product’ or ‘media object’, the concept of media constellation does not focus on the character of the product as a work or an object, but on the practices of creating or performing and using media objects (see also Burkhardt, 2015, p. 50 ff.). 4 I employ the term ‘logistical media’ in reference to John Durham Peters, who has used it to emphasise the coordinative function of media beyond their communicative function: ‘They

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lines of conflict and alternative solutions that are practised, discussed and implemented for version control systems in the ‘[r]ecursive publics’ (Kelty, 2008, p. 7) of software developers.5 The question of how the collaborative development of software can or should be coordinated by version control systems is the subject of sometimes heated debate about what makes ‘good’ or even the ‘best’ software for the purpose of version control. These debates are less concerned with specific organisational models of collaboration, but rather revolve around different ideas of what documents, versions and version histories are and how their parallel development can be guaranteed. The problem of the co-laborative development of software articulates itself in this context as a question about the materialisation of documents and their histories as well as about the elementary operations of a (co-laborative) development practice. In the following, this will be traced by a comparison of centralised and distributed version control systems, whereby both similarities and differences between them will be elaborated. With this comparative perspective on version control applications, the contingencies of software supporting and organising co-laborative work become apparent.

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Controversial Lines of Development

The history of software applications for version control goes back to the era of mainframe computers. The first VCS is considered to be the Source Code Control System (SCCS) developed by Mark J. Rochkind at Bell Labs in 1972, which allowed for local version control of individual files on a computer (see Raymond, 2008). The Revision Control System (RCS) developed in the 1980s by Walter F. Tichy at Purdue University worked in a similar way. These early systems did not focus on coordinating co-laboration, but on supporting the programming work and development activities of individuals. In addition to the implementation of

add to the leverage exerted by recording media that compress time, and by transmitting media that compress space. The job of logistical media is to organize and orient, to arrange people and property, often into grids. They both coordinate and subordinate, arranging relationships among people and things. Logistical media establish the zero points where the x and y axes converge’ (2015, p. 37). 5 Kelty defines recursive publics as follows: ‘Recursive publics are publics concerned with the ability to build, control, modify, and maintain the infrastructure that allows them to come into being in the first place and which, in turn, constitutes their everyday practical commitments and the identities of the participants as creative and autonomous individuals’ (2008, p. 7).

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new functions for new program versions, this also includes, for example, the correction of errors in already published program releases or the optimisation of the implemented source code. In software development, the code of an application is always multiple. Early VCS first and foremost supported developers in managing this multiplicity of source codes, which is intrinsic to all software development projects and only becomes more complex and complicated when development work is distributed between developers and done in parallel. Computer data storage, which can be easily overwritten and modified, was given a long-term archival memory by SCCS and RCS, which knows not only the current, but also all previous versions of a document. However, this archival memory does not retain all changes ever made to a document. It is rather a selective memory of important points in the development history. Tichy emphasised this in an essay about the design of RCS: [I]ndiscriminately storing every change produces too many revisions, and programmers have difficulties distinguishing them. The proliferation of revisions forces programmers to spend much time on finding and deleting useless files. [...] An alternative approach is to separate editing from revision control. The user may repeatedly edit a given revision, until freezing it with an explicit command. Once a revision is frozen, it is stored permanently and can no longer be modified. […] Editing a frozen revision implicitly creates a new one, which can again be changed repeatedly until it is frozen itself. (1985, p. 651)

The fact that changes to a document are not automatically included in its version history, but must be explicitly instructed by the so-called commit command, is a fundamental principle on which even today’s version management systems are still based. Versioning is therefore not an automatism but a practice in the process of programming, which in the case of SCCS and RCS was able to support the programming practice on a computer. This changed with the introduction of networked VCS, such as the Concurrent Versions System (CVS) in the mid-1980s, a centralised version control system that was especially popular in the open source developer community, but has now largely been replaced by other applications, such as Apache Subversion (2000).6 Centralised VCS are based on a client–server model of managing software projects, i.e. the version history is stored centrally in an authoritative repository from which developers check out existing versions and to which they commit their changes (Fig. 1). 6

CVS was probably the first central VCS released under an open source licence. However, the first proprietary applications for managing software code based on a client–server model, such as Panvalet or Software Change Manager, had been developed already in the 1970s.

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Repository

Fig. 1 Client–server model (Collins-Sussman et al., 2011, p. 1)

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As an alternative model to centralised VCS, a distributed model of version control emerged in the late 1990s. In distributed VCS co-laboration is not organized around a single, centralized repository, but each developer has their own repository of the version history of a software project, which can be synchronised and merged with any other repository. BitKeeper, one of the first distributed version control systems, was created in response to the growing complexity and dynamics of co-laborative development of Linux. Linus Torvalds was and is at the centre of this development activity: He not only implemented the first version of the operating system in 1991, but also maintains the official, stable code base of the Linux kernel that other developers contribute to. However, Torvalds’ central role in the development process held potential for conflict. As Christopher Kelty recounts in Two Bits, in late summer 1998 Torvalds failed to incorporate suggested changes into the official code base for some time, which caused severe criticism from contributing developers (2008, p. 232 ff.). The fact that Torvalds was simply on vacation calmed his collaborators. At the same time awareness of the practical challenges in coordinating and integrating the code work for Linux grew. In the wake of this controversy Larry McVoy pointedly stated, ‘Linus doesn’t scale’ (1998a) and suggested to mitigate the challenges of co-laborative code work by using a distributed version control system, which he had been working

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on for some time (1998b) and which was released as BitKeeper under a proprietary license in 2000. For his work on BitKeeper McVoy drew on concepts he encountered already in the early 1990s while working on what was probably the first distributed VCS WorkShop TeamWare released by Sun Microsystems in 1993 (see Hacker News Contributors, 2016). Git and Mercurial are examples of widely distributed VCS today. There is an ongoing quasi-religious dispute between the proponents in the centralised and the distributed VCS camps about which of the two approaches is better for version management in theory and practice. Thus, there are countless posts online that praise the assumed advantages of one or the other approach and underline the disadvantages of the respective other. Apart from the tireless discussions about technical details, these debates reveal different attitudes, tastes, and ideas about the handling of information, documents, and versions as well as about the realisation of collaboration in co-laborative development projects. In the discussions, therefore, there are numerous variations of the argument that it is necessary to understand the basic ideas of the respective approach to really appreciate its advantages and consequently be convinced by it (see, e.g., Chacon & Straub, 2014, p. 31 f.). Similarly, the debate about whether version control systems should be based more on the concept of the snapshot or the changeset is also highly controversial. The snapshot metaphor refers to the current overall state of a project after a commit. It refers to the ‘snapshot’ of the contents of all the files in the repository at a given point in time (Fig. 2). In contrast, the idea of the changeset focuses on the changes made in each step of revision. The repository does not appear as a sequence of versions, but as a sequence of revision steps. Proponents of this approach therefore often speak more of revision control systems (see Lord, 2002). Although the corresponding changesets can be derived from different snapshots, and vice versa the content of a repository can be calculated from a sequence of changesets, there are subtle differences between the two. Thus, Martin Pool argues that changeset systems have a finer granular ‘memory’ and are therefore more ‘powerful’ than snapshot systems like Subversion (see 2004). Proponents of the snapshot approach, however, point out that such systems are easier for users to understand (see Chacon & Straub, 2014; Collins-Sussman et al., 2011).

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Fig. 2 Snapshot perspective on version control (Collins-Sussman et al., 2011, p. 8)

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Co-laborating with Subversion

The controversies about the best design of software applications for version management seem abstract, very technical and hardly comprehensible if one focuses solely on the aspect of preserving version histories. However, the creation of a digital long-term memory of earlier versions of a software project by no means fulfils only an archival purpose, but serves to coordinate synchronous, distributed work on a project. Centralised and distributed VCS face similar challenges but solve them in different ways. In the following, we will first discuss centralised VCS and the forms of cooperation inscribed in them. As a paradigmatic example, Apache Subversion, a centralised version management system introduced in 2000 and still with a broad user base, will be examined in more detail. Access to a repository in a centralised VCS like Subversion is usually regulated, with Subversion allowing for fine granular assignment of read and write permissions. However, the decisive factor in this context is not so much who is

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Two users read file A

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Fig. 3 Problem of collaboration (Collins-Sussman et al., 2011, p. 3)

granted access to the program code as who is given the right to modify which parts of the code. The granular administration of write access to a centralized repository formalises the division of labour and practices of co-laboration in software development projects. In addition to regulating collaboration, centralised VCS must deal with problems that arise when different programmers simultaneously edit the same files. For example, it needs to be ensured that changes are neither lost nor in conflict with each other (Fig. 3). These problems are solved when only one person is allowed to work on a specific file at any given time. This is achieved in practice by a file-locking

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mechanism: once a developer checks out a file of a central repository this file gets locked preventing other developers from working on the same file. Once locked a file needs to be committed back to the central repository before someone else can access it. While this approach provides some benefits in terms of cooperative development, the linearisation of the development process makes it impractical. Especially in large software development projects, this file-locking approach proves to be too restrictive and inflexible if numerous programmers, possibly scattered around the globe, are working simultaneously on many different tasks, such as fixing bugs, implementing new features or porting the application to a platform. Another approach for coordinating co-laborative work on source code files in centralized VCS is based on providing mechanisms for remembering which version of a file was worked on by a programmer and for comparing and combining different versions of a file. Subversion does this by verifying on each commit whether the version of a file checked out and modified by the user is still current. If a newer version of this file is available in the repository in the meantime, the user must first load it and merge it with the locally edited file (cf. Collins-Sussman et al., 2011, p. 10). The file can only be transferred to the repository after the merge has been completed. Even though certain changes to multiple versions of a file can be merged automatically, the integration step often requires additional programming work that eliminates conflicts between the versions. However, instead of programmers having to coordinate with each other communicating, it is each programmer’s task to merge the different file versions and thereby eliminate conflicts. File checkout, update, merge and commit are the basic ways in which users interact with Subversion’s central repository, allowing them to participate directly in a development project, provided they have the appropriate access privileges. Nonetheless, Subversion’s ability to coordinate the distributed reading, writing and rewriting does not in itself ensure successful collaboration. This is also pointed out by the authors of the Subversion manual: Subversion provides the ultimate flexibility in terms of how you arrange your data. Because it simply versions directories and files, and because it ascribes no particular meaning to any of those objects, you may arrange the data in your repository in any way that you choose. Unfortunately, this flexibility also means that it’s easy to find yourself ‘lost without a roadmap’ as you attempt to navigate different Subversion repositories which may carry completely different and unpredictable arrangements of the data within them. (Collins-Sussman et al., 2011, p. 17)

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In addition to the technologically implemented possibilities of coordinating colaborative development work, additional project-specific, socially established and practically implemented rules and routines are required, which do not concern the handling of files, but their organisation in the repository. These rules are not written in software code, but codified in guidelines, recommendations, and best practices that Subversion developers also recommend to the system’s users.7 For each project, three folders should be created: the so-called Trunk folder, a Branches folder and a Tags folder. This structure is not technically ‘enforced’ but is based on conventions of ‘good’ collaboration that have become the de facto standard for organising files in Subversion. While the software does not prescribe specific practices at this level, it does provide the framework within which co-laborative practices can and must be administratively disciplined. In the structure of trunks, branches and tags, two different forms of colaborative development work can be realised. In the first form, the trunk is used as the main development area, to which all changes such as bug fixes or new features are passed. The Branches folder is used to store copies of the project that refer to the development status of the software at a certain point in time (Fig. 4). These are branches of the project that can be developed further without the trunk. In this co-laboration model, the creation of a development branch prepares the release of an official version of the respective software, which must still be tested before the actual release. After these tests are completed, a tag is set on the version of the development branch intended for release, i.e. a specific revision is marked, and a snapshot of this version is copied to the Tags folder. This folder finally contains the different published versions of a software. Since in this development mode the main development work takes place in the trunk, this folder contains the latest version of a software, which at the same time is relatively unstable. In the second co-development model, the trunk contains the most stable version, whereas the development work on new features or releases is delegated to development branches. These branches are integrated into the trunk as soon as they have been tested and found to be sufficiently stable. As a result, the revision, which represents an officially released software version, is not tagged in one of the development branches, but in the trunk. The choice of the development model, and thus the model of co-laborative work on software code, is not predetermined by Subversion, but must be established and carried out in practice. To accomplish this, guidelines for collaborative 7

The described interweaving of software codes and social or legal guidelines is by no means specific to the area of co-laborative work with version control systems, as Lenglet (2011) has shown, for example, for the area of high-frequency stock exchange trading.

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branch 3

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Fig. 4 Forms of branching (Collins-Sussman et al., 2011, pp. 95 and 98)

work are typically formulated, but they are generally not derived from in-situ development practices, but are rather set by the repository administrator or a project manager. To a certain extend a centralised VCS can support compliance with these rules by, for example, limiting write permissions for developers according to their tasks. Specific guidelines for committing and maintaining changes in program routines can also be formalised, allowing the version control system to check whether the practices of the programmers correspond to the desired uses of the system. Version control systems in general, and Subversion as a centralised VCS in particular, afford the formation of contingent practices of coordinating collaboration. Co-laborative teamwork is, thus, codified in at least two ways: firstly, by the modes of document handling implemented in software, and, secondly, by the conventions or standards of using the software, which are articulated as well as discussed in manuals, tutorials, guidelines, blog posts, discussion forums and best-practice case studies. What is specific to centralised VCS is that version management is understood and designed as a social practice grouped around the central repository. Following Star and Griesemer (1989) repositories can be understood as boundary objects. In their study of heterogeneous practices of collecting at the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology in Berkeley the authors define repositories as follows:

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M. Burkhardt These are ordered ‘piles’ of objects which are indexed in a standardized fashion. Repositories are built to deal with problems of heterogeneity caused by differences in unit of analysis. An example of a repository is a library or museum. It has the advantage of modularity. People from different worlds can use or borrow from the ‘pile’ for their own purposes without having directly to negotiate differences in purpose. (1989, p. 411)

Repositories are described as a shared information resource that meets the different informational needs and practical requirements of heterogeneous stakeholders. To a certain extent, this holds true for code repositories as well. However, the code repositories of centralised VCS first and foremost serve to establish and coordinate a singular community of practice, the community of software developers by structuring co-laborative work on media objects. The code repository thus functions less as an information resource than as a logistical medium. And as such it sets the ‘terms in which everyone must operate’ (Peters, 2015, p. 37). At the same time specific communities of developers always run the risk of falling apart, at least in open source software development, when a project gets ‘forked’, i.e. the repository is duplicated, and the developer community splits up as a result. In the context of centralised VCS, the ‘fork’ is an event that has only negative connotations, as it interrupts collaboration. This changes fundamentally in distributed version control systems, where repository duplication is the beginning, not the end, of a co-laborative practice.

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Co-laborating with Git

While in the context of centralised version control systems all developers work on a common repository, distributed VCS, as mentioned above, do not have a central repository from which all developers must check out files and to which they must commit changes. Instead, each developer has their own repository, which contains the version history of the software and their own development activities (Fig. 5). BitKeeper may have been one of the first distributed VCS, but Git and the software-based platform GitHub are by now the predominant distributed version control systems. Similar to BitKeeper, that was created in response to the needs of the community of Linux developers and that was used for managing the development of the Linux kernel between 2002 and 2005, the history of Git is closely connected to this developer community as well. Following the announcement that the Linux developers will no longer be allowed to use BitKeeper free of charge, Linus Torvalds began developing Git in 2005, a distributed VCS that is primarily tailored to the distributed, non-institutionally framed development

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Server

Fig. 5 Distributed version control systems (Chacon & Straub, 2014, p. 30)

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logic of the Linux kernel. At its core, a maintainer, Linus Torvalds, not only has responsibility for bringing together the unpaid work of a development community, but also has the power to decide what becomes part of the software and what does not. The advantage of not just allowing distributed access to files, but of distributing the repository itself, according to proponents of distributed VCS such as Git, lies in the increased reliability and in the possibility of enabling more complex forms of co-laborating, such as hierarchical development workflows: ‘Unlike Centralized Version Control Systems (CVCSs), the distributed nature of Git allows you to be far more flexible in how developers collaborate on projects’ (Chacon & Straub, 2014, p. 151). The price of this flexibilisation is the growing complexity of establishing and maintaining co-laborative development work, especially because distributed VCS do not have an explicit model of collaboration inscribed in a repository. At the heart of Git, or more precisely a Git repository, is individual development work. At the same time, the software provides extensive functions for integrating the results of individual work on the code of a project into other repositories. So unlike Subversion, the problem of co-laborative work here is not one of coordinating collective work on a single repository, but rather one of circulating code between repositories, which always also raises the question of the unity of a development project.

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Blessed repository

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Fig. 6 Integration manager workflow (Chacon & Straub, 2014, p. 153)

Distributed VCS are not concerned with any specific form of circulation of revisions. These must be practically established as workflows, whereby distributed development work is generally also oriented towards an authoritative repository, which functions as a centre without a centre, so to speak, and is recognised by the developer community as a so-called ‘blessed’ repository.8 The right to make changes to the ‘blessed’ repository is reserved for its owners, sometimes referred to as integration managers (Fig. 6), sometimes as good-natured dictators (Fig. 7). Participation in distributed VCS begins with making a copy of the blessed repository. Each member of the developer community creates their own clone or fork, which they work on individually, i.e. they can make changes and make them available online in a public repository. In order to integrate their changes into the 8

It is also possible, however, to establish workflows that are characteristic of centralised VCS such as Subversion by making a central Git repository accessible on a server and granting write permissions to all developers.

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Developer public

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Fig. 7 Dictator and lieutenants workflow (Chacon & Straub, 2014, p. 154)

blessed repository, the integration manager must pull them from the developer’s repository and add them to the main repository. To do this, the authors of the Pro Git manual write: ‘The contributor sends the maintainer an email asking them to pull changes’ (Chacon & Straub, 2014, p. 153).9 The proposal to organise distributed development practice by means of email and mailing lists has a model in the Linux developer community, which from the very beginning achieved and coordinated the circulation of code through the circulation of email (cf. Kelty, 2008, p. 232 f.). The development process depicted in the integration manager workflow can also be designed in several stages if the supervisor of a project transfers responsibility for parts of the project to lieutenants. However, the lieutenants are not granted write access to the blessed repository. Rather, they review the proposed changes and recommend their adoption to the authoritative repository by integrating the change into their own repository and sending a pull request in the form of an email to the ‘benevolent dictator’ of the authoritative repository. Delegation

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Alternatively, the changes can be sent directly via email in the form of a patch to the authoritative repository manager to have them apply the patch to their repository and thereby adopt the proposed changes.

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of tasks here does not take the form of a transfer of rights, but is rather accomplished through a more or less formalised and explicit structure of trust, which enables the multi-level evaluation of the circulating proposals for change (Fig. 7). What is important here is not so much the subtle differences between the discussed workflows in detail, but rather the basic observation that Git itself only provides means for documenting and integrating changes, but not for circulating these changes. Thus, the co-laborative use of Git requires not only the formulation of rules of collaboration (as was the case with Subversion), but also the establishment of an accompanying socio-technical infrastructure for the communication and circulation of co-laborative work.

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Git Versus GitHub: Politics of Collaborative Platforms

To organize co-laborative work on software development projects via e-mail was a well-established practice in the community of Linux developers in particular and in the broader open source community in general. However, since Git in itself is a rather complex software and since establishing as well as stabilizing collaboration via e-mail is a complex undertaking, it remains rather surprising that Git and the model of distributed version control systems has spread far beyond the boundaries of the then much smaller open source community and is used for collaboration in many contexts other than software development projects today. Thesplatforming of Git by GitHub has made a significant contribution to this.10 The GitHub platform is built on the software Git and allows its users to create and host Git repositories online, and to synchronise their local working repository with the online repository by pushing local changes into the public online repository. At the same time, GitHub creates a framework in which distributed and co-laborative work on projects can be established more easily, as it adds features for organising co-laborative work (separate from mailing lists), such as the issues function for communicating or discussing problems, feature requests, or development prospects. Even more important for easing the establishment of colaborative work is the formalisation of pull requests by encoding the previously informal circulation of changes via email into the platform’s functional logic and interface through a fill-in form:

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Besides GitHub, there are now a number of other platforms and open source software applications that do something similar, such as Bitbucket and GitLab.

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GitHub is designed around a particular collaboration workflow, centered on Pull Requests. This flow works whether you’re collaborating with a tightly-knit team in a single shared repository, or a globally-distributed company or network of strangers contributing to a project through dozens of forks. [...] Here’s how it generally works: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Create a topic branch from master. Make some commits to improve the project. Push this branch to your GitHub project. Open a Pull Request on GitHub. Discuss, and optionally continue committing. The project owner merges or closes the Pull Request. (Chacon & Straub, 2014, p. 202).

These steps form the basic grammar of co-laborative work using GitHub. The platform provides a function for organising collaboration instead of requiring emails to be sent with suggestions for changes. A number of different workflows can be realised within this framework, such as the integration manager workflow already discussed, as well as the dictator and lieutenants workflow. In comparison to centralised VCS, where collaboration is regulated by assigning write permissions to the repository, GitHub affords more casual forms of collaboration. Users can become contributors by submitting a single pull request with possibly minimal changes to the core code or its documentation. The standardised form in which pull requests can be addressed directly to the repository, i.e. without detour via email or other communication channels, is of great importance here. Even though GitHub allows for various forms of collaboration, the pull request is the smallest unit of co-laborative practice that applies to the entire platform. While the implementation of the pull request as a platform feature substantially reduces the complexity of establishing co-laborative practices, it does not guarantee the satisfaction of all users with its concrete implementation. Linus Torvalds, for example, commented on a pull request from user WNeZRoS on 11 May 2012 as follows: I don’t do github pull requests. github throws away all the relevant information, like having even a valid email address for the person asking me to pull. The diffstat is also deficient and useless. Git comes with a nice pull-request generation module, but github instead decided to replace it with their own totally inferior version. As a result, I consider github useless for these kinds of things. It’s fine for hosting, but the pull requests and the online commit editing, are just pure garbage. (Torvalds, 2012)

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According to Torvalds, Git has a native function for generating pull requests that is superior to GitHub’s. However, Git’s ‘request pull’ function only summarises information about changes made in a standardised text. It does not request the integration of the change into a repository. Instead, the output message must be copied and sent to the project manager: ‘you can run the git request-pull command and email the output to the project maintainer manually’ (Chacon & Straub, 2014, p. 171). GitHub’s pull request, on the other hand, automates this process. Perhaps this only makes a small difference to co-laborative practices, but it is still a crucial one. Thus, Torvalds’ rejection of GitHub’s pull requests stands in contrast to the platform’s huge popularity, with 56 million users and more than 60 million repositories created between October 2019 and September 2020 (see GitHub, 2020).11 Usage statistics like these are a good indicator of the central role GitHub plays as a platform for software development projects. But even though the platform’s ability to collaborate on projects is very popular, a number of developers criticised GitHub in an open letter in 2016. Their critique was mainly directed towards the issues function provided by the platform and the pull request. Unlike Torvalds, however, the developers did not express any fundamental rejection, but rather the desire to be able to customise the mentioned functionalities in order to optimise the flow of information when reporting problems and suggesting changes (see dear-github, 2016). The platform operators reacted to this criticism by offering users the possibility of defining templates with which each project manager can specify the minimum amount of required or desired information for pull requests and problem reports.

5

Conclusion

Given GitHub’s popularity among software developers, Mackenzie (2017) suggested using the repositories hosted on the platform as a resource to trace the contours of the digital infrastructure that invisibly surrounds us. In contrast, the present text has attempted to make version control systems themselves readable as infrastructures of co-laborative infrastructuring. If the communities of software developers, following Kelty (cf. 2008, p. 7), are to be understood as recursive publics that help shape the digital world in which they themselves live, then version control systems can be understood as recursive infrastructures that, as digital infrastructures, frame the development of digital infrastructures. 11

In GitHub’s report The State of the Octoverse 2017, the platform operators also smugly point out that last year Linus Torvalds had made his first pull request (see GitHub, 2017).

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Co-laborative practices are established in the interplay of technical codes and social guidelines, in which collaboration can be realised in an emphatic sense. Version control systems do not determine how collaboration takes place. However, they structure this process by prescribing elementary media practices of handling, manipulating, and circulating documents, which are adapted in situated contexts of co-laborative work. Collaboration unfolds here as a practice that is both socially and medially shaped. As the comparison of centralised and distributed VCS has made clear, these different software architectures afford different forms of organising co-laborative cooperation. In comparing them as ideal types of media of cooperation my aim was to unpack how differences in software create different conditions for collaboration that I understand as conditional spaces of possibility which are adapted and actualized in practice. None of the software systems discussed in this paper creates a space for smooth or even hierarchy-free collaboration, as the term ‘distributed VCS’ might suggest. For here, too, co-laboration is dependent on a centre, which, although not inscribed in the architecture of the software, must be established in development practice and depends on the benevolence of the ‘dictator’ who ‘owns’ the ‘blessed’ repository. It also became clear that the issue of collaboration in the context of version control systems is taking shape as a problem of coordinating individual working practices. In this context, collaboration is the result of the coordination of co-laborative, i.e. distributed and parallel, work on documents. This coordination is not an automatic process, but the accomplished through working with and on version control systems.

References Balter, B. (2014). Open source, not just software anymore. https://ben.balter.com/2014/01/ 27/open-collaboration. Accessed 26 Feb 2018. Bundestag. (2012). Bundesgesetze und -verordnungen. GitHub. https://github.com/bundes tag/gesetze. Accessed 26 Feb 2018. Burkhardt, M. (2015). Digitale Datenbanken. Eine Medientheorie im Zeitalter von Big Data. transcript. Chacon, S., & Straub, B. (2014). Pro Git. Everything you need to know about Git (2nd ed.). Apress. https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2. Accessed 26 Feb 2018. Collins-Sussman, B., Fitzpatrick, B. W., & Michael Pilato, C. (2011). Version control with subversion. For subversion 1.7 (Compiled from r5228). http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/ 1.7/svn-book.pdf. Accessed 1 Nov 2016. dear-github. (2016). dear-github. An open letter to GitHub from the maintainers of open source projects. GitHub. https://github.com/dear-github/dear-github. Accessed 26 Feb 2018.

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Egan, D. (2012). Some sort of travel log. GitHub. https://github.com/dylanegan/travel. Accessed 26 Feb 2018. Eggers, D. (2013). The circle. A novel. Alfred A. Knopf. GitHub. (2017). The state if the octoverse 2017. GitHub. https://octoverse.github.com/2017/. Accessed 22 Jan 2021. GitHub. (2020). The 2020 state of the octoverse. GitHub. https://octoverse.github.com. Accessed 22 Jan 2021. GitHub. (n.d.). GitHub pages. GitHub. https://pages.github.com. Accessed 26 Feb 2018. Hacker News Contributors. (2016). Show HN. BitKeeper—Enterprise-ready version control, now open-source. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11667494. Accessed 26 Feb 2018. Kelty, C. M. (2008). Two bits. The cultural significance of free software. Experimental futures. Duke University Press. Lenglet, M. (2011). Conflicting codes and codings. How algorithmic trading is reshaping financial regulation. Theory, Culture & Society, 28(6), 44–66. https://doi.org/10.1177/026 3276411417444. Lord, T. (2002). Re: svn diff, svn merge, and vendor branches (long). https://svn.haxx.se/dev/ archive-2002-12/0822.shtml. Accessed 26 Feb 2018. Mackenzie, A. (2017). Infrastructures in name only? Identifying effects of depth and scale. In P. Harvey, C. Brunn Jensen, & A. Morita (Eds.), Infrastructures and social complexity. A companion (pp. 379–390). Routledge. McVoy, L. (1998a). A solution for growing pains. Linux Kernel Mailing List. https://lkml. org/lkml/1998/9/30/122. Accessed 26 Feb 2018. McVoy, L. (1998b). BitSCCS—SCCS compatible revision control system. Bitmover. https:// www.bitmover.com/bitsccs. Accessed 26 Feb 2018. Niewöhner, J. (2014). Perspektiven der Infrastrukturforschung: Careful, relational, kolaborativ. In D. Lengersdorf & M. Wieser (Eds.), Schlüsselwerke der science & technology studies (pp. 341–353). Springer VS. Peters, J. D. (2015). The marvelous clouds: Toward a philosophy of elemental media. University of Chicago Press. Pool, M. (2004). Integrals and derivatives. Martin Pool’s blog. https://sourcefrog.net/web log/software/vc/derivatives.html [archived version: https://archive.fo/ctWmx]. Accessed (archived version) 26 Feb 2018. Raymond, E. (2008). Understanding Version-Control Systems (DRAFT). http://www.catb. org/esr/writings/version-control/version-control.html. Accessed 26 Feb 2018. Star, S. L., & Griesemer, J. R. (1989). Institutional ecology, ‘translations’ and boundary objects: Amateurs and professionals in Berkeley’s museum of vertebrate zoology, 1907– 39. Social Studies of Science, 19(3), 387–420. Tichy, W. F. (1985). RCS: A system for version control. Software: Practice and Experience, 15(7), 637–654. Torvalds. (2012). Add support for AR5BBU22 [0489:E03c] by WNeZRoS Pull Request #17 Torvalds/Linux. GitHub. https://github.com/torvalds/linux/pull/17. Accessed 26 Feb 2018. Vogel, M. (2001). Medien der Vernunft: Eine Theorie des Geistes und der Rationalität auf Grundlage einer Theorie der Medien. Suhrkamp.

Part III During the Situation

Chains of Co-operation in the 1940s: Working on the Air Situation Picture Christoph Borbach and Tristan Thielmann

Even if one accepts that modern computer-supported communication media have developed from military intelligence (Kittler, 1996), the question must still be asked whether media can be reduced to certain operational functions. Are there basic operations beyond the three media functions identified by Friedrich Kittler—storage, processing and transmission—which are also characteristic of a technical medium, especially the medium of ‘radar’? For some time now, the conviction has been established in media studies that media are to be understood primarily in their operative use and that they only become media through their practice: Tools and media exist only in the gestures and chains of operation in which they become technically effective. Human beings lose their distinguished position and become a link in a chain, a ‘servomechanism’ of their techniques, which they have separated from themselves and outsourced to technical media. (Maye, 2010, p. 132 f., trans. CB/TT)

Accordingly, technical specialisations appear as an expression of practical skills that can be traced (genealogically) by means of chains of operations (cf. Schüttpelz, 2010, p. 111). Prioritising actions and chains of action over media technology artefacts therefore allows us to put thinking in terms of individual

C. Borbach (B) · T. Thielmann University of Siegen, Siegen, Germany e-mail: [email protected] T. Thielmann e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 S. Gießmann et al. (eds.), Materiality of Cooperation, Medien der Kooperation— Media of Cooperation, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-39468-4_5

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media on the back-burner and to avoid a ‘chronologically ordered tool determinism’ (Schüttpelz, 2006, p. 92, trans. CB/TT). The pioneers of this approach can be seen in the techno-anthropological universal history of André Leroi-Gourhan (1980) or the actor-network theory (ANT) of Bruno Latour (cf. 1993, 1999, 2005). From Leroi-Gourhan’s point of view, chains of operations are programmes of action based on experience. For Latour, the media signal a continuous intermediate state—or in other words: ‘The benefit of an ANT’s observation of mediatised processes consists precisely in not determining in advance where “the media” can be found in an action nexus’ (Schüttpelz, 2013, p. 15, trans. CB/TT; see also Wieser, 2012, p. 103 f.). But the thesis of the precedence of chains of action over all other entities involved in the event is also criticised (cf. Heilmann, 2016). On closer examination, however, it becomes clear that the problems that arise are not due to the underlying conceptuality or theoretical modelling but are rooted in the operability of chains of operations. Frequently, the approaches refer back to an understanding of coding and decoding of a message based on traditional information theory. Schüttpelz, for example, also criticises the fact that in Latour’s case, thinking in chains of operation and translation ‘is achieved exclusively through the mediation of a message’ and thus does not escape ‘the pitfalls of common communication models’ (2008, p. 251, trans. CB/TT). As a result, many representations of the history and practice of chains of operation in media studies only reflect the functioning of media technology apparatuses. Only an understanding of information, data and/or communication in terms of practice theory is therefore in a position to appropriately depict the required ‘precedence of chains of operation’ (ibid.). Transmission, storage and processing of data and information are only three of many media operations. The US-American sociologist Harold Garfinkel therefore assumes in his praxeological view that there are considerably more characteristic properties of informational processes. These include, on the one hand, descriptiveness and representability as well as ‘logical operations like matching, counting, comparing, classifying, measuring’ (2008b [1952], p. 110). Garfinkel also sees the triad of transmission, storage and processing necessarily supplemented by the factor of tradability (ibid., p. 111; see also Thielmann, 2012, p. 91 f.). The fact that German media studies has so narrowed down the operative functions of media technologies (cf. most recently Winkler, 2015) has to do not least with the fact that behind the transmission, storage and processing there are manual methods of encryption and decryption, which for Claude Shannon were the basis of his ‘Mathematical Theory of Communication’ (1948a, b). Specifically, these are mechanical methods of cryptography using the Vernam system, which,

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according to Shannon himself, cannot be considered separately from his information theory (cf. Kline, 2015, p. 32 f.). Similarly, the operability of chains of operations is still based on ‘mechanisable forms of movement’ (Schüttpelz, 2017, p. 218, trans. CB/TT). It was only Garfinkel who succeeded in extending their power of action to electronic means by stating much more fundamentally that ‘[w]e know the thing “information” through usage. We’re looking for the ideas that are immanent to the concept of information in use, and we seek to isolate these ideas and arrange them in relational fashion’ (Garfinkel, 2008b [1952], p. 113). A praxeological perspective on data and information processing is therefore able to find out what is isolated as a medium even under digital conditions within an operational chain. In the representation and reconstruction, therefore, a precise differentiation between a chain of operations and a chain of translations must also be made. Often both terms are used synonymously. In Bruno Latour’s sociotechnical analyses, we often essentially deal with transformation and translation chains, since the focus here is on mediation.1 In this way, certain media and intermediaries are favoured and the analytical system is predestined. These are media that are either bound to paper (see Latour, 1995, 2005, p. 221 ff., among others) or chains of procedures that are determined by image operations—i.e. operations of scanning, photocopying and printing (cf. Robben, 2006, p. 153 ff.). In contrast, chains of operations cover a wider range of ‘processes’ relevant to media studies. For Friedrich Kittler, the reference to the ‘war medium of radar’ was also relevant because computer images are characterised by their addressability, which has been maintained since the early warning systems (cf. Kittler, 2001). But what are computer images under the present conditions? Has not the ‘digital image’ itself become an absolute concept? Screens and computers are no longer bound together as different material objects, as was the case in Kittler’s time. Today we are becoming more and more aware that the computer as a ‘black box’ and/or ‘beige box’ (Haigh, 2012) has been a transitional phenomenon (cf. Knop, 2018). What does this mean for the reconstruction of the history of radar and media? If computing takes place distributed, the postulate that ‘the computer is the medium of translation’ (Robben, 2006, p. 12) can no longer claim validity. Similarly, translation is also inevitably woven into a chain of actions; with the help of digital media, it is no longer identifiable as a component of chains of operation. 1

See the difference between mediation with and without transformation in Latour (2005, p. 37 ff.); see also the equation of the interweaving of chains of operation and translation with a network in Latour (1995).

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Like the network, the chain of operation is not only a material object of the micro-sociological organisation of work processes, but also the subject of a macro-technological infrastructure (see Schüttpelz, 2007). From a praxeological perspective, ‘communicative paths’ can be regarded as a form and technique of representation of chains of operations (cf. Garfinkel, 2008a [1951]; Thielmann, 2013). The communication path is the medium of the chain of operations. This path structure is not to be confused with the operational use of network representations, which are committed to the genealogy of diagrams. In (flow) charts, we are dealing with an operative use of the image, that is: ‘there is an interaction between the operations that one performs on the image—drawing, tracing, stripping—and the operations that one sets in motion via the image, with the help of the image’ (Schüttpelz, 2007, p. 36, emphasis in the original, trans. CB/TT). Operation chains, on the other hand, can only be understood in and through the routing. If one understands in this sense the priority of the operation chain as a recursive principle—if one assumes, therefore, ‘that the same operation applies to results of the operation—and in different ways to all variables involved’ (Schüttpelz, 2006, p. 95, trans. CB/TT), then this recursiveness must also be reflected in a path-dependent form of representation in methodological terms. The prioritisation of chains of operations not only has a heuristic, historical and practical dimension (see ibid., p. 91 f.), but also leads to specific conceptualisations, which will be examined below in the historical analysis and reconstruction of the operability of Air Situation Pictures (ASP) in military operations. We base this on the following premises: If one assumes that (a) other operations precede the practices of chains of operations (cf. Heilmann, 2016, p. 20), (b) chains of operations are subject to recursive precedence and (c) media can only be understood in their cooperative constitution (cf. Schüttpelz & Gießmann, 2015), then it is only logical and consistent to analyse media through their chains of co-operation. Furthermore, reference can be made here to Charles Goodwin, who uses the hyphen to refer to the specific material operativity of co-operation: ‘The hyphen is used in “co-operative action,” […] to emphasize the importance of performing specific operations (most importantly decomposition and reuse with transformation) on materials provided by another’ (Goodwin, 2018, p. 6; on the material analysis of cooperative action situations, see also Burzan & Hitzler, 2016). In Garfinkel’s T rust paper (1963), which he developed immediately after the ‘Sociological Theory of Information’, four conditions of cooperation are put up for discussion: (a) the congruence of the relevance of action, (b) the interchangeability of the standpoint as well as the recourse to (c) a common scheme of

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Fig. 1 Communication paths in a two-person network (Garfinkel, 1951, p. 6)

communication and (d) a general knowledge (cf. ibid., p. 220 ff.). In addition, (e) vagueness in co-operative chains of operations cannot be ignored. Nor can this be limited by technical mediation, as Garfinkel (1967, p. 76 ff.) makes clear in Chap. 3 of Studies in Ethnomethodology. These five conditions of cooperation are an integral part of a model of ‘communicative paths’ which Garfinkel had already developed in 1951 (see Fig. 1). Figure 1 shows (from a to f) the logically possible communication paths in a two-person network in which the joints of a connection are marked with 1 and 2. According to this model, there are six independent signal paths that serve as links in an operational chain. The aim of this method of representation is to functionally depict the ‘communal character of the relationship between communicants’ (Garfinkel, 2008b [1952], p. 169), whereby the necessary vagueness of a situation is expressed by the independence of the signal paths, and the reciprocity of perspective is shown in the secondary information (c and d)—i.e. in the information that says something about whether and how a message was received. The other conditions of cooperation, such as the reference to common knowledge or to a jointly shared communication scheme, can also be depicted in this model presentation by the inferential information (e and f). Moreover, without congruence of action, a chain of co-operation would not come about in the first place. For cooperation, an overlapping of tasks is always necessary (cf. Kumbruck, 1999, p. 232). In Garfinkel’s model, these cooperation conditions are interwoven into twoperson networks that can be arranged in a chain of potentially infinite numbers of further two-person networks, thus forming a ‘grand network of interrelated paths’ (Rawls, 2008, p. 83). In this sense, social and technical networks can be sketched as a chain of two-person networks that are strung together along a trajectory. The practice of searching and finding paths is always taking place along a route and by means of routing. Garfinkel was able to show, on the basis of the practice of map use, that ‘the traveler’s work of consulting the map is an unavoidable detail of the in situ, in its course, just this next time through, traveling body’s way-finding journey that the map is consulted to get done’ (Garfinkel, 1996, p. 1). A praxeological model conception, which refers to Garfinkel, must always be considered sequentially and in situ and does not recognise any observation that

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takes place ‘from above’ and not ‘on site’. For Garfinkel, communicative paths and routes are characterised by the fact that they represent both a topological and a topographical structure.2 This corresponds to the concept of a model as it was also developed by Torsten Hägerstrand, who uses the notion of the ‘life path’ as a basis for his theory of action and his idea of a geography of time. According to this, actors move along a trajectory that is linked by prisms and thus develops different medial space–time condensations (cf. Hägerstrand, 1970, p. 14; cf. also Hägerstrand, 1982). In Garfinkel’s model as well as in those of Hägerstrand and Schüttpelz, there is an anthropocentrism at work in the determination of the individual connection points. As a rule, it is the steps of human action that define the sequence of operations (see Schüttpelz, 2006, p. 93 f., 2007, p. 33). For this reason, a comparative analysis of the human nodes in British and German command posts will show what capacity for action different chains of operations develop. In the following, it is particularly important to be able to make statements about the specific infrastructural conditions and the spatial constitution and mediality of operations rooms on the basis of the analysis of chains of co-operations.

1

The Initial Situation

Operations rooms are the centres for the coordination and command of military units in combat. Their operational structure therefore aims to collect and process data as permanently and as close to real-time as possible, so that—in our case— the airspace becomes observable, the situation in the air is transformed from large to small, and operations on the image become possible, which at the same time can act as a chain of command back to the (battle) field. Radar is of fundamental importance for that because it is the imaging medium. However, the conditions of radar are historically variant. In the 1940s radar was not yet automated, standardised or even on the computerised media level of the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE), the first real-time controlled air defence system (cf. e.g. Everett, 1983; Slayton, 2013). At the beginning of the 1940s, digital computers or computer-supported interfaces were not yet available. In addition, the early radars were only partially accurate, which made additional reports from listening and visual observation posts necessary. 2

The missing link between the topological and topographic dimension is a fundamental conceptual problem within ANT (see Schüttpelz, 2007, p. 39) that can be resolved by a praxeological perspective.

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Centres were needed where the tracking results of all the radar stations in an area and the corresponding messages from the listening and observation posts converged: operations rooms. In these centres, after the corresponding data had been processed by upstream operations, which were characterised by measuring, comparing, filtering, combining, etc., the data were centralised, compared, combined and visualised to produce an overall Air Situation Picture (ASP). These operations rooms were therefore nodes of relevant data on air situations, which passed through various media operations and a chain of communicative paths, whereby the dispositif of the operations rooms was designed according to the material conditions of the time and itself recursively affected the functionality and mediality of the operational chains. The plotting of aircraft movements was at the core of the production of comprehensive ASPs. Plotting refers to the static, visual display of individual detection results and/or individual visual and auditory messages, whereby successive plotting enables so-called tracking. Techniques of plotting in a radar station using radar screens—the CRTs (Cathode Ray Tubes)—were comparatively easy to realise (Haworth, 1947). By contrast, the production of ASPs on a large scale— for example of an entire country and thus beyond the locating radius of a single radar station—was a problem that in the first half of the 1940s could only have been solved to a limited extent with the help of media technology. Although surveillance or omnidirectional radars had already been developed and it was possible to output their geolocalisation results on displays that were not located at the radar set (the German ‘Jagdschloss’ radar together with ‘daughter tubes’, BA-MA RL 3/8078), their detection radius was not yet sufficient to display the overall air situation on a large scale. On the other hand, for many other problems of ASP visualisation ‘the solution would have been television transmission’ (BA-MA RL 2 VI/166, p. 67, trans. CB/TT). For large-scale ASP visualisation, i.e. the ‘big picture’ or ‘tele-vision’, however, visual broadcasting technology was not yet sufficiently advanced at the time. The visualisation of large-scale air situations was therefore almost exclusively tied to manual operations, the practised cooperative answer to the question of how to know what was happening in a particular airspace. The aim of this chapter will be to develop two exemplary chains of cooperation for the generation of ASPs, to trace their material conditions and thus focus on the sequential linking of operations. First, the Dowding System, which served the systematic air defence of Britain in World War II, will be analysed. Subsequently, the chapter examines the German equivalent, the system of the so-called Divisional Command Post, which, unlike the Fighter Command Headquarters of the British Dowding System, was not established nationwide until the

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turn of the year 1942/3, but, like the Dowding System, was primarily utilised for air defence. The reconstruction of these two chains of co-operation is difficult, because they (a) are historically situated, (b) were only accessible to an exclusive circle of actors and (c) these actors had very limited insight into the entire chain. Therefore, (d) the co-operative chains of operations in their entirety were not described by contemporary witnesses and (e) are not directly accessible. To trace the media operations of the two chains—beyond an exclusive focus on the triad of storing, transmitting and processing—in their sequentiality therefore cannot be done, but only according to what (a) is accessible as source material and (b) what has been documented in these sources—or in other words: according to what seemed worthy of documentation in the historical context. While we can refer to secondary literature with regard to the Dowding System, the unfolding of the chain of co-operation associated with the German Divisional Command Post was not possible without archival work in the Federal Archive-Military Archive (BA-MA) in Freiburg im Breisgau in Germany.

2

The Dowding System

Historically, the first systematic radar-based work on ASP imagery was established by the British Dowding System. This can be described as an infrastructure whose operational core consisted of translating objects from the airspace into data for the operations room where an ASP was generated. Based on this ASP, instructions for British air defence were distributed to fighter, anti-aircraft and barrage balloon positions. The Dowding System became necessary because of the enormous size of the British chain of radar towers along the coast, the so-called ‘Chain Home’. Chain Home was built from 1937, initially with three radar stations at Bawdsey, Canewdon and Dover, to warn London and the Thames Estuary by radar of approaching aircraft. With the outbreak of World War II in 1939, the radar chain was expanded to cover more than half of the south of Britain and the entire east coast, including the coast of Scotland. Over the following years the chain was further extended, and its technical equipment and operation improved. The novelty of Chain Home was its centralised ‘data processing’. This was relevant for the defence in the ‘Battle of Britain’, because a constant air patrol of fighters against incoming bombers was a quantitative problem that would have massively exceeded the capacity of the Royal Air Force (RAF), like any other air force. Instead, fighters had to be stationed on the ground and remotely navigated

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to incoming units separately. Chain Home’s radar data on aircraft entering British airspace were therefore routed to operations rooms where they were analysed. For this purpose, the British coast was divided into sectors, each with its own fighter airfield and headquarters (‘Sector Control’). These sectors were assigned to a group headquarters (‘Group Control’), which in turn was under the control of a main headquarters, the Fighter Command Headquarters (Fig. 5). The latter was not only in contact with the fighter positions, but also with anti-aircraft guns and the organisation of barrage balloons still in use at that time (Air Ministry, 1941, p. 7). The crucial problem was to establish the most efficient organisation for the evaluation of radar data, which made the question of ‘system design’ (Ridenour, 1947a, p. 214) historically explicit at an early stage, and similarly, the question of equipment, media and methods ‘which have been worked out to translate into commands the decisions taken on the basis of radar information’ (ibid.). The subject of system design thus became at least as complicated and important as the technical design of the radar itself. It became apparent that technical design must always be embedded in a functional, cooperative system, which in turn contained technical media, but also a division of labour, explicit work commands and human translation works in order to generate actually useful results: the British system of radar stations Chain Home had to be integrated into a functional co-operative chain of operations. The following description of an ideal co-operative chain of centralised visualisation of positioning results up to their subsequent distribution in the Dowding System is based on a presentation from the first volume of the ‘MIT Radiation Laboratory Series’: Radar System Engineering (Ridenour, 1947b). In this, the cooperative nature of the infrastructure, which, incidentally, has already been recognised and named as such by its actors,3 becomes evident. (1) If an aircraft approached British airspace, it was detected by the radar surveillance system, or more precisely by two or three radar stations of Chain

3

This is from the recollections of Eileen Younghusband, who worked as a ‘filterer officer’ at Fighter Command Headquarters in Bentley Priory: ‘This was a team operation […] the plotters, raid orderlies and tellers responsible for the display and forwarding of the information from the Radar Station, to the Controller who identified the tracks; the Filter Officer who supervised the action on the table and who was in constant contact with all the Radar Stations; and the Filterer Officer whose job was to interpret, collate and correct the information instantly into tracks of all aircraft approaching or leaving our shores’ (Royal Air Force, 2015, p. 6).

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Home. In the radar stations, this was visualised and displayed to the radar operator.4 The first interfaces were the so-called ‘A-Scopes’, which visualised the relative distance of the located aircraft to the radar station on the radar screen as a vertical deflection (the so-called ‘blip’) on a horizontal timeline. The screens were scaled so that the distance to the located aircraft could be read off the screen. However, the individual radar masts of Chain Home did not always locate correctly, which was mostly due to the poorly installed antennas and their poor maintenance. As a result, in many cases the located position of an aircraft did not correspond to its actual position. In addition, it was not possible with the A-Scope to determine the exact direction in which a located aircraft formation was heading. Each of Chain Home’s radar stations was therefore equipped with a machine, the so-called ‘Fruit Machine’ (Fig. 2), whose name was inspired by the name of a similar slot machine. This was a calculating machine ‘made up of standard telephone selector switches and relays’ (Bowden, 1947, p. 226) and was thus—and this is special—an early electro-mechanical analogue computer as a modification of the uniselector already used in telephone technology. With the Fruit Machine, the radar operator was able to semi-automatically correct detections that had previously been visualised at the A-Scope. In addition, the Fruit Machine was able to convert the corrections into cartographic coordinates of the ‘British National Grid’ plus flight altitude by trigonometry (based on the locations of other radar antennas of Chain Home) (Rowe, 1948, p. 26). The British National Grid represented a standard necessary for plotting and forwarding plots, ‘so that all information could be understood in any part of the system, however small, and all the plotting procedures were standardised and had been practised day and night until people could do them in their sleep’ (Wood, 1991, p. 4). For the semi-automatic determination of the distance to an aircraft, the radar operator measured the distance to the located target by placing a marker on the blip visualised on the A-scope. To isolate a message from the visual noise, she then turned a protractor (‘goniometer’) until the echo disappeared on the screen and pressed a button to send the presumed distance to the Fruit Machine. The Fruit Machine automatically made the necessary corrections and, depending on the location of the radar masts, automatically calculated the coordinates of the target in about one second (for more details see Bowden, 1947, p. 226 f.). A special feature was the way the data were output, because this was not done by 4

According to the WAAF (Women’s Auxiliary Air Force), after 1940 ‘radar operators’ were almost exclusively women, which is why in the MIT volume the standardised ‘radar operator’ is explicitly referred to as ‘she’ (e.g. Bowden, 1947, p. 227).

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Fig. 2 Radar operator Denise Miley on a radar interface (CRT) together with a Fruit Machine (Royal Air Force, 2015, p. 9)

punchcards, but by a display: the numerical geodata of the located aircraft were illuminated on a panel. The MIT source soberly states ‘information was displayed in lights’ (ibid., p. 227), since it was not yet possible to foresee how revolutionary this display was. To identify British aircraft, a transponder could be switched on board the aircraft, which amplified the radar impulse (‘Identification Friend or Foe’ (IFF)). Thus, the aircraft was displayed twice on the radar screen and the respective radar operator was able to distinguish enemy aircraft from their own (Bowden, 1985). (2) These data (‘radar plots’) from Chain Home’s radar stations were sent either by the radar operators or from the ‘teller’ (these were women or men) in the station to usually female plotters in the Filter Room of the Fighter Command Headquarters at Bentley Priory near Stanmore (close to London). There, the data was first displayed in a bomb-proof, underground room. The room was equipped with a large, horizontal, gridded map of Britain: the so-called ‘plotting table’. The plotters standing at these evaluation tables each had a telephone connection to a ‘teller’ of the radar stations of Chain Home and stood around the plotting table according to the geographical position of the radar station to which they were connected by telephone. (3) When the ‘tellers’ in the radar stations transmitted location information (‘plots’) by telephone, the existence of real airplanes in the airspace was transferred by ‘plotters’ into a coloured round plate on the table at the indicated position. The colour coding of the plate was based on the respective time of the message: every quarter of an hour was divided into three five-minute intervals, in which the colour of the figures was chosen between red, yellow or blue. If a plate

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was older than fifteen minutes, it was removed from the table (Royal Air Force, 2015, p. 9). If two or more radar stations detected the same aircraft formation, this became obvious by multiple occupancy of the same position on the map. (4) Due to possible inaccuracy of radar detection and varying delays in the plotting process, a so-called ‘filterer’5 stood next to a ‘plotter;’ their task was, among other things, to decide whether two adjacent figurative aircraft were actually separate or represented one and the same aircraft (Figs. 3 and 4). Since aircraft were usually detected by several radar masts, the probable position could be further qualified and false data eliminated if two of three stations reported the same position. In other words, this made it possible to reduce the vagueness of where aircraft formations were actually located in the airspace. The task of the ‘filterer’ was also to decide whether successive plots represented a flight path or not. The decision had to be made whether to wait for further plots in order to confirm or invalidate the initial assumption of a flight path. While waiting for further plots meant more validated and thus better-filtered data, it was very timeconsuming and could put the air defences in a predicament. On the other hand, the premature identification of (wrong) trajectories meant supplying the operations rooms—and thus ultimately the air defence—with misinformation. If a ‘filterer’ was sure that they had identified an aircraft position and flight direction, they replaced the round plates with small panels on which additional information could be entered if required—for example identity, position, altitude, estimated speed and number of aircraft of the located formation (Bowden, 1947, p. 227). (5) These operations were supervised by ‘filterer officers’, who had an overall view of the air situation map one floor higher, as if on a balcony. They determined which aircraft formation should be tracked by which radar station, relaying this to the radar stations in a communicative return channel (ibid.). (6) Aircraft formations identified as such were in turn forwarded by the ‘tellers’ in the Filter Room to the Fighter Command Operations Rooms located next door, where they were again displayed by female ‘plotters’. In the central Operations Room, only the filtered data was visualised via figures. (7) There, in the central command room in Bentley Priory, the information was combined with further information from so-called Observer Corps, which also reported to group and sector headquarters.6 This additional information from 5

These posts were originally exclusively staffed by men. During World War II, women were also trained as ‘filterer’ or ‘filterer officer’ (Royal Air Force, 2015, p. 6). 6 The material basis for this information was again plotting. This was done in the Observer Posts Centre similar to Bentley Priory and the group and sector headquarters with arrow symbols on a ‘plotting table’, which were marked either red, yellow or blue according to five-minute phases. The individual observer posts reported by telephone to the centre. From

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Fig. 3 Dowding system, HQ fighter command filter room (Royal Air Force, 2015, p. 7)

Fig. 4 Female ‘plotters’ work at the plotting table; you can see the small figures and small plates representing identified aircraft formations (screenshot from the documentary ‘Battle Stations’, online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QcDT6wqDnO8, 12:27)

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the observation posts—such as the identity of the aircraft, exact flight altitude, flight speed and number of aircraft—was added to the figurative aircraft on the ‘plotting table’ of the Fighter Command Room. Vagueness about potentially erroneous radar data could thus be reduced, as the radar data and the Observer Corps messages either confirmed or complemented each other, thus providing a more complete and valid picture of the air situation. (8) From the central Operations Room the information about incoming bombers was distributed by the ‘tellers’ to the respective command centres of the groups and from there finally to the sector headquarters. This way, they only received the information about the overall air situation that was filtered and geographically relevant for them. (9) For this purpose, aircraft formations were again displayed on plotting tables in the respective group and sector command centres. The operations rooms of the Group Headquarters were architecturally similar to the centralised Operations Room and, as a dispositif, were equipped with the same visualisation strategies of the air situation, which were displayed on a horizontal map according to the Fighter Command Headquarters. In addition, the new plots were again combined with information from the Observer Corps. This supposed redundancy of the new combination of radar data with information from the Royal Observer Corps was important insofar as visual information may have been updated in the meantime due to the delay in Fighter Command Headquarters. The sectors’ operations rooms were then used to instruct all defence operations: anti-aircraft guns, barrage balloons and, most importantly, fighter launch and long-range navigation. This allows us to name the different stations of the data flow and the co-operational chain of the centralised visualisation of the air situation in its sequentiality, which reveals the systemic channelling and recursive circulation of air situation data. Radar detection as the supposed operative core of the Dowding System is characteristically only the condition of its infrastructural operations. Based on the ANT maxim ‘follow the actors’, ten operational links can be identified in the Dowding System around 1940—in short, ten operational links, each link in the chain being involved in successful or unsuccessful air defence. Each subsequent link in the chain is determined by a different human actor. In this respect, it is a sequence of two-person networks. If one person performs several actions relevant to situation awareness and combat coordination, these are listed within the respective co-operative step. the sighting of aircraft to the forwarding of the plot to Fighter Command Headquarters could take only about forty seconds. For the structure of the Royal Observer Corps and its plotting method, (see Wood, 1961, p. 152 ff).

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The Co-operative Chain of the Dowding System

(1) Deciding, Marking, Correcting, Transforming and Visualising The radar operator identifies an aircraft and marks it on the A-Scope. With the help of the Fruit Machine, a possibly incorrect location is corrected, and the geographical coordinates of the located formation are automatically determined according to the British National Grid. If British fighters had IFF transponders, the radar operator could distinguish enemy from friendly aircraft on the A-Scope. The position identified in this way is shown on a display. (2) Transmitting A ‘teller’ or ‘radar operator’ forwards the radar data by telephone to the ‘plotter’ responsible for the respective radar station at the ‘plotting table’ of the Filter Room in Fighter Command Headquarters. (3) Visualising A female ‘plotter’ in the Filter Room visualises the radar data on the plotting table in true coordinates with small plates that are colour-coded according to the time of the message. (4) Deciding (Filtering) A ‘filterer’ further narrows down the probable position of aircraft based on the plates and replaces identified aircraft formations with small figures (if possible, with additional information). (5) Deciding (Selecting) A ‘filterer officer’ on the gallery in the Filter Room instructs radar stations via the return channel as to which aircraft formations are to be further tracked and which are not. (6) Transmitting and Visualising Aircraft formations identified as such are forwarded by telephone from the ‘teller’ of the Filter Room to the ‘plotter’ of the central control room, where they are again visualised in figural form on a ‘plotting table’. (7) Combining The filtered radar data are combined on the plotting table in the central command room with additional information from Observer Corps’ listening and viewing stations. (The chain of co-operation inherent in the Observer Corps, which was simultaneous with the radar evaluation operations, is left out of our unfolding of the chain.)

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(8) Transmitting (Disseminating) Distribution of the ASP to subordinate group and sector command rooms: ‘tellers’ transmit the relevant data by telephone to the ‘plotters’ of the corresponding command rooms. (9) Visualising and Combining In the group and sector command posts, the ASP relevant to them is again visualised by ‘plotters’ and again combined with messages from the Observer Corps—the resulting specific ASP was the basis for concrete air defence orders. (10) Transmitting (Disseminating) Instructions are given for British air defence at fighter, anti-aircraft and barrage balloon positions by the sectors. Fig. 5 Schematisation of the Dowding System (Air Ministry, 1941, p. 9)

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What is striking is that the first step of the operation proves to be the most complex. The radar operator at the very beginning of the chain of co-operation has the greatest responsibility and is the most critical factor in the whole process. She is the one who carries out the transformation from a distance display to a cartographic representation, which is not fundamentally revised in the further course of the operation. The subsequent operational steps serve primarily to filter and update the initially acquired information. The British procedure is characterised by the fact that the basis for the data image is created at the point where the radar data are entered into the Dowding System and is ‘merely’ adjusted in the subsequent stages. The steps that follow enable the air situation to be determined solely by operations on the image. The outside world is cut off from the point of data input insofar as the messages of the Observer Corps ((7) and (9)) only serve to verify or supplement the initial image basis with additional positional information. Furthermore, the co-operational chain is primarily characterised by the distributed validation of the situation. The respective steps of data filtering are accompanied by a change of location: each room stands for a different state of data. In this respect, the spatially distributed arrangement already defines where in the course of action the respective actor is located and what their position and task are, even if they themselves lack the knowledge of the overall situation. The co-operational chain of the Dowding System is characterised by (also spatially) distributed agency. Nevertheless, the common goal of action (air defence) is clearly defined in this example. In this respect, one of the conditions for cooperation established by Garfinkel is fulfilled. Moreover, the chain of co-operation is clearly and definably structured in its sequential course. Each co-operative step is characterised by a different place of action. Only the ‘instruction’ under (5) deviates from this. Overall, the common reference to a communication scheme (a map) is given in all operational steps. The British Air Ministry’s source The Battle of Britain, which appeared in 1940 and was reprinted with illustrations in 1941, shows the relatively simple schematic representation of the Dowding System, which is described as ‘intricate and flexible’—complex but at the same time adaptable (Fig. 5). This is precisely what a functional infrastructure had to provide, an infrastructure that transforms both human and non-human actors into links in a co-operational chain: On the one hand, the infrastructure had to be so routine and small-scale that the functional interlocking of the actors at the points of intersection of the operational chain could be described as a mechanical procedure. On the other hand, it had to be so flexible that the individual differences in the actions of the human actors could be tolerated. In addition, the term ‘flexible’ referred to the fact that the Dowding

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System made it possible to address the entire British air situation, instead of leaving the defence to the autonomy of the individual sectors. Nevertheless, ‘[t]he operation of this system was much more difficult than might be inferred from this brief description’ (Bowden, 1947, p. 228). For every minute hundreds of radar localisation results had to be interpreted and trajectories had to be represented on the ‘plotting table’ under the time-critical conditions of the flight speed of enemy aircraft. At the same time, disturbances in the visualisation of aircraft curves were also the consequence of a space problem, because the plotters at the plotting tables had to be accommodated without standing in each other’s way. Assuming normal aircraft traffic, the precise correspondence between the grid square and the actual aircraft position was about 70% (ibid.). The entire infrastructure was thus dependent on data volumes (airplanes), whereby there were limits to the processing power of the entire system—a problem known in communications engineering as ‘bandwidth’ (the limitation of the channel). As the MIT Radiation Laboratory put it: ‘When plots were sparse, the accuracy was excellent, and the only objection to the system was its unavoidable time lag in reporting. Under conditions of high aircraft density, the system broke down, and it was commonplace to cease reporting in certain areas where the density was so high that filtering was impossible’ (ibid.). However, a breakdown of the entire system due to ‘information overload’ occurred only rarely, even though there were cases in which radar stations were ordered not to send any further data to the Filter Room, since because of their quantity they could no longer be processed there (Zimmerman, 2004, p. 389). Thus, the Dowding System proves to be not only a time-critical but also a spacecritical infrastructure. Analysis of the chain of co-operation reveals that we are dealing with human actors as agents. Each female ‘plotter’ was in direct contact with a ‘teller’ of the respective radar station. In this sense, the operations at the plotting table of the Fighter Command Filter Room represent the structure of two-person networks on the basis of which the Dowding System operates. The size of the plotting table, the number of plotters and the size of the plates and figures, which limited the visual ‘resolution’ of the air activities, proved to be critical for the action. These material factors had a strong influence on the operational capability of the British air defence system. This becomes particularly clear in the analysis of the chain of co-operation. It can even be said that the material boundary conditions had a greater influence on the ASP practice than the technical quality of the radar detection itself. The ASP is shown at four points in the co-operative chain. At each of these chain links, the situation picture is re-validated: At data entry on a display, in the

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filter room, in the central command room and in the distributed sector command rooms. Although the radar image is initially available in (analogue) electronic form, the transmission and carrier medium of the cooperation is the paper map and the telephone set.

4

The Division Command Post

In Germany—in contrast to Britain—the governing principle until 1941 was that the Luftwaffe would attack rather than defend, which is why Allied approaches were answered with counterattacks instead of being repelled (Galland, 1984 [1953], p. 173). ‘[A] kind of defence of the Reich’ (ibid. p. 174, trans. CB/TT) only existed from the beginning of 1941, and it was rather rudimentary. The main means of defence were anti-aircraft guns (not fighters), so the principle ‘hearing, seeing, shooting’—i.e. the combination of listening post, anti-aircraft searchlight and gun—determined common practice. In addition, until 1940 the fundamental challenge of night interception (‘Nachtjagd’) was detecting enemy aircraft on cloudy or rainy nights, which was more a matter of coincidence than something that could be planned for. The interconnection of radar technology changed this: on the one hand for the anti-aircraft artillery, which from 1940 onwards could control the fire of anti-aircraft batteries without listening posts and searchlights (Hoffmann, 1968, p. 96), and on the other hand for the newly established fighter control centres. From 1940 there was night fighting, which became an important part of the war. The transition from so-called illuminated to dark night fighting was decisive in this respect. Illuminated night fighting relied on searchlight batteries, which detected targets in the so-called ‘light dome’. Dark night fighting, on the other hand, operated by locating aircraft with radar7 and by making use of the groundbased long-range guidance of fighters to the point of visual contact with the enemy. Both dark and illuminated night fighting were the foundation for the first radar chain in Nazi Germany, the ‘Kammhuber line’, which attempted to shoot down incoming British bombers using the so-called ‘Himmelbett (four-poster bed) method’. With the beginning of large-scale air raids by the Royal Air Force from 1942, however, the Himmelbett method became increasingly ineffective due to the Kammhuber line’s lack of bandwidth. The mass of incoming aircraft and 7

On the method of operation of radar stations for dark night fighting, (see Hoffmann, 1968, p. 40).

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their concentration posed a quantitative problem: the processing capacity of the individual sectors had been exceeded. It became apparent that it was necessary not only to monitor one block of Himmelbett positions by radar, but also to display the air situation of a large area in a centralised manner in order to be able to remotely navigate fighters from the ground. In the spring of 1943, air defence was therefore reorganised: it was changed from a linear form to chessboard-like, condensed airspace surveillance. This made the infrastructure of fighter control and thus system design for coordinating air defence on the basis of the display of ‘large-scale ASP’ also critical for Germany. At the same time, this meant a change from a ‘rigid system’ to a ‘movable, large-scale command and control system’ (Diehl, 1943, p. 401, trans. CB/TT), which had to be as ‘intricate and flexible’ as the Dowding System already was. In addition, the necessity of centralising the organisation of air defence became apparent. As with the Dowding System, there was also a problem of translation, namely that of transforming the airspace into an exact image of that entire airspace. This was realised in the so-called Divisional Command Posts. Each night-fighting position of the former German Reich was organisationally assigned to one of these, where a complete overall air picture of the divisional area was produced, on the basis of which air defence was organised. Among other locations, such large-capacity command posts were established in Stade (‘Sokrates’), in Gedhus (‘Gyges’) and in Schleißheim (‘Minotaurus 1’). Organisationally and technically, all command posts were based on the earliest command post of the 1st Night Fighter Division: the high bunker ‘Diogenes’ in Deelen (Netherlands). The primary task of all those involved was to depict the air situation of the divisional area in this bunker. The core component of the command post was a 9 m × 9 m, vertically installed air situation map—the ‘main situation map’ or ‘command map’—on a scale of 1:100,000, which divided the so-called command post room into two halves and on which the ASP was to be produced. The aim was to display both the messages from ground observers (audio and visual reports) and the localisation results of the radar positions of the entire divisional area on this large ‘main situation map’, and then to use this map as a basis for solving air defence problems and distributing air situation information to various locations. For this purpose, the air situation map was clearly addressable according to the ‘Jägermeldenetz’ (fighter report grid): the ‘Jägermeldenetz’ or ‘Jägergitternetz’ (fighter grid), which had evolved from the previously used ‘Gradnetzmeldeverfahren’ (grid reporting procedure) and was introduced in 1943 (BA-MA RL 2-VI/166, p. 59), was a standard that provided a binding reporting and charting system for fighters, anti-aircraft artillery and ground observers. The

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fighter grid divided defined areas horizontally and vertically into fighter trapezoids, coded with the letters of the alphabet from A to U, but without the ‘I’, with one address (= one letter) for horizontal and another address (= again one letter) for vertical positioning. A smaller subdivision of the hunter trapezoids was made with 3 × 3 equally sized signalling trapezoids, to which the numbers 1–9 were assigned. The size of such a signalling trapezoid covered an area of about three by three kilometres (BA-MA RL 2-VI/166, p. 60). Berlin-Mitte, for example, was located in FG 9 in hunting trapezoid 33, 15 OS. Besides the fighter grid, the main situation map contained no elevation markings, and only those water bodies that could be regarded as navigation aids, i.e. only large rivers and lakes. The road and railway network were not shown, and cities were only displayed as far as they allowed a rough orientation from the air. However, the map did show ground observers’ stations or air defence installations. ‘With the omission of all that was dispensable, maps of great clarity and comprehensibility were thus produced, on which registered flight paths and the corresponding notes stood out well’ (BA-MA RL 2-VI/166, p. 57, trans. CB/TT). Originally, guided night fighting was to be coordinated or at least monitored on the basis of the ASP on the main map of the Divisional Command Post ‘Diogenes’. The guided night fight, i.e. directed from the ground, had previously been based on the autonomy of those individual radar stations of the Kammhuber line that were capable of night fighting and it took place on the basis of radar evaluation at the so-called ‘Seeburgtisch’ (‘Seeburg table’). Through upward projection from below, each sector of the Kammhuber line (the individual ‘fourposter beds’) displayed a blue or red dot onto the so-called ‘Seeburg table’ to indicate an enemy bomber approaching the sector as well as a friendly fighter. The data for this display came by telephone from one radar unit each, which was called ‘Würzburg-Riese’ (Würzburg giant). On this basis, a fighter allocator of the night-fighting position took over the remote navigation of the friendly fighter. An essential part of the logistics of the Divisional Command Post therefore was the duplication of the so-called ‘Seeburg table evaluation’ of each of the individual radar stations capable of night fighting on the main situation map in the Central Command Post with differing visual representations. For ‘only then was it possible to lead from the Central Command Post in the same manner or at least to control every single position in all its details’ (BA-MA RL2/VI-166, p. 45, trans. CB/TT).

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In the following the case study of ‘Diogenes’ at the end of 19438 will be used to develop the chain of co-operation required for the representation of the air situation, first with regard to radar data and then with regard to acoustic and visual dispatches.9 This example shows what Birgitta Godt has already observed in relation to the German organisation of airspace surveillance: Both in the development of airspace surveillance with the help of radar equipment as well as during deployment, it becomes clear how important it was for the various recipients of information – be they equipment or persons – to interact well, then for the information to be passed on, and finally for the information to be processed (Godt, 2003, p. 8, trans. CB/TT).

(A1) If an aircraft flew into the detection radius of a radar station, this was indicated to the operator on the radar screen, the A-Scope, as a blip. As with the British Dowding System, at the beginning of World War II, it was mostly women who worked at the radar stations as assistants of ground observers (‘LN assistants’), so-called ‘Blitzmädel’. They could determine the distance to the located aircraft on the radar screen as the distance to the blip on the horizontal timeline, depending on the scaling of the screen. With both of the early German radar sets—‘Freya’ and ‘Würzburg’—a friend/foe identification was possible that had been used since 1941 (BA-MA RL 17/578, p. 43), when it had become necessary to determine whether a detected aircraft was actually friendly or whether it was a Royal Air Force aircraft. This was realised by the radio unit 25a (‘FuG 25a’), also known as ‘Erstling’. A so-called ‘interrogator’, a query transmitter, the Q-device (also called ‘cow’), stimulated a transmitting device—the FuG 25a—in the aircraft detected by the locating radar beam to automatically transmit a certain Morse sequence. This sequence was received in the radar station by the identification receiver, the ‘Gemse device’, and displayed on another Braun tube, where the radio code was visualised as a moving spike. By means of a further technical add-on, this code could also be 8

Just as the Dowding System experienced infrastructural changes, which are not part of this chapter, the chain of co-operation for the production and display of ASPs in the Divisional Command Post ‘Diogenes’ is also variant, as it was subject to changes when the reporting hierarchy was updated in favour of new institutional structures. Due to the availability of material, we decided to unfold the co-operative chain of operations for the end of the year 1943. 9 While the documentation of the co-operative chain of the Dowding System was only carried out with regard to radar data and could thus be numbered ‘1’, ‘2’ etc., for the example ‘Diogenes’ we use a differentiation into ‘A1’, ‘A2’, etc. for the radar data and ‘B1’, ‘B2’, etc. for the listening and observer messages of the separately running co-operative chain.

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made audible (BA-MA RL 2-VI/166, p. 26). The operator of the radar unit had to know the Morse code of the respective day. So friendly airplanes could be distinguished from enemy planes, because the latter did not send a return signal. In addition, the operator made the first statements about the aircraft located on the radar screen. Accuracy was decisive in determining whether the ASP at the command post was unambiguous. Locating errors could occur, for example, if several target aircraft flew at approximately the same distance from the radar unit and were only staggered according to the angle of attack—the deflection on the radar screen could then refer to a few aircraft or entire formations. Tight formations of aircraft were also difficult to determine (BA-MA RL2-V/51). Tracked aircraft had to be given a geo-position that was binding for the entire system. For this purpose, the relative distance and other data of the radar detections were translated on a conversion map into unambiguous addresses according to the ‘fighter grid’, which corresponded to the addressing of the ‘main position map’ at the command post. In contrast to the British radar masts of Chain Home, the German radar units worked more precisely and therefore did not require any subsequent data correction as was necessary on the British side with the Fruit Machine. The direction of the located aircraft could also be determined more easily than with the British radar masts, which—unlike the German radar units— could not be rotated. A subsequent filtering of the radar data—as shown in the Filter Room of the Dowding System—was therefore not necessary on the German side. (A2) The radar data—geo-position, flight altitude, flight direction, approximate number of objects, classification according to friend/foe—of the devices of one position (which consisted of several radar units) were first sent by the radar operator to the radar position control centre and there (A3) they were visualised by draughtswomen on a so-called evaluation table (more on this later in this contribution) (BA-MA ZA 3/767, p. 407). Since all operators of the radar units of a position reported to this control centre and this data was visualised on the table by draughtswomen, all data was brought together in this way. (A4) All radar positions of the divisional area Diogenes were connected with the command post by direct telephone line. If an enemy approach was displayed on the evaluation table when the radar data was displayed, this information—in addition to the geo-position of located friendly aircraft—was transmitted directly from the operational positions of the ‘Diogenes’ division area to the division command post. The information—i.e. the position of friendly and enemy aircraft together with information on flight direction, presumed number of objects and flight altitude—was given to LN helpers working at so-called ‘light-spot projectors’. These were located in one of the two halves of the ‘combat room’ of

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the division command post. Notifications were made, for example, in the form: ‘50–100 aircraft in GD 8, course 3, altitude 5000’ (BA-MA ZA 3/767, p. 407, trans. CB/TT), whereby ‘GD 8’ referred to the ‘fighter grid’ and served the clear addressability of the aircraft. ‘Course 3’ signified eastward flight direction. (A5) The representation of this data on the main map of the command post was solved by using ‘light-spot projectors’. The purpose of the light-point projector was to represent instantaneous airplane positions on large-scale maps. They were operated manually and pointed at the aerial map. On the air situation map they produced a round, clearly defined light spot, which could be coloured by holding tinted glasses in front of them: blue for friendly aircraft, red for enemy aircraft, light green for friendly fighters and black for initially unknown flying objects. In some models it was also possible to insert numbers or letters (e.g. for flight altitude or aircraft type) next to the light spot (BA-MA RL 2-VI/166, p. 39). In addition, it was possible to display the flight paths of formations in their width and depth using the so-called ‘square projector’. This was designed like the spotlight, but its light exit opening could be changed in height and width. This made it possible to project rectangles and trapezoids onto the air situation map, over which individual data such as number, altitude and type of aircraft could be superimposed (BA- MA RL 2-VI/166, p. 40). Light-spot and square projectors were thus the solution to a spatial drawing problem. On the one hand, the vertical arrangement of the main position map made it impossible to equip the map with representative movable figures as in the Dowding System. On the other hand, due to the size of the map, messages could not be drawn in directly, so this had to be done indirectly using a projective method. The light-spot projector thus served to replace practices of drawing with projections and was therefore an answer to the question of how an air situation map, which in turn was very large due to the dimensions of the Divisional Command Posts, could be filled with symbols. The light-point procedures used thus solved genuine spatial problems: ‘the projection technique was basically only a forced replacement for the drawing technique, which was impracticable in this case’ (BA-MA RL 2-VI/166, p. 39, trans. CB/TT). The projection of the symbols on the main map was mirror-inverted, namely on the back of the map, because the information had to be viewed from the front by a different set of people. Due to the large number of radar stations in a divisional area, there was a correspondingly large number of ‘LN helpers’ working at the light-spot projectors. Because they—as well as those in the other half of the room—needed a clear view of the air situation map, all the people could not be arranged in one room. But also, in spite of the division of the personnel by the partition of the room via the main situation map, many people

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in both halves of the room still needed a direct view of the main situation map. This was solved architecturally by rows of seats rising like galleries, on which the ‘LN helpers’ as well as the people in the other half of the room could be seated. Thus, the setting of the actors in the Divisional Command Post was, according to the maxim ‘form follows function’, comparable to a cinema or an opera house, in front of whose stage the spectators were arranged in ascending rows. For this reason, the Divisional Command Posts were also called ‘combat opera houses’. In addition, this meant that the main situation map had to be transparent, so that the light points of the light-spot projectors, which were projected onto the map from behind, could actually show an overall picture of the air situation of the radar data on the front of the main situation map. However, it was not only data from radars that were used in the Divisional Command Post to produce ASPs, but also messages from ground observers, which were fed by audio and visual signals. The fact that both radar stations sent their detection data and ground observers sent their messages to the division command post was not redundant. On the one hand, this enabled the air situation to be displayed despite radar malfunctions, and, on the other hand, both sets of data complemented each other (BA-MA RL 2-VI/166, p. 69). This was because very low-flying aircraft could not be detected by the radar, while very high-flying aircraft could neither be seen nor heard by the ground observers. In the case of the Dowding System the co-operative chain of visual and audio data followed the same symbolic scheme as the radar messages—namely on the basis of ‘figurines’ and ‘tiles’—thus the development of a second operational level was not necessary. In the Divisional Command Post in 1943, however, the visualisation of relevant data from the ground observers’ service followed a different logic of representation, different routines and thus different media operations, which in turn enabled other symbolic codings of what was represented.10 Since this results in a different regime of signs and visual dispositif, it is worthwhile presenting this chain of co-operation in relation to the German Divisional Command Post separately. This necessarily results in the co-operative chain of the Divisional Command Post in 1943 being altogether longer than the previously described co-operative chain in the Dowding System. This is not attributable to causes inherent in the system but can be explained by our selection of connecting links.

10

It was not until 1944 that the German side began to send radar reports as well as reports from listening and observer posts via the ground observers’ network rather than directly to the division command post.

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Fig. 6 Flight message evaluation table in the division command post ‘Sokrates’ in Stade (BA-MA RL8/173); clearly visible are the fighter grid on the table, the individual acceptance buttons for the telephone connections (right front) and the headphones used

(B1) If a message was received from an observation or listening post of the Ground Observer Corps, it was forwarded by telephone to the Flight Watch Command (‘Flugwachkommando’, short form ‘Fluko’) responsible for the post. Ideally, this flight message contained—in addition to the information on the ground observer’s position for the exact determination of the geographical position—the number and, if possible, the type of aircraft detected, their identification (categorisation as friend or foe), flight direction and flight altitude. (B2) In the ‘Fluko’ the incoming flight messages were recorded, evaluated and visualised. This was done either by drawing on vertical air situation maps or more effectively with ‘plotting tables’, since the former method was associated with spatial problems if several evaluators drew on the map. The flight message evaluation tables (‘Flugmeldeauswertetische’, short form ‘Fluma’) introduced in 1942 replaced the previous practice of written evaluation by an oral reporting method, since messages could be drawn on the ‘Fluma’ directly with grease chalk or oil pencil (BA-MA RL 2-VI/166, p. 33). This is where, based on audio and visual reports, ASPs were first created for a comparatively small area. The evaluators working at the tables had headphones and chest or throat microphones, as this left their hands free for drawing. The table showed the map of the corresponding reporting area and was addressable according to the fighter grid (Fig. 6). Up to twenty ground observers’ posts reported to a ‘Fluko’ (BA-MA RL 2-VI/166, p. 32), whose messages were visualised on the ‘Fluma’. Since the visualisation of the messages for the ‘Fluko’ area was, however, usually carried out by only four evaluators, the table had direct speech connections to all posts, which could be

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accepted individually. On the map field of the table, below the glass, a white light bulb was installed at the map points of each ground observer’s station for quick location, which was connected to this station’s telephone line (BA-MA RL11/210, p. 8). If a message came from a guard post, the lamp lit up on the map together with the accept button of the voice communication. When the connection to the guard was established, the light on the table went out. There was a clear ‘reporting policy’ for the visualisation of messages on the ‘Fluma’. This policy regulated what could be said and how it could be said, by defining the possible vocabulary and the stock of symbols, reducing them to a minimum. The ‘flight report signal board’ was the ‘dictionary’ of the ground observations service; anything not already in it could not be formulated, and breaches of it ‘could be punished as disciplinary violations’ (BA-MA RL 2VI/166, p. 70). According to this regulation, the type of aircraft, its flight path and the extension of formations could be represented by unambiguous symbols, whereas the quantities and flight altitude of aircraft were indicated numerically, with these numerical additions having to be made at certain positions near the symbol. The identification of aircraft was added via different colour coding: blue for friendly aircraft, red for enemy aircraft, light green for friendly fighters and black for initially unknown flying objects. For example, 60 four-engine aircraft of the type Boeing B-17 (‘Flying Fortress’)—sighted at 10:32 a.m., flying from west to east at an altitude of 6,500 m and a speed of 420 km/h—were shown as red drawing as follows (BA-MA RL 2-VI/166, p. 72):

All the actors involved in the evaluation had to master this writing technique along with all coding and decoding operations. Practical problems consisted in drawing and writing legibly on the maps from the head or the side of the table, which had to be done according to the north orientation of the map, and at the same time as keeping the map largely free for other evaluators. At the flight message evaluation table, visual and acoustic sighting reports were combined for the first time, as various evaluators cooperatively produced cartographic representations from verbal messages, i.e. they translated verbal messages back into visual information. The flight message evaluation table was a

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material condition for cooperation in the representation of an air situation. Similar to the cartographic tables of the Dowding System, it made it possible for a group of people under the supervision of a head of evaluation around a table with a horizontal plate and in telephone contact with the individual observation points to directly map the air situation of an area. (B3) This process of air situation visualisation on the ‘Fluma’ was now repeated in the further chain of co-operation. While the evaluators were still displaying the air situation on the evaluation table in the ‘Fluko’, an evaluation manager, who was located on the south side of the map table and thus was able to read the information, passed on the resulting ASP to a superior ‘Fluko’ (later the so-called ‘Section Flight Reporting Centre’) by telephone in shortened plain text. (B4) There again, in the main ‘Fluko’, the ASPs of several subordinate ‘Flukos’ were displayed, and thus combined, on a flight message evaluation table for a larger geographical area according to the procedure already described: thus, if the audio and visual reports of one area were first combined with each other, the results of those combinations were now combined again in order to be able to produce an ASP for a larger area. (B5) This ASP was finally sent by an evaluator to the evaluation room of the ground observation service in the division command post ‘Diogenes’, where, in turn, separate small ASPs were displayed on a flight message evaluation table by evaluators and thus combined with each other (B6). The ASP for the divisional area was created in the evaluation room of ‘Diogenes’ on up to four flight message evaluation tables (BA-MA RL 2-VI/166, p. 33). There, on the south side of each flight message evaluation table, there was again one head of evaluation, who (B7), however, no longer reported the resulting ASP to a superior position, but to a draughtswoman at the so-called ‘combat screen recorder’ (‘Gefechtsbildschreiber’) in the main room of the division command post; accordingly, the division command post ‘Diogenes’ had to have as many flight message evaluation tables as combat screen recorders. (B8) While the possibilities for information and representation were severely limited with the light-spot and square projector, the combat screen recorder provided a projection device which made it possible to display the symbols defined in the ‘flight message signalling panel’ on the transparent main map. The operator of the device drew the ASP of a flight report evaluation table received from the evaluation officer on a small-scale map sheet with a pencil in the usual form. A so-called ‘stork’s beak system’ transferred the movements of the pencil to a fine steel needle, the tip of which, when the pencil was placed on the first map, touched a soot-blackened glass plate underneath and left fine white lines when

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Fig. 7 View of the combat room of the Central Command Post ‘Dädalus’ in Döberitz; upper right, flight message evaluation tables; upper left, combat screen recorder; centre, light-spot projector; in front, the ascending rows of seats for commanding personnel; the main position map is in front of the ascending rows of seats (not visible here) (Biermann & Cielewicz, 2006, p. 145)

it moved over the soot plate. With the appropriate optics and lighting, this soot drawing was projected onto the large main air situation map—for this purpose, the combat scene recorder with the soot plate had to have the same dimensions as the large air situation map in miniature. By using tinted glass plates, the drawing could also be displayed in colour (BA-MA RL 2-VI/166, p. 40). At this point, all data from listening and observer posts and radar detections in the division command post—after several translations into symbols, several evaluations, forwarding, visualisation and combination—had been displayed, thus the air situation for the entire division area had been established. This presentation of the radar and the audio and visual reports meant that precisely those data volumes were combined at the same time, complementing or confirming each other. On the basis of this ASP of the main situation map, which consisted of the projections of the light-spot and square projectors as well as the combat

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screen recorders (A5 and B8) (see e.g. Fig. 7), air defence was centrally organised and parts of the ASP were distributed to the air force, the anti-aircraft artillery, the Reich Defence Commissioners and the Air Defence and Rail Air Warning Service. The operational core, however, was the centralised remote navigation of the fighters by fighter control officers, who were located in that half of the room that could read the main situation map (Fig. 8). While the description above cannot claim to be complete or exclusive, it is possible, as already demonstrated for the Dowding System, to unfold the co-operative chain of operations necessary for the representation of the overall air situation, here specifically for that of mid-1943 and with a focus on the representation of the air situation in the Divisional Command Post ‘Diogenes’.

Fig. 8 Combat room of the Central Command Post ‘Gyges’ near Gedhus; on the left side the map of the main area can be seen, in front of it rows of tables for ‘Heads of Reporting’, ‘la-Officers’, ‘Chiefs of Reporting’ and ‘Chiefs of Anti-Aircraft Artillery’; ascending two rows of tables for fighter control officers (1–18), here hidden by the rows of balconies with flying-spot projectors that could be placed in the same room (Trenkle, 1987, p. 194, titles in quotation marks trans. CB/TT)

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5

The Co-operative Chains of the Division Command Post

5.1

The Radar-Based Chain of Co-operation

(A1) Deciding and Transforming When aircraft are detected with the ‘Freya’ or ‘Würzburg’ radar, the operator categorises the aircraft detected on the radar screen into friend or foe as visual or audio operations and determines the flight altitude and approximate number of aircraft detected. The operator also determines the geo-position of the detected aircraft on the radar screen. (A2) Transmitting The operator at the radar forwards the radar data to a draughtswoman at the evaluation table of the operational position. (A3) Visualising and Combining Using the radar data, an image of the air situation is generated at the evaluation table for a limited area. (A4) Transmitting The image information—number, position, flight altitude and direction of located objects together with their approximate number as well as their classification as friend/foe—is transmitted directly to an ‘LN helper’ in the division command post working at the light-spot projector. (A5) Visualising The ‘LN helper’ visualises the radar information communicated to her by telephone with the aid of a light-spot projection. (A6 and B9) Transmitting (Disseminating) The final ASP on the vertical main situation map in the command post is distributed to subordinate locations (e.g. fighter control centres, air-raid warning service, anti-aircraft guns) and serves as a basis for organising the remote navigation of fighter aircraft.

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The Parallel Reporting Service-Based Chain of Co-operation

(B1) Transmitting Listening and observation posts pass on their reports by telephone to evaluators in the ‘Flight Watch Command’ responsible for them. (B2) Combining, Marking, Correcting, Transforming and Visualising Several evaluators at an evaluation table in the ‘Flight Watch Command’ visualise the audio and visual messages of their reporting area by drawing in symbolic form, which, combined in this way, results in a small-scale ASP. By means of a direct speech connection to the ground observers, the situation displays on the grid could be corrected. (B3) Transmitting While the drawing process is still in progress, a head of evaluation passes on the resulting ASP by telephone to a draughtswoman at an evaluation table of a higher-ranking flight watch command (pyramidal reporting hierarchy). (B4) Combining, Scaling and Visualising Several draughtswomen at the evaluation table of a higher-ranking flight watch command visualise the air situation of smaller sectors which have been communicated to them; they are then combined to produce a larger ASP. (B5) Transmitting An evaluation manager at the evaluation table forwards the resulting ASP by telephone to a draughtswoman at an evaluation table in the division command post. (B6) Combining, Scaling and Visualising Several draughtswomen at the evaluation table in the division command post visualise the air situation of smaller sectors which have been communicated to them; they are then combined to produce a larger ASP. (B7) Transmitting A chief evaluator at the evaluation table in the command post forwards the resulting ASP by radiotelephony to an assistant at the ‘combat screen recorder’. (B8) Visualising The combat screen recorder produces an ASP based on the reports of all ground observers in the divisional area; this is projected onto the main map.

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(B9 and A6) Transmitting (Disseminating) The final ASP on the main vertical map in the command post is distributed to subordinate locations (e.g. fighter control centres, air-raid warning service, antiaircraft guns) and serves as the basis for organising the remote navigation of fighters.

6

Results

The chains of co-operations presented here are not exclusively constituted by radar. For the cooperation, reporting chains are very decisive, which are partly fed by the information from ground observers, but also transmit the image information within the two operation centres analysed here. What the historical reconstruction cannot make visible here is the extent to which these reporting chains are not also characterised by the reciprocity of perspective—in other words, that they do not function unidirectionally, but are also dependent on approval and consent. In this case one can assume that a transfer always also took place by consensus. It is also apparent that the priority principle of chains of action is not only to be understood as a methodological principle of representation, but that it itself develops a dispositive form of representation. Similar to the ARPANET, we can also assume an isomorphism of the technical and social circuits in the radar airspace surveillance system (see Schüttpelz, 2007, p. 35). In the present case of analogue computing, chains of transformation and translation do not coincide, as is often insinuated in other analyses of socio-technical mediation (see above). Rather, here translation always inscribes itself in the transmission, while the operations take place on site in the image. As the itemised chains of co-operations show, the two systems differ in their complexity. While the British Dowding System is characterised by ‘operations on the image’, the German command post is characterised by the fact that both ‘operations on the image’ and ‘operations between images’ are carried out. In the cases at hand, however, we are not dealing with co-operations on and through the image, but with a ‘radar operator’, ‘plotter’, ‘teller’, ‘filterer’, a human ‘projector’, a human ‘combat screen recorder’, etc., each entering into a communicative exchange with the other by forming a chain of communicative networks. What is special about this mode of representation is that it leads to a theoretical sharpening of the model conception of mediators. In the classical idea of networks, a network can be imagined as ‘a number of wires with hooks at each end that can be connected to form different networks’ (Schüttpelz, 2007, p. 33,

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trans. CB/TT). In the praxeological imagination, these hooks can be understood as ‘two-person networks’. From a praxeological point of view, the recursiveness of operations only occurs locally at the site of each individual operation step. In this sense there is no ‘self-referentiality of chains of operations’ (Heilmann, 2016, p. 12, trans. CB/TT), but only self-referentiality of the individual links of a chain of co-operation. This shows the media specificity of distributed computing, as the analysis of the Operations Rooms has shown. Media are at work here in two places: within a link and outside all links of a chain of operations. The representation of chains of co-operation thus makes it possible to clarify at which point strict and loose couplings in socio-technical processes arise. The analysis of chains of co-operation shows that sequentiality, which is associated with the decomposition of the complex task of producing and visualising ASPs, was bound to different actors, who all contribute to the work on the respective ASP with tasks of varying complexity. The length of the co-operative chains is not so decisive. There are six, nine or ten steps from data input to data output in the respective command centre. The work on the ASP differs rather in the tasks performed by the actors. While the British system involves more human decision making (especially filtering), the German command post strongly deals with the specific material operations of the map (including combining, marking, scaling and disseminating). This shows that the operational capability of the German command post was more territorially conceived. Evaluation tables, combat screen recorders and the main air situation map were equipped with a grid structure that was linked to individual external sectors—not only in the figurative sense, but also very practically with the help of telephone lines. Although the telephone was also indispensable in the command post, here it was reduced to the operational aspect of transmission, often using headphones and chest microphones, often also simultaneously with other operations. Whereas the British air defence represented manual operations symbolically on map tables with figures on top of them, the German air situation display was characterised by a permanent map drawing on the one hand and a continually changing image projected on a wall by light on the other. Common to both chains of co-operations is that the spatial architecture can be understood as a structureforming element for problems to be solved cooperatively. It is no coincidence that the command centres of the British Dowding System and the central large-scale command posts of the German air defence were spatially structured in such a way that a large number of human actors had a clear view of the air situation map

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to be generated. The concrete architectural implementation, however, differed massively. In the Dowding System, balconies were used to create a spatial densification of various actors in the Operations Rooms, so that the horizontal air situation map could be viewed from above. On this vertical air situation map, data could be processed by hand using plotters. In the Division Command Post this was solved, as in the cinematographic setting, by a vertical aerial map, which could no longer be equipped with figures movable by hand but was indirectly charged symbolically with a supply of characters via projections. This architectural-cinematographic dispositif resulted in the fact that the Divisional Command Post ‘Dädalus’ in Döberitz was repurposed after the end of World War II as a cinema for Soviet units (Biermann & Cielewicz, 2006, p. 158). Another common feature of both co-operational chains is that they could only process a certain amount of information. As a result of a data input that was too fast or large, an ‘information overload’ would occur. Both infrastructures also have in common that they refrained from alphabetical and symbolic forwarding of data, as this was too time-consuming, and they instead forwarded data orally by telephone. Feedback in the reporting hierarchy can also be found in both the British and the German command posts. The fact that both Operations Rooms received not only radar detection data but also reports from listening and observer posts of ground observers reduced the risk of breakdown of the entire infrastructure. Both infrastructures were also characterised by the symbolic standardisation of relevant objects and spaces as a condition for co-operative functioning. For this, certain indications had to be unambiguous and—formulated in terms of sign theory—the signs had to be sufficiently distinguishable. This was the case, for example, with the specification of plots according to the British National Grid, the fighter grid map, or the German ‘Flugmeldesignaltafel’ (air traffic message board), which defined the symbol set for air traffic reporting. We are therefore dealing with two times two forms of ‘co-operating environments’, which are mutually dependent: (1a) a flat co-operating environment, which is organised horizontally by a viewing perspective from the top and decentrally by distributed spaces; (2a) a three-dimensional co-operating environment, which organises the work processes centrally and displays its representations of the air situation horizontally and vertically. In addition, (1b) we are dealing with a graphic and figural representation of the air situation, which limits the embedding of further actors, but at the same time increases the potential expressiveness of the individual operator. By using different projectors (light-spot/square projector and combat screen recorder), (2b) the visibility of the operations for all actors

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involved is increased, thus in turn increasing co-operative ability, while at the same time reducing the repertoire of signs. From the perspective of Science and Technology Studies, therefore, two forms of command posts can be distinguished: the British Dowding System, which is organised more like a distributed laboratory and therefore does not need to visualise the path of the information, and the German Divisional Command Post, whose Operations Room is characterised by the fact that it gathers all the information in one room. The Divisional Command Post therefore has to communicate the information path—to paraphrase Garfinkel, the secondary information of the situation—in order to make the status of the information known to the actors involved in the process. Starting from this, what can be said retrospectively about the supposed exclusivity of the triad of storing, transmitting and processing mentioned at the beginning (Kittler, 1996)? First of all, that the three operations are not sufficient to categorise the practices described, which are components of the chains of cooperations. The unfolded chains have as its essential links operations that cannot be subsumed under one of the three media functions. The chains of co-operations consists mainly of the basic operations of transmission and visualisation. In addition, there are further operations that could be subsumed in the broadest sense under the media function of processing already relevant for Kittler. As Winkler (2015) has already pointed out, the operative nature of processing conceals a series of very differentiated procedures and practices, which this chapter has revealed: these include deciding, combining, marking, correcting, scaling, transforming, selecting and disseminating. These operations are closely related to the functioning of analogue computers and cartographic representations but cannot be reduced to them. If ‘processing’ generally means a processing of data in ‘any form’, it would be easy to assign these basic operations to that very same ‘processing’. However, this would neither do justice to the listed operations, nor would it help to sharpen the concept of ‘processing’. What can be stated is that although processing is a genuine media function of the computer following Friedrich Kittler, it has become clear that data processing is by no means a specific feature of analogue or digital computer operations but can also be accomplished by human activity. In this context, processing is divided into different procedural practices that can be described as media functions. However, these do not necessarily testify to the specific property of a technical medium—they can be practised literally by ‘human hands’ in the command centres mentioned above. Thus, the information selection, which is very important in the present case, is primarily carried out by human ‘filterers’. In this respect, this contribution demonstrates that filter work is

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not reserved for digital operations. If today there are complaints that algorithmic processes elude direct observation, this challenge also applies to the historical reconstruction of media practices and chains of operation. The present attempt at a historical praxeology of radar shows that the work on ASPs cannot be described by basic operations of media technology alone. The sequential linking of operations in the medium of radar is mainly oral. Garfinkel’s approach to the analysis of two-person networks makes this particularly clear. The conditions of cooperation outlined by Garfinkel are also effective for media technology systems such as radar, even if the historical reconstruction of this media practice is not easy due to the archival situation. Thus, although the congruence of the relevance of action is given by the relatively clearly contoured attribution of functions of the command posts or operations rooms analysed here, one can only speculate about the reciprocity of perspective in the reporting chains. In order to analyse the interchangeability of standpoints in detail, one would have had to conduct interviews with contemporary witnesses or resort to (filmic) documentation, if such documentation is available at all. The common scheme of communication is relevant for a number of practices that can be determined by transmitting, visualising, combining, marking, correcting, scaling, selecting/dividing and disseminating/distributing (in the broadest sense) maps. In the analysis presented here, the necessary vagueness of expression turns out to be the crucial point, around which the visualisation of localisation information has to be wrestled with again and again. In this respect, data filtering proves to be the decisive co-operative practice for working on the ASP. It is precisely this filtering work that is not directly bound to the medium of radar, but is more or less loosely linked to many (mainly human) media.

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Schüttpelz, E., & Gießmann, S. (2015). Medien der Kooperation. Überlegungen zum Forschungsstand. Navigationen. Zeitschrift für Medien- und Kulturwissenschaften, 15(1), 7–55. Shannon, C. E. (1948a). A mathematical theory of communication. Bell System Technical Journal, 27(3), 379–423. Shannon, C. E. (1948b). A mathematical theory of communication. Bell System Technical Journal, 27(4), 623–666. Slayton, R. (2013). Arguments that count. Physics, computing, and missile defense, 1949– 2012. Cambridge: MIT Press. Thielmann, T. (2012). Taking into Account: Harold Garfinkels Beitrag für eine Theorie sozialer Medien. Zeitschrift Für Medienwissenschaft, 6, 85–102. Thielmann, T. (2013). Digitale Rechenschaft. Die Netzwerkbedingungen der AkteurMedien-Theorie seit Amtieren des Computers. In T. Thielmann & E. Schüttpelz (Eds.), Akteur-Medien-Theorie (pp. 377–424). Bielefeld: transcript. Trenkle, F. (1987). Die deutschen Funkführungsverfahren bis 1945. Heidelberg: Alfred Hüthig. Wieser, M. (2012). Das Netzwerk von Bruno Latour: Die Akteur-Netzwerk-Theorie zwischen Science & Technology Studies und poststrukturalistischer Soziologie. Bielefeld: transcript. Winkler, H. (2015). Prozessieren. Die dritte, vernachlässigte Medienfunktion. Paderborn: Fink. Wood, D. (1961). The narrow margin: The battle of Britain and the rise of air power, 1930– 1949. New York: McGraw-Hill. Wood, D. (1991). The dowding system. In H. Probert & S. Cox (Eds.), The Battle Rethought: A Symposium on the Battle of Britain (pp. 3–10). Airlife Publishing. https:// www.rafmuseum.org.uk/documents/Research/RAF-Historical-Society-Journals/Brackn ell-No-1-Battle-of-Britain.pdf. Accessed 1 July 2023. Zimmerman, D. (2004). Information and the air defence revolution, 1917–40. The Journal of Strategic Studies, 28(2), 370–394.

On Identification: Theory and History of a Media Practice Sebastian Giessmann

‘Identities seek control.’ (White, 2008, p. 1)

Joy Buolamwini is a superhero. Or at least a star of critical algorithm studies. In 2018 she founded the Algorithmic Justice League, which has taken a clear stance on questions of both machine and social prejudice and the power of algorithms. Algorithmic bias exists, especially in commercial face recognition systems. But Buolamwini’s clever public relations work, including her popular TED talks, easily obscures the scientific substance of the public mission. Thus, in 2018, together with Timnit Gebru of Microsoft Research, Buolamwini also published an article that is as spectacular as it is positivist. ‘Gender Shades: Intersectional Accuracy Disparities in Commercial Gender Classification’ subjects the intersectional abysses of mass facial recognition to a computer science analysis, which aims This text is based on ideas that were developed within the framework of the Lecture and Workshop Series on Practice Theory of the CRC 1187 ‘Media of Cooperation’ at the University of Siegen. It was first published as a Working Paper in German (http://dx. doi.org/10.25819/ubsi/4437). My thanks go to Jenny Berkholz, Verena Wöbking, Tobias Conradi and Sebastian Randerath for their help with the text, Ronja Trischler for collaborative work on blockchain ethnography, Francis Hunger for helpful critique, and Friedemann Vogel and the students of a joint Siegen seminar on Signs, Media and Practices of Identification in the summer term of 2021. Funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) – Project-ID 262513311 – CRC 1187 Media of Cooperation. S. Giessmann (B) University of Siegen, Siegen, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 S. Gießmann et al. (eds.), Materiality of Cooperation, Medien der Kooperation— Media of Cooperation, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-39468-4_6

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at fair, transparent and accountable face recognition algorithms (Buolamwini & Gebru, 2018). Comparable goals are pursued by other European activist initiatives on algorithmic accountability. Contrary to Buolamwini and Gebru, they reject automated facial recognition completely (Ban Facial Recognition, 2020; Reclaim Your Face, 2020). In view of the rapid development of machine learning and recent cases such as that of Clearview, which savagely aggregated facial data from three billion photographs worldwide (Hill, 2020), one must cautiously ask: What was facial recognition capable of until 2018 and what does it mean for the subsequent identification of human bodies? First of all, it requires an infrastructure that, even before Clearview, relied on capturing the largest possible data sets (see Crawford, 2021). Buolamwini and Gebru note that, based on collections such as Megaface and LFW, high recognition rates in automatic face recognition have been postulated—about 97.35% in the case of LFW—but without differentiating quality according to racial/ethnic and gender criteria. In contrast, they subject both the labelling of the skin colour represented by digital photography and the use of algorithms for gender classification to an audit process. This practice of socio-technical testing accepts the world-generating power of digital classification and identification. It pays particular attention to disparities—for example, when dark-skinned women (IJG, 4.4%) or dark-skinned men (Adience, 6.4%) are least represented in the data sets (Buolamwini & Gebru, 2018, p. 7). Only one in three data sets, PPB, is more balanced in terms of representation of darker and lighter skin tones. Commercial facial recognition systems, which are mainly used in police and legal contexts, are tested by Buolamwini and Gebru using API bundles, i.e. interface accesses from Microsoft, IBM and the Chinese company FACE++. The results of the comparison are striking: all classifiers recognise fair-skinned male subjects better. The detection rates were worst for dark-skinned women. In response, the authors argue: ‘Future work should explore intersectional error analysis of facial detection, identification and verification’ (ibid., p. 12). Significantly, it is less the facial recognition itself which the authors criticise. Rather, its computational quality, public transparency and accountability are being put to the test. Face recognition algorithms surely are an escalation of the control society that also undermines critical media research. But how can this escalation be explained in terms of media history? How did it come to ever new cascades of registration, identification and classification? Nearly all media theories of identification emphasise the asymmetrical distribution of identification power, which causes state and private media agencies in particular to be brought to the fore. The role of the police and secret service for identification practice can hardly

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be denied, but it is the thing to be explained and not the explanation itself. It also remains to be explained why and, above all, how subjects who are continually kept identifiable deal with state and private intelligence services. From a media anthropological perspective, face, language and body remain open semiotic resources, whose practices always include masking, staging and differing accounts: it is for good reason that the superheroine of the Algorithmic Justice League is wearing a white theatrical mask to cover her face.

1

From ‘Identitas’ to ‘Identification’

The French verb identifier is regarded as the point of reference in Anglo-Saxon and German etymologies. Identifier, in turn, derives its origin as a transitive verb from scholastic Latin, if one follows the Larousse: ‘latin scolastique identificare, du latin classique idem, le même, et facere, faire’ (‘identifier’, in: Larousse). Identification is interested in equal qualities, one could say. To recognise something as equal or made equal, however, is a complex practice that needs to take cultural schemata and acting between categories into account. The German noun Identität (identity), which stands for ‘völlige Übereinstimmung, Gleichheit, Wesenseinheit’ (complete accordance, equality, unity of essence) and the verb identifizieren (to identify), which means ‘to establish identity, to equate with one another’, were borrowed from Latin in the eighteenth century (‘Identität’, in: Pfeiffer, 2005, p. 570, trans. SG). In the nineteenth century, Identifikation (identification) was added (ibid.) The encyclopaedically verifiable history of the German language appears to be lagging behind the practices of identification that with French, English, Spanish and Italian etymology can be dated much earlier in the seventeenth century (‘identify’, in OED). The Oxford English Dictionary, for example, which is perhaps the most suitable for praxeological research, notes early modern occurrences from 1626 onwards for the transitive use of identify—in the sense of ‘to regard or treat as identical’. To identify in the sense of ‘to serve as a means of identification for; to show something or somebody to be’ became common as a transitive verb especially in the late eighteenth century (ibid.). Etymology and historical semantics alone, it must be said, help in identifying identification only to a limited extent. In his much read study Who Are You?, Valentin Groebner has noted how difficult it is to connect to postmodern concepts of (plural) ‘identity’ if one wants to historically assure oneself of identifying practices. Thus, the concept of ‘identitas’ was frequently used in medieval logic—not,

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of course, as an indication of uniqueness, ‘but rather for those characteristics common to various elements of a group, derived from idem, the same, or identidem, repeatedly’ (Groebner, 2007, p. 26). Groebner rather prefers to focus on ‘identifying’ than on ‘identities’, which remains a valuable lesson in micro-historical anthropology: ‘For identifying is always a process in which more than one person is involved’ (ibid., p. 27). This co-operative constitution of identification will be discussed in the following. It is closely related to the practices of registration— which precondition any identification—and to those of classification, which allow for locating in categorical orders and established schemata. A media praxeology of identification is based on the infrastructural combination of registration and identification, is part of the long history of classification systems, and on this basis necessarily addresses symbolic orders. I would first like to outline the framework of such a media praxeology before turning to the history of mutual identification using the examples of passport, credit and their constitutive practices. Particular attention will be paid to those bureaucratic media agencies through which people, signs and things are interconnected.

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Media and Social Theory of Identification

Practices of registration and identification are systematically inseparable.1 For no media use is based on mere technical storage. Rather, all stored inscriptions become semiotically and socio-technically relevant through identification processes, reference production or simply reading traces. Media practices of registration and identification begin even before writing, in mutual interaction, in linguistic and gestural practices of referring, clarifying and addressing. They are, contrary to a supposed dominance of written language and other inscriptions, also characterised by interactional techniques of the body. Intercorporeality (Merleau-Ponty, 1964 [1960], pp. 168–169), in which reciprocal body movements, gestures, facial expressions and speech acts are indexically accentuated, encompasses all those situations in which we turn our bodies into media. Ethnomethodological and anthropological research that employs sequence analysis has shown this particularly clearly (Meyer et al., 2017). Harold Garfinkel’s concept of ‘accountability’ (1967, p. 33) not only includes the written forms of reporting, accounting and justifying, but also the oral account as a narrative, the contact between colleagues working together as embodied accountability (Suchman, 1993), or the filing of juridical speech 1

The following passage is based on my thoughts in Giessmann (2018a), here: pp. 104–106.

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acts. Making oneself accountable continuously produces identifiable data in co-operative settings ‘with more than one person’ (Groebner, 2007, p. 27). A further interactional and intercorporeal justification of registration and identification can be based on Charles Goodwin’s anthropological research on incremental co-operative action. Goodwin’s studies on ethnology and sequence analysis of human interaction and sign practices (2018) demonstrate how we use semiotic resources provided by the counterpart (linguistic, gestural, mimic) cooperatively as a registrative basis for identifying the respective further turns of interaction. These mutually shared semiotic resources also represent the public basis for embodied learning processes, as Goodwin emphatically described in the case of the professional vision of archaeologists, in which the media of learning to see (How to recognise layers of earth?) are at the same time instruments of scientific registration, identification and classification. Identifying is, if you follow Goodwin (1994), a normal everyday practice and at the same time a condition for highly differentiated skills. Garfinkel’s and Goodwin’s diagnoses in social theory and anthropology remain central to the intercorporeal, co-operative dimension of identification. This is particularly evident in pre-modern practices, such as those excellently described by Valentin Groebner. Admittedly, the registries—whether in the chancellery of Frederick II, the ecclesiastical bureaucracies of the Middle Ages or the colonial power of Spain under Philip II—were an expression of a codification of the world pursued from Europe. However, the concrete medieval and early modern practices of identifying individuals mobilised a multitude of semiotic resources, the examination of which was carried out situatively and indexically along similarity criteria: hair and skin colour, facial features, dresses, tattoos, coats of arms, seals, letters of passage and finally identity cards, passesportes as the enduring heritage of the European Middle Ages. In this context, the constitutive element of the media and data practices of identification was the limited representation of the mobile person by his or her mobile papers, who thereby simultaneously became a legal subject (Groebner, 2007, p. 176). However, the gap between a person and his or her signs remained, so that only the practice of identifying similarities themselves was able to overcome it: ‘After all, to identify is to show’ (ibid., p. 169). At the same time, it means asserting oneself as a legal subject in media practice by making oneself accountable. Media theory has traditionally devoted less attention to these small, distributed practices—which include the tricks of impostors and identity fraudsters—than to the main and state actions of identification and the disciplining microphysics of power introduced by them (Foucault, 1995 [1975]). In fact, it can be said that a media-interactionist perspective alters the view on the classic data techniques of state registration and

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identification, including governmental statistical tables since the seventeenth century (Vismann, 2008 [2000], Chap. 4), police identification services, optical and acoustic surveillance, social statistics and more recently big data and biometrics (Wichum, 2017), in favour of the agency of the identifiable person. After all, the perfect documentation system remains a—usually momentous—bureaucratic dream that can turn into a nightmare. Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star have dedicated their famous book Sorting Things Out to this Janus-headedness of infrastructural modernity, thinking through the consequences of categorical orders of that which can be registered and identified (Bowker & Star, 1999). At the same time, they have shown the rise of new media agencies that emerge with the administration of the identifiable. Within that development, the infrastructural backstages of media history are the place where data processing and classification practice are linked. Bowker and Star’s analysis of the International Statistical Classification of Diseases (ICD) has become a classic, in which the ICD has sought to mediate between knowledge management and medical identification practice. As a globally oriented, growing information infrastructure, the ICD assumes a coordinating and standardising function that supports the respective local practices of registering, identifying and classifying diseases. It was and still is a world project that has employed a different type of identification service than, for example, the police administration of crime and criminal data at the end of the nineteenth century (Meyer, 2019, pp. 131–210). For Bowker and Star, the distance between the person and the classification still applies in exactly the same way as for the difference between the body and identity documents described by Groebner: ‘The crack comes when the messy flow of bodily and natural experience must be ordered against a formal, neat set of categories’ (Bowker & Star, 1999, p. 68). This applies to the formality of colonialist fingerprinting in India (Ginzburg, 1980, p. 27), modern identity cards and the pragmatics of medical identification as well: whoever identifies, classifies. In terms of media theory, there is much to be said for understanding identification practices not only according to a paradigm that privileges police, secret service and social evaluation procedures. Rather, both smaller and larger media agencies of identifying persons belong firstly to the Western modern infrastructural state, and secondly to those ‘centers of calculation’ (Latour, 1999 [1987], Chapter 6) that afford for private enterprise, consumer research or the statistical evaluation of publics. There have always been countermovements against the asymmetry of this relationship—such as the ‘right to be let alone’ in relation to press photography around 1900, data protection in relation to state dragnet investigations from the 1970s onwards or the encryption activism of the 2010s.

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Usually, these countermovements are motivated by good normative and political reasons. What needs to be explained, however, is why interactional forms of making oneself accountable have been leading to ever new cascades of registering, identifying and classifying—right up to the appropriation of machine learning for a poor automation of precisely these purposes, as has been criticised by the Algorithmic Justice League. For an artificial separation of data, calculation, bodies and faces can hardly be made within digital media cultures anymore. Here, registration and identification involve everyday logistical media and data practices, addressing, assessing, locating, tracking and delivering a message, object or person. Registration and identification techniques enable the referencing of singularised persons, characters and objects, as well as localised and dated delivery processes. However, all this would not be possible without the interactive and intercorporeal capacity of registration and identification, in its respective modification by infrastructural and logistical media. Phil Agre has characterised these practices in 1994 with the logistical concept of ‘capture’ (2003 [1994]). While this was initially intended to differentiate capture from visual modes of surveillance such as the panopticism described by Michel Foucault (1995 [1975]), the continuous capturing of data for surveilling pattern recognition is now well established: face recognition and other biometrics assume that the human body provides the best basis for identifiable individuality. Our semiotic resources thus lead an inseparable double life: not only since the rise of social media platforms, the intercorporeal, co-operative and reciprocal creation of accounts has become inseparable from their bureaucratisation, valorisation, profiling and data processing. Media and data practices of identification converge in contemporary digital cultures, and big data and machine learning are means to this end. On which media histories is this disturbing development based? One can understand these media histories in terms of a critique of culture, state, colonialism and capitalism, but because of their other genealogies in medical data processing, consumer and publicity research, they can also be understood as a form of ‘banal surveillance’, normalisation of distributed control and continuous practice of indexicalisation of digitally networked media. I would first like to outline the framework of such a media praxeology before turning to the history of mutual identification using the examples of passport, credit and their constitutive practices. In doing so, I follow up on a question generated together with Asko

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Lehmuskallio, Paula Haara and Heikki Heikkilä2 and ask: What do passports and credit cards have in common?

3

Identity Documents and Credit Cards

Identity documents carry a real longue durée of media history, in which mobile use and identification are combined with large registry projects (Macho, 2013). From the fifteenth to the twenty-first century, the distance between the person, their distinguishing marks and the media of identification includes the structural non-identity of moving bodies and their data, which are always in need of stabilisation and tend to be produced by the authorities. Siegert (2006, 2015, Chap. 5) has strikingly described this along the semiotic practices of the Spanish Crown in the sixteenth century, which attempted to strictly regulate passengers and papers on their way to the American colonies. In Valentin Groebner’s history of warrants of apprehension, identity cards and control, the ‘big apparatuses’ or media agencies of Western modernity seem like an echo of the—multiple, similarity-oriented, distributed—medieval practices of identification (Groebner, 2007). Turning points in this long history of identification were often political, be it the Peace of Westphalia, be it the strict laws on names enacted after the French Revolution (Torpey, 2018 [2000], Chap. 2) or, with the outbreak of World War I, the reintroduction of the requirement for identity cards, passports and other means of identification (Groebner, 2007, p. 164). At the same time, periods of liberal circulation of socially higher-ranking persons, as was the case in the last third of the nineteenth century in Western and Central Europe, were also based on state strategies that made ‘good’ circulation possible and prevented ‘bad’ circulation (Foucault, 2009, p. 65). Privileges in international transport applied to citizens of colonial empires and administrative elites, but not to the working class and even less to the masses of the colonised. Beyond the singled-out person, the nineteenth century was characterised by economic and technical innovations for the creation of new registration and identification media. Dommann (2012), for example, was able to show how bills of lading and shipping books could become transport standards in the expanding world trade. Yates (1989) has reconstructed the history of binders, memoranda and filing practices as working media in the American control revolution since 2

On ‘banal surveillance’, see the BANSUR research project (https://www.tuni.fi/en/res earch/banal-surveillance-unravelling-causes-and-remedies-privacy-paradox-bansur (access 30 March 2020)). On the history of Finnish identity papers, see also Haara and Lehmuskallio (2020), Lehmuskallio and Haara (2022).

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the middle of the nineteenth century, systematically documenting industrial and bureaucratic practice in a new style. We have Gardey (2008) to thank for a parallel overview of the media of the modern office, focusing on France’s industrialisation, which highlights writing, calculating and archiving practices as they are based in their material and institutional culture. Infrastructural media innovations of this kind were inextricably interwoven with the working worlds of their organisations and institutions and were part of what could be called the bureaucratic background co-operation of identification. The connection between economic liberalism and background identification is particularly evident in the emergence of credit rating agencies in the USA. In 1841, for example, Lewis Tappan founded his Mercantile Agency in New York to obtain small reports on the solvency of credit customers in narrative—and not primarily numerical—form and make them available for enquiries from paying subscribers (Lauer, 2017, p. 33). In the large folio volumes in Brooklyn, accounts of businessmen from all over the country were centrally registered. This included, for example, the credit report of Abraham Lincoln, the contents of which were deleted in the course of his political career (Sandage, 2005, pp. 156–158). Agencies such as Lewis Tappan’s Mercantile Agency or the Bradstreet Company were designed from the outset to have a high territorial reach and growing scope. They shifted information and identification practices primarily to their network of human agents and merged in 1933 as Dun & Bradstreet. Beginning in the 1880s, the granting of temporary loans by US department stores, became established practice for private customers in the major cities. This involved substantial investments into the identification of regular customers and the corresponding accounting work (cf. Lauer, 2017, Chaps. 2 and 3). This bureaucratisation was made possible by the widespread practice of tab keeping, which was used to tabulate mutual social obligations. In both cases—personal debt and the granting of temporary credit by larger department stores—identification remained primarily local and interactional: American households thus incurred small debts with local shopkeepers that were settled when hard money was available, often six to twelve months later, and sometimes longer. The spread of installment credit after the Civil War, conventionally viewed as the takeoff point of modern consumer credit, merely expanded the scope and impersonality of practices already in place (ibid., p. 51).

The agencies for the local monitoring of customers, which had been established since the 1870s, especially in the larger cities of the USA, evaluated customers’ ability to pay with short classifications. For example, in 1874 the Brooklyn-based

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Retail Mercantile Agency listed ‘A’ for fast payment, ‘B’ for cash use, ‘C’ for late repayments, ‘K’ for incapability to pay and ‘&’ for non-ratable customers, details of whom could only be obtained at the office (ibid., p. 68). While World War I led to the fixation of mobility based on identity documents, the rise of US consumerism in the 1920s established new signs of financial identity.3 At this point, it became possible for the first time to sell accumulated debt, which was mainly used by department store chains such as Sears and Roebuck & Company (Hyman, 2011, Chap. 1). The already high demand for installment credit for larger purchases, including cars and record players, and legally secured personal loans (small loan lending) corresponded to the new buying and selling of accumulated debt in the financial system. At the level of everyday economic practices, loyalty cards were becoming more widespread, making it easier to register and identify consumers. In addition to the corresponding book and card management, this included a special form of customer card, the so-called charge-a-plates or charge plates. These were simple objects with a few typographical elements that were initially intended to facilitate basic payment practices in department stores, petrol stations and hotels, such as payment delayed by up to thirty days with proven, ‘good’ customer relations. Payment with charge plates—or with the related charge coins—was on the one hand a matter of socio-economic prestige. On the other hand, each card corresponded to a local customer account, which is why the customer’s name and signature contributed to the personalisation of the charge plates. In this way, the accounting practices by which businesses granted credit created a new link between account and person. Account, body and card, as a media network, allowed the paying and creditworthy subject to be identified and addressed, just as they offered people an extension of their payment options. Existing interaction orders between paying, looking, giving and handing over were largely retained or supplemented by registration and identification by plate or coin. The individualised cards and coins were connected to the customers’ bodies and vice versa in bookkeeping practice. Payment techniques and infrastructures remained embodied and interactional. They required a high level of mutual trust from all parties involved, which could only partially be delegated to the bureaucratic registration and identification techniques. By means of bookkeeping, the delayed payments were assigned to the appropriate person, who in turn identified themselves by their cards and coins. Here, the two-state difference constitutive for printing techniques (cf. Giesecke, 1994, Chap. 2), which is used 3

The following is based on my observations in Giessmann (2017), here: p. 56.

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by inking superscript characters or carbon paper copy, became the basis of a veritable file generation program in which cards and coins supported the formalised interaction. This legacy of charge cards has been retained by later credit cards, although not directly. For example, when Diners Club—often referred to as the ‘first’ credit card company—was founded in 1949/50, it had the special function of conveniently paying monthly bills incurred at business dinners in New York. For this, Diners Club did not initially use a charge card made of metal or plastic but combined a cardboard card with a booklet of all the participating New York restaurants. It was more of a debit card than a credit card (Swartz, 2014, pp. 137– 138), which in turn had more in common with a booklet of discount stamps than with a charge plate. The material diversity of the newly emerging credit cards led to a veritable proliferation of designs and formats. These, however, always included the name of the account holder—first only men but increasingly also women (cf. ibid.)— the account number, address and a signature field. As local merchants, nationally operating chains (hotels, petrol stations, airlines), specialised companies such as American Express and banks had been launching their own cards on the market since the 1950s (Zumello, 2011), technical questions of standardisation arose, which quickly resulted in legal and regulatory interventions. After a phase of unregulated market conquest in the mid-1960s, characterised by mass mailings without further identification of prospective customers, the first standardisation of the plastic credit card in 1971 marked a significant turning point (Giessmann, 2018b, pp. 1262–1270). It largely defined the data to be stored and added a decisive early moment of digital identification with the magnetic stripe. Corresponding to this, market research was established, which sought to define and quantify the social identities of customers more precisely (Mandell, 1972). This was all the more challenging because after the initial focus on white travelling businessmen, credit cards were marketed as middle-class products for mainly white women and families in the 1960s, especially Bank Americard and MasterCharge. The option of comfortable debt was particularly appealing to poorer users. As is well known, financial market products are created where they are needed, and the need for mobile easy credit was accompanied by a social selfclassification that sought to demonstrate creditworthiness and solvency. On this basis—the financialisation of the middle classes—American credit card providers

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have been pursuing the globalisation of their product since the 1970s, including the conflict-prone export of their corresponding US-style social realities and economic practices.4 When the name of Bank Americard was about to get changed in 1976, the issue of branding it as an international mobile identification medium came up within the corporate culture of NBI (National Bank Americard Incorporated). Dee Ward Hock, the responsible central figure and CEO, had promised the creator of the new name a—symbolic—cheque of $50. In retrospect, Hock narrates the overall process as a decentralised, co-operative and anonymous [sic!] invention: Lists of possibilities emerged, were combined in various ways, suggestions appearing and disappearing as the winnowing process continued. Hundreds of ideas emerged, failed to meet the test of purpose and principles, and were abandoned. Within months, no more than a handful remained. One, which had been discounted on the assumption it was so common it could never meet the test of trademark protection, continually reappeared and often rose to the top. VISA. Was it possible such a common name, used for centuries to denote an entry document to a foreign country, might be capable of trademark protection for financial services worldwide? Maybe, just maybe, it was so old and common that no one had thought of using it for financial services. A worldwide trademark search was quietly undertaken to determine if it had ever been used in the field of financial services. One by one, the reports came in. There was a Visa car. There were Visa golf clubs. There were Visa fabrics. We held our breath. There were Visa pens. There were Visa appliances, there were Visa products of many kinds, but we could find no use of Visa for financial services, publications, or related activities of any significance. We quietly filed worldwide trademark registrations in every possible jurisdiction for the use of the name for financial and related services. Whether or not we could gain worldwide acceptance for the change among our members was unlikely, but at least we had a beginning, a protected name to propose. But who was to get the fifty-dollar check? There were dozens of different recollections of where and how the name first appeared [cf. Stearns, 2011, p. 117–122]. No matter how hard we tried, none among us could unravel the puzzle. The name had appeared as an integral part of a self-organizing process. In a staff meeting to celebrate our success and untangle the puzzle someone wisecracked, ‘Maybe it suggested itself. Either make the check payable to “everyone” or to “no one”. It belongs to us all.’ Amid much laughter, the matter was settled. (Hock, 2005, pp. 218–219).

Whereas previous socio-technical identification mechanisms were still strongly tied to paper-based documentation systems and a representational verification of information, the personal data stored on two of the three tracks of the credit card’s magnetic stripe introduced an unencrypted, but rather invisible machine-readable 4

On European credit card history, see Giessmann (2021).

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element. This did not mean, however, that previous identification mechanisms were used less or even disappeared. For example, the foundations for the magnetic stripe had been laid by an order from the US government to produce locally usable identification cards.5 The laborious application of the magnetic stripe on plastic, made possible by IBM in Los Gatos from 1969 to 1971 in laboratory precision work, became the basis of a whole infrastructural cascade of identification techniques. In everyday use at the payment terminals of the point of sale, this also meant accepting delays in verification (Stearns, 2011, pp. 30–32). Ever new integrated elements characterise the media history of credit card identification. These include holograms, security numbers on the back and projects for the widespread introduction of smart cards in the 1980s. The corporate EMV standard, which was created by Eurocard, Mastercard and Visa, integrated chips and personal identification numbers (PINs) worldwide from 1998 on. In the course of this, ‘card not present’ functions were introduced, which proved to be particularly important for e-commerce in the rise of the World Wide Web. More recent developments include Near Field Communication (NFC), both for stationary applications as well as for mobile devices such as mobile phones of the 2000s, one-time tokens—as temporary identification during transactions (Giessmann, 2018b, pp. 1270–1275)—as well as fingerprint and facial recognition technologies for smartphones. The questions that arise from this continuous escalation of infrastructural mistrust are: What do the ever renewed infrastructures of registration and identification actually answer to? What kind of trust should they (re-)establish and what practices should they enable, contain or prevent? In monetary theory, the matter is comparatively clear: the more money of account or bank deposits there are, the more credit has to be administered, the more important it is to secure and verify debit and credit entries, which are just one data set among others—‘data that could pass as money’ (Brunton, 2019, p. 200). In contrast to the politically marked history of identity documents, major turning points—such as the end of the Cold War or the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001—can only be used to a limited extent as justification for new proof of identity in the field of financial media. Passports, ID cards and credit cards have been fitted with multiple security features in parallel, some of which are produced by the same industrial service providers. They differ significantly in detail, however, even though, for example, identity cards and driving licences 5

Gilles Deleuze, in his ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’ (1992), much later cites a fantasy by Félix Guattari, who imagines a city in which access to spaces is granted via electronic (dividual) cards. Ibid., p. 261.

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owe their cheque card format of 85.6 × 53.98 × 0.76 mm to their origin in credit card standardisation.6 For example, the option of personalising credit and debit cards with ID photographs has largely failed to gain acceptance. On the contrary, the advertising slogan coined by American Express for Germany in 1984, ‘Bezahlen Sie einfach mit Ihrem guten Namen’ (‘Simply Pay With Your Good Name’, trans. SG), apparently still applies, which manifested itself among other things in the stubborn persistence of handwritten signing of invoices.7 A comparatively simple justification for the stratification of ever new possibilities of identification can be given on the basis of technical path dependencies and undesired uses: neither the unencrypted, copyable magnetic stripe was sufficient for confidential transactions in the long run, nor the security number written on the back. As in the nineteenth century, blocking lists, which are used to check and—negatively—identify in the background, are the condition for seamless transactions. So there are always strong media-practical anti-programs to the economic encodings of the credit card. Consider the varities of credit card fraud: skimming (i.e. reading and misuse of data), theft of blank cards or of cards sent by post, hacking of accounts and transactions, overuse of options such as membership rewards and benefits, debt as a result of fiddling between several credit cards and much more. A more far-reaching justification, on the other hand, is that all the infrastructural, digital and legal means in the world will hardly be enough to close all the gaps that have existed between people and papers since the late Middle Ages and early modern times. These gaps are dealt with by interconnected references between account, card, body and person. All means of personal identification thus convey the certification of persons, money of account, transactions, creditworthiness and solvency. Media networks of financial record keeping formed in this way are notoriously unstable, which in turn should be compensated for by the proliferation of ever new controls, evaluations, scores (Mau, 2019, Chap. 4) and certifications (Busch, 2011, Chap. 4). This distinguishes the identification of economic exchanges from authentication by a state-territorial authority. Only in 6

The ID-1 format, first standardised in 1985, takes these dimensions from the US ANSI credit card standards since 1971, which in turn were a basis for the ISO standards 7810, 7811-1 to 6 and 7813. 7 ‘Handwriting is also an indexical sign, because unlike printed matter, it refers to its reason or author like a pointer. The juridical logic of the signature is based on precisely this indexicality, because the assertion of an authentic and physical presence of the author in the act of writing remains, even and especially when the author is no longer present—as a testamentary instrument’ (Neef, 2008, p. 43, trans. SG). The Covid-19 pandemic seems to have had a lasting impact on practices of signing though.

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rare cases do the two converge, for example in the case of debit cards, which—as has been customary in Nigeria since 2014—function simultaneously as electronic and biometric IDs.8 It is therefore logical that the latest smartphone-based payment options include personal identification by fingerprint or face recognition. The infrastructural fusion of body signs and monetary signs in favour of exactly one machinereadable identity promises to overcome the old distance between personhood and identification media: be yourself, no matter what they say. Using biometrics, consumers can participate in apps and financial platforms by identifying via their body data, if they accept the methodological individualism of digital accounting. Banks and credit card companies remain legally dependent on the ‘Know Your Customer’ principle (cf. Swartz, 2020, pp. 88–89), especially after the financial crisis of 2008. They are thus forced to be beneficiaries of state identification regimes and—in Europe—by the Payment Services Directive of 2007 and 2015 (PSD 1 and 2 respectively) to continuously identify financial identities (EU Parliament & Council, 2007, 2015). Beyond this mainstream of financial media, the cascades of identification are also being expanded in refugee aid. This applies, for example, to the OneCard, which has been in use in the camp in Zaatari, Jordan, since 2014 by the UN World Food Programme. The very presence of the OneCard had a paradoxical effect due to the MasterCard symbol visible on its surface. It was even surpassed in terms of personal identification by iris scans, in which the biometric data ‘unlock’ the right to food rations in the UN World Food Programme (Blumentrath et al., 2019, pp. 121–125). The following therefore applies to the present situation: the more registering and identifying intermediary steps are taken to realise a transaction, the more real a payment interaction becomes. Every co-operative mediator adds to the actual payment, and thus every mediation may be registered. The closer the authentication of solvency is to the body in networked accounting, the more credible it appears—whether by iris scan, face recognition or fingerprint. Control societies apparently no longer appreciate the comparatively anonymous circulation of cash value, replacing it with new media networks between accounts, infrastructures and people. In contrast to such cascades of registration and identification, we need digital (financial) media that make pseudonymity and non-classification possible again. Otherwise, a deeply asymmetrical power differential in digital interaction and control spaces will continue to apply for the time being: every mediation 8

For this purpose, the Nigerian National Identity Management Commission has been collaborating with Mastercard. Cf. Mastercard (2014). ‘The tendency to link money and registry systems is well known from African Fintech solutions’ writes Anna Echterhölter (Blumentrath et al., 2019, p. 123, trans. SG).

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counts, is registered, identified in digital files, sewn to body and person and thus made calculable and classifiable as a fait social. More than ever, digital infrastructures of identification are based on media and data practices emanating from users. Users continue to make themselves accountable and classify themselves, despite the constitutive asymmetries towards all new identification services. Following Harrison White, one could say that identity seeks control in the face of surveillance.

4

Masking, Disguising, Deceiving

After all, given both the data hunger of states and the algorithmic tracking and tracing of private-sector media agencies, there is currently no way of not identifying oneself. If the Algorithmic Justice League does not want to be identified in this way, but rather differently and along higher recognition rates of race/ethnicity and gender in face recognition, this is characteristic of a contemporary digital culture in which participation depends upon avoiding possible machined prejudices in identification. A good counter-term for identification is therefore difficult to find in ‘surveillance capitalism’ (Zuboff, 2019) because masking, camouflage, deception and faking also require a virtuoso handling of the media of identification. One might insist that a perfect identification of any one person remains elusive. Both multiple, dividual identities and the distributed vagueness and dividuality of personal data speak to that (Hunger, 2018). In addition, journalistic, legal and technical practices of pseudonymisation and anonymisation, which seek to structurally evade the constraints of clear names, can also be considered a contrary movement. Individual disconnection, on the other hand, relies on withdrawal from those media and data publics in which individuals are strategically identified—with corresponding consequences for social mobility and status. If public identification and classification are always already present, encryption is the obvious, rather short-term infrastructural answer. However, it adapts an intelligence service practice, sometimes by direct conversion: the origin of the widely used encryption software TOR (The Onion Router) from intelligence and military contract research does not prevent activists worldwide from intensively using it (Levine, 2018, Chap. 7). Juridical containment of identification is—at least in those democratic states that still emphasise it—costly, controversial and time-consuming. It is also in constant conflict with state identification regimes, which are shifting more and more into the financial media to combat

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crime and fraud.9 On the other hand, those artists and activists who deliberately disturb identification and classification can intervene without compromise. For example, a tactical media intervention such as adversarial.io turns against mass face recognition by specifically adding disturbances (adversarial noise) to digital images against recognition by machine learning and by removing typical metadata (Hunger & Flupke, 2020). The categorical work of relevant neural image recognition networks is thereby disturbed, or at least shifted. For financial media identities, which are inseparably linked to the rise of modern consumption and its logistics, this proves to be incomparably more difficult. For example, the activist initiative OpenSchufa, launched in 2018 to combat the intransparency of algorithmic scoring by the German credit rating agency Schutzgemeinschaft für allgemeine Kreditsicherung (Schufa), has so far had largely no consequences (Algorithm Watch & Open Knowledge Foundation, 2020). The emergence of new digital payment systems, which counter the identification imperative typical for money of account with pseudonymous methods of use, can also be understood as a computational counter-practice.10

5

Bureaucracy in Digital Cultures

Thus, the real twist of digital infrastructures that rely on distributed computing in blockchains is their pseudonymous but digitally public use. While the first years of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin were at least questionable in ideological terms and ecologically disastrous with certainty, encrypted infrastructures have been able to spread widely through Bitcoin and its successors (DuPont, 2019). While entries are registered anonymously in their distributed transaction databases and in the wallets of users, they generally remain publicly identifiable by means of their pseudonyms and can thus be checked by anyone.11 Identification is thus shifted from the person to the transaction (Ferguson, 2019, p. 143). However, a central hope of the blockchain author Nakamoto (2008)—significantly also an unresolved pseudonym that can stand for more than one person—and other apologists of digital cash has not been fulfilled. Thus, actual peer-to-peer transfers from Bitcoin are 9

Cf. Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (2010): Basel III: International framework for liquidity risk measurement, standards and monitoring. 10 On resistant practices to the identification of monetary transactions, see O’Dwyer (2019, pp. 147–149). O’Dwyer lists money burning, pro-cash movements, obfuscation and algorithmic accountability. 11 This does not apply to the increasingly numerous private, ‘permissioned’ blockchains. Cf. DuPont (2019, p. 109).

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financially unattractive due to the associated fees and tend to be slow compared to other options. The speculative handling of the new financial medium therefore still dominates; cryptocurrencies hardly play a role for everyday payments. Although numerous alternative cryptocurrencies successfully solve problems with the original Bitcoin design, Bitcoin remains the largest public blockchain actually used. As structurally open technologies, blockchain applications are also appropriated for the exact opposite in terms of identification, often based on the open source platform Ethereum. Thus, the non-modifiability of once-calculated blocks, which is supposed to guarantee trustless trust in blockchains also has seductive qualities for the definition and verification of digital identities. This structural conservatism is intended to authenticate digital data unambiguously distributed, i.e. to make them accountable in terms of infrastructure—from simple document (OriginStamp, n.d.) to personal identity. The spectrum of small and large digital identification projects, whose background is based on blockchain registration, is wide. Perhaps most notable are companies such as the now failed BerlinBudapest start-up Taqanu, which promised to develop a mobile banking app and ‘self-sovereign digital identity’ for refugees (Taqanu, 2016–2018). Taqanu was not an isolated case; the US start-up BanQu also promised Dignity Through Identity™, before it reinvented itself as a test and verification medium for socially fair supply chains (BanQu, 2019). Both Taqanu and BanQu explicitly wanted the users to retain ownership of their identification data. This tendency towards ‘selfsovereign identification’ that inspired start-ups has since then become a much considered conceptual feature of governmental identification regimes. IBM, on the other hand, has more financial and organisational staying power than the idealistic start-ups. Big Blue continues to be active in the field of decentralised identification in parallel to the facial recognition services and promotes IBM Verify Credentials as the long-missing decentralised identity layer of the Internet, which is supposed to guarantee a high degree of autonomy for persons identifying themselves (International Business Machines, 2020). IBM thus recommends itself to the largest political actors in global identification, for development and refugee aid purposes: the World Bank, the United Nations, the World Food Programme and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). The United Nations (2020) has promised to make legal identity available worldwide for everyone by 2030 as part of the UN Legal Identity Agenda. Against this background, further cascading of identification can be expected, whether blockchain-based or not. This includes the numerous digital biocertificates that have become infrastructures of identification to control the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic. In

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Germany, IBM was among the central actors developing the so-called CovPass app. As part of a consortium with the Cologne-based company ubirch, the IT service company Bechtle and the digital cooperative GovDigital, IBM earned the government contract for developing a digital vaccination certificate in March 2021. It was supposed to use no fewer than five blockchains for verification. Technically, this was not necessary. Politically, it proved to be contrary to the European demand for interoperability of national vaccination certificates. The first version of the CovPass app thus got published in June 2021 without any use of blockchain technology. Yet the original plan to include five blockchains speaks to the desires for perfect bio-identification and certification in the midst of a pandemic crisis. The social is now mediated by and through self-sovereign identificatory biodata practice. On the mundane level of everyday interaction, however, biocertification proves to be a less than perfect endeavour. It is instead characterised by a multitude of chained mediators that constantly translate and shift in and in-between situations of identification (cf. Pelizza, 2021). Against this background, what should be the mandate of a scientific Identification Justice League? Obviously, the relationship between personal selfidentification and external identification through digitally networked media seems to be transforming once again. Paradoxically, more user sovereignty over their modes of identification, i.e. self-sovereign ID, generates a simultaneous stratification of new identification infrastructures, which in turn tighten control and billing options. This dynamic between declarative and relational identifications has become particularly evident through the parallel development of social media and network analytical intelligence surveillance (Engemann, 2016, pp. 48–53). Informational self-determination and determination by data processing are part of the same controversial field. One can note with astonishment how users of social media or self-trackers add to the ‘triumph of profiling’ (Bernard, 2019) or empirically take seriously the various data-practical modes of interaction between banal surveillance, authentication (Vogel, 2020) and everyday accountability. After all, maximising desired observation in social media is only one option, which is usually counterbalanced by the fine, gradual balancing of relational privacy (Englert et al., 2019). Together with Thévenot (1984), it can be said that ‘investment in forms’, i.e. self-investment in (digital) forms and interaction orders, has become a bureaucratic and legal basis for the distributed intersectionality of digital media cultures. It is precisely through the interfaces, objects and infrastructures of identification that the game of self-identification and third-party identification can be critically understood and publicly tested. So, we will continue to juggle and dance with passports, credit and health insurance cards, smartphones, face-recognising cameras, social media accounts, network graphs and pandemic apps. Increasingly,

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digital cultures are characterised by the fact that they provide their elementary identification and classification services through infrastructural media: identifying means producing files, classifying enables their arrangement, and registry can always be assumed.

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Routines of Cooperation in Creative Work Hannes Krämer

My contribution examines routines of cooperation. It investigates the ways and means in which cooperation is produced within the setting of contemporary employment. This line of questioning is based on two assumptions. Firstly, cooperation itself is the result of practical activities (see also Schüttpelz & Meyer, 2017). Cooperation is thus not simply given, but rather the result of various efforts (activities) and links (relations) that determine the specificity of the respective cooperation and its results. Media (Latour, 2007) and routines (Reckwitz, 2003) can become effective as stabilising agents for corresponding cooperative relationships. In the context of paid employment—and this is the second assumption—various elements are involved in establishing cooperation. These include practices and their actors, bodies, things, artefacts, media, discourses. The social theory frame of reference in this chapter is praxeology, according to which practice is the link between these individual elements (Schatzki, 1996). The task of this chapter is to examine this specificity of cooperative arrangements in more detail with reference to a concrete empirical case. However, before the case is presented, the underlying concept of cooperation in the field of labour research must be briefly defined.

H. Krämer (B) University Duisburg/Essen, Essen, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 S. Gießmann et al. (eds.), Materiality of Cooperation, Medien der Kooperation— Media of Cooperation, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-39468-4_7

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Cooperation in Labour Research

From the perspective of cultural-sociological as well as praxeological labour research (Krämer, 2016), cooperative collaboration cannot be accepted as selfevident and needs to be explored. In my opinion, there are four different possibilities in the interdisciplinary professional debate on work-related cooperation, which I would like to briefly outline:1 First, in one traditional sociological approach, cooperation is seen as a central concern of the relationship between workers and entrepreneurs. Here the so-called ‘transformation problem’ in labour research is the starting point for theoretical and empirical research (Braverman, 1974). It is concerned with the question of how, in capitalist working environments, ‘the labour force bought by companies on the labour market can be transformed internally into work actually carried out’ (Marrs, 2010, p. 331, trans. HK). The debate that follows this question— known as the labour process debate (for an overview see Hildebrandt & Seltz, 1987)—deals with the various forms that a fit between workers’ interests and company interests take. In short, as soon as there is talk of cooperation in this context, the tension between the poles of control and autonomy in the factory-like large corporation is at stake. On the one hand, there are the (self-)techniques of disciplining the workers through control and incentive mechanisms on the part of the management. On the other hand, however, it is a matter of cooperation as ‘voluntary service’ (Deutschmann, 2002, p. 98, trans. HK) by the workers, as self-limitation qua subordination to the corporate goal and, at the same time, practices of resistance and autonomy against the corporate demands (Burawoy, 1979). Here cooperation becomes a basic form of collaboration between people in the field of tension between self- and external control. Secondly, a different approach is represented by the considerations of Richard Sennett, who in his trilogy on successful everyday life, dedicates an entire book to cooperation and describes it as the ‘lubricant’ (2012, p. 9) of societal cohesion.2 He understands cooperation as a ‘craft’ (ibid., p. 10) and an Aristotelian ‘techné’ (ibid., p. 19), which paradigmatically appears in working relations and practices in the workshop. Successful cooperation is conceived as a normative practice that enables members of society to step out of postmodern isolation. Sennett’s 1

The numerous studies on cooperation at the level of work organisation in the sociology of labour and industry are not included here. Paradigmatic of the German debate (and also of the self-image of the sociology of work and industry) are the studies on ‘structure-like cooperation’ (Popitz et al., 1957). 2 In the English original, the title of the book is Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation (2012).

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view of cooperative work activities thus by no means grasps only the formal dimensions of the coordination of organised work, but also the implicit, informal and physical dimensions, as he shows in the practice mode of ‘producing’ and ‘repairing’ (ibid., p. 267). The surgeon’s habitual, rhythmic cutting practices, the violinmaker’s informal gestures in their social environment, the minimal use of force by the community worker are examples of successful cooperation for him. Thirdly, similar to Sennett, in one area of the German sociology of work the question of cooperation is being shifted from formal dimensions to an informal one (Böhle & Bolte, 2002). As developments in the labour sector in recent decades have made forms of hierarchical and Tayloristic management appear questionable, informal work practice is (again) increasingly coming into focus. Cooperation is no longer treated as a matter of coordination by the organisation’s management,3 as a question of planning, but as a component of individual work performance and situational coping with pending work tasks. Cooperation thus becomes work itself (Bolte et al., 2008), ‘cooperation work’ and, in connection with the concept of ‘experience-guided subjective action’ (Böhle, 2009, trans. HK), a specific model of work action in which situativity, objectrelatedness, experiential knowledge and personal-empathic social relationships are at the forefront. Finally, fourthly, there is the area that is largely fed by Workplace Studies, Studies of Work and partially by Computer Supported Cooperative Work.4 These research approaches are also interested in the informal dimension of work and, in a central sense, in its cooperative dimension. However, the focus is on interactions with technical apparatuses and instruments in the workplace, on the ‘way in which instruments and technologies are used in social activities’ (Knoblauch & Heath, 1999, 168, trans. HK). Accordingly, cooperation is not limited to interaction between human actors, but explicitly includes cooperative relationships between people and technical artefacts as well as the mediating capacities of technologies. Cooperation is therefore usually identified as a coordination process that the actors (have to) carry out within their work. In this way, work practices and services that are not, or at least not primarily, considered professional characteristics of the field of work (in the sense of knowledge linked to the 3

Here, by the way, a parallel can be drawn to the above-mentioned labour process debate, which, as soon as there is a stronger focus on corporate governance, locates itself in critical management studies (cf. Hassard et al., 2001). 4 This field of research is quite heterogeneous and comprises a variety of different research approaches and paradigms. Depending on the boundaries, this field may also include workrelated studies from the fields of human–computer interaction, ethnographic labour research and neo-pragmatism.

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profession) or of the actors are also brought into focus. Thus, cooperative work is not necessarily an official component of the work activity, but rather a necessary basis and result of the execution of it.5 In this context, it has been argued that in certain areas of Workplace Studies the focus on cooperation and communication is on only one component of everyday work and that too much focus on it would neglect other important aspects. Moreover, these cooperative and communicative activities are subordinate to the achievement of the actual goal of the work activities and thus represent only one, even less important, part of the reality of work (see for example Böhle & Bolte, 2002, p. 79). In my opinion, this criticism should be followed up insofar as it denounces the strong situationism of Workplace Studies. There is a danger that by focusing on the workplace itself overarching aspects of work-related reality, as they were carved out within the labour process debate, for example, could be easily neglected. At the same time, however, this criticism—now somewhat outdated and narrow-minded—fails to recognise that the goals and means of work also require situational presentation and elaboration. It is possible that contemporary work activities consist much more of communication and cooperation work than classical sociology of work would prefer. This is all the more true if the central concept of technology that Workplace Studies operates with is understood in a broad sense and takes into account the most diverse, even analogue, media of coordination. Such a wide concept of technology would also broaden the research of Workplace Studies by generally asking about all media and social forms of collaboration. With such a broadening, conversations between different people are of equal interest, as is the coordination work of analogue and digital media in cooperative situations.

2

The Case: Cooperative Situations in Advertising Agencies

In the following, I would like to examine the routines of establishing cooperation in a current work setting, highlighting the role of the body as well as the technical artefact of the computer. For this purpose, I will mainly follow the 5

Especially in the case of Studies of Work, these partly explicitly follow Garfinkel’s (1967) basic ethnomethodological considerations, according to which joint action in practice itself must first be established through numerous micro-practices that naturally accompany it, and cooperation thus represents a constitutive characteristic of interactions. Tomasello’s (2010) anthropological studies go one step further in this respect, in that he attributes to humans, in contrast to great apes, for example, the ability to cooperate as an exclusive characteristic.

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last two approaches to cooperation outlined above, because they emphasise the routine nature of cooperative action. While Böhles (2009) idea of cooperative action raises the awareness for the non-technological aspects of cooperation, the Workplace Studies, and even more so Studies of Work, focus additonally on the technological everyday life of cooperative action that is not directly related to operational goals. In a next step, both perspectives, of ‘experience-guided subjective action’ and Workplace Studies, allow for connections to the other two frameworks mentioned above: the normative and the labour-analytical. The case presented here concerns work practices in advertising agencies—more specifically those agencies which, according to their self-description, establish themselves as so-called “creative agencies”. The data are taken from an extensive ethnographic study on the gradual production of creativity (Krämer, 2014a). Despite the distinct focus on the limited area of the advertising industry, initial comparisons with other areas in the field of creative work have indicated that parallels can be assumed here (Krämer et al., 2016). In this respect, not only can this chapter be understood as an analysis of cooperative activities within the fabrication of advertising products but it can also serve as a positive marker of possible overlaps with regard to other work settings.

2.1

Cooperation in the Field of Creative Work

Advertising agencies describe themselves as untidy entities, as organisations that are difficult to tame, that are not tangible through standardised organisational structural categories; in the words of their employees as “not normal”, “not representative”, “quite different”.6 In terms of self-mystification, this narrative may not be surprising at first, since the stylisation of the unknown, transgressive and unorthodox seems to belong to the creative’s aura (Haug, 2009 is critical of this), but it does point to at least one other finding: If organisations are not or at least not only structured through their formal principles (such as hierarchies, departments, defined communication channels), then a certain amount of coordinative and cooperative effort seems to be shifted to work practice itself.7 This is especially true for advertising agencies: they can be described as organisations and occasionally refer to themselves as those in which cooperative work is part of 6

Double quotation marks refer to formulations from the field of investigation. Such formulations were collected through interviews, participant observation and document analysis. 7 Without going into detail in this respect, it should be pointed out that a significant result of research in Studies of Work is that it is precisely this that has been elaborated in numerous individual studies (cf. Bergmann, 2006; Llewellyn & Hindmarsh, 2010).

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daily business. According to the managing directors of the organisations I have observed, a good agency is characterised by a form of cooperation that is lived out in practice, which manifests itself as ‘process harmony’8 —i.e. as a result of the coordinated interlocking of targeted activities. Employees more or less unconsciously rely on their daily work routines and condemn “wrong” practices, i.e. those that break out of these routines. This does not mean, of course, that routines are static repetitions of the same thing. Rather, routines also consist of skillful performances that are produced again and again, each a confrontation with every situation ‘for a next first time’ as Harold Garfinkel calls it (2002, p. 163). Now, what routine forms of cooperation can be observed? Although advertising agencies describe themselves as untidy and unstructured organisations, in the examined cases formal organisational principles can still be indeed identified: A “classic” variant for establishing cooperation consists in breaking down the work into subtasks and the formation of areas of competence (e.g. the areas of “consulting” and “creation”) in which these are processed. Despite all the talk about the special nature of agencies, the distinction between consulting and creation has decisive and widespread structuring power for the entire field. Between these different areas, which are characterised by different knowledge bases, career paths and job titles, interfaces emerge that, in a kind of recurring opportunity for interaction, make cooperation more likely. The bestknown case of such interfaces is probably the interdepartmental meeting (cf. Bolte et al., 2008; Krämer, 2014a, pp. 148 and 265). Now, for research on cooperation in the field of praxeology and cultural sociology, it is not only such formal structures that are of interest, but also, if not primarily, the routine procedures of advertising production, which are used to structure joint work to a considerable extent and which can also cut across formal processes. In the following I would like to single out an example that can be used to illustrate the diverse situations and practices of cooperation within creative work and which also stands for it: graphic design work.

2.2

Cooperation in the Area of Design

Visual design practice is to a large extent technically mediated work. Technical artefacts, first and foremost the computer but also graphics tablets, cameras, printers, scanners and other objects as well as the associated software programs, are constantly integrated into the work process. Such technical artefacts are usually 8

See Schnaithmann in this volume.

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marked as individual ‘territories’, insofar as they experience forms of appropriation by individuals both ‘externally’ and ‘internally’, i.e. in relation to specific software. In this way they also clarify the limits of cooperation: ‘don’t use’ someone else’s computer, a graphic designer said to me, and, even if this happened, the user would nearly always comment on the other person’s specific program configurations. At first glance it almost seems that with regard to their use technical artefacts are not designed for cooperation but are oriented towards individual use.

2.2.1

Computer Work as Structuring of Opportunities for Cooperation

This form of self-reference can also be found in the physical handling of the computer as a work tool, which can be observed as an experienced skill that structures cooperation opportunities through specific physical attention. An example: In front of the graphic designer Esther stands a computer screen on which various logo designs can be seen in the Illustrator graphics program (a standard program in the graphic design field). Her left hand rests above the left keyboard area. The keyboard is about 40 cm away from her, just in front of the screen. Her right hand guides the mouse. Her attention is directed towards the screen and her gaze follows the movement of the cursor. At the same time, depending on the commands desired, she presses various keys with which she selects, for example, program points in the menu or selection points to mark the image. The clicks of the keys and the mouse are temporarily carried out in very rapid succession. Her gaze is always directed towards the screen and she rarely turns away, for example when she is handed a glass of water. (Video transcript, see Fig. 1)9

This single process illustrates graphic work as an active, focused and physical activity. As such, it is public in socio-spatial terms and accessible to observation by the field participants and the ethnographer (see Schmidt, 2008, p. 288). At the same time, this form of attention signals a low level of willingness to cooperate with colleagues.10 Within the public sphere of the office, for example, specific postures at the computer play an important role as indicators of various work situations and conditions of cooperation. The actors have a delicate sensorium for ‘sending out’ and ‘receiving’ legitimate moments of work interruption. 9

The data are presented here in a video transcript (VT), which means that the audiovisually recorded events are not transcribed, but described afterwards (see Schmidt, 2008, p. 287). As with field notes (FN), some aspects are emphasised more strongly, while others are omitted. 10 Similarly, the use of headphones, usually large ones, can be interpreted as a method of minimising the willingness to cooperate. Robert Schmidt also observes this in his ethnography of work and interprets it as a ‘gesture of inapproachability’ (Schmidt, 2008, p. 288, trans. HK).

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Fig. 1 (left) Design work on the computer; (right) Internet research (photographs HK)

For example, the body-specific interaction with the technical artefact indicates to other field participants that the graphic computer work to be performed here requires a high level of concentration. In addition to the focused attention on the screen and a taut posture, it is not least the specific configuration of the hands that refers to a concentrated approach to the designs. In almost all cases observed, graphic design work on the computer could be identified as a two-handed activity, whereby the hands operate various ‘tools’ with the mouse and keyboard. In contrast to this, for example, there are moments when visual material for the designs is searched for on the Internet, which is characterised by less body tension and mostly one-handed work. For example, the left hand, which in the illustration (Fig. 1, right) touches the lip and cheek, repeatedly plays with the hair or rubs the chin and neck during the research. The subject also pauses more often during the process, pictures are looked at and even the right, mouse-leading hand rests in such moments. This one-handed and also pausing execution of the activity physically reveals a clear contrast to the activity of creative design, in which the rhythm of work is much more dynamic and focused (Fig. 1, left).

2.2.2

The Computer as a Silent Companion in Cooperative Situations

These moments of concentration, however, constantly alternate with moments of office-public communication and intensive, more expansive movement: copywriters and account managers walk around, turn their screens so that other people can see them, discuss designs with the graphic designers on the screen, briefly shout information across the room or talk to a person across their desk. In such

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cases, technically mediated design work is not staged as focused individuality, but as a cooperative event. One example11 : The radio is playing in the background. A techno song can be heard. Graphic designer Severin (S) quickly walks around, from the craft table to the kitchen, back to his desk and from there to a small coffee table on which he is currently arranging designs for a customer presentation. Severin’s radius of movement is clearly visible from the desk of graphic designer Esther (E). She is sitting at the computer and working on a design. Without an invitation to communicate and also without interrupting her work, she offers Severin help (field notes):

During this brief conversation, the graphic designer does not interrupt her work. Her gaze is directed at the screen. Shortly after this conversation, an account manager, Nina (N), comes by and involves the graphic designer in another conversation, this time about the homemade birth announcement of a colleague’s daughter which Nina has taken off the wall to show Esther (FN):

11

The example given is a conversation recording for which field notes are also available. In the transcripts, empty single brackets indicate incomprehensible statements (), filled single brackets indicate the assumed wording (i.e.). Contextual references as well as para-linguistic means are indicated by double brackets (()). Square brackets indicate overlaps [Hello], single digits in brackets indicate the pause length in seconds (1.0), dashes indicate micro-pauses of about 0.25 s per stroke (–). Utterances where the speech breaks off are indicated by a simple hyphen (Cancel-). Contrary to common linguistic transcription conventions, the utterances have been transcribed in a written and orthographically correct manner to increase readability.

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The graphic designer briefly interrupts her work on the computer to signal her willingness to communicate. Non-verbally, however, she continues to work with the technical artefact, while attention is given verbally to other people. The technical artefact of the computer is here shifted into the background as a kind of silent companion and neutralised for the verbal interaction process (Böhringer & Wolff, 2010, p. 244). In contrast to the previous example, such a gesture can be interpreted as encouragement to continue the conversation, which is what happens in the example with the birth announcement:

At the same time, the computer offers a parallel opportunity for interaction, which makes it possible to abandon verbal conversations and turn entirely to the technical artefact. Without much verbal explanation, focusing on the computer again brings an end to verbally interactive situations.

2.2.3

The Computer as Medium of Cooperation

The collaborative work of several actors on the computer is quite different. Here designs are shown on the computer, which thus becomes a fellow player. The following is a situation at the beginning of the processing of two logo designs. The two graphic designers involved, Esther (E) and Astrid (A), discuss the problems of the previous graphic design and then divide the further processing of the logo designs among themselves (VT):

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This short excerpt shows various overlapping activities that are integrated into the collaborative work on the design; here, for example, various means are used to show things: there is physical movement, speech, design elements are pointed out and at the same time technical changes are made to the graphics. The computer is used here as a partner, to illustrate visual changes of state. In naming the initial situation, Esther refers to the design problem of a lack of cohesion. The main reasons given for this dissatisfaction are visual and aesthetic (l. 1–12, 19–28). The main problem diagnosed here comprises the formal “connection” (l. 4) and the lack of “unity” (l. 12) between graphic element and writing. The identification of the problem is on the one hand accomplished by means of a verbal utterance and on the other hand by activities on the screen like zooming out from the total view of the logo or zooming to the view of several logos next to each other. Here, with the help of the technical artefact, the focus of attention is directed to what is happening on the screen, and a specific logo design (among others) is placed at the centre of attention and is marked as negative. Through the hand movement of the graphic designer, with which she conceals the graphic element of the logo, she makes it clear which elements appear to be ‘lacking unity’ here (l. 6–12). The general expression of the ‘lack of belonging together’ is thus specified in gestures and language. The interplay

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of the pejorative gesture,12 the linguistic utterance and the attention to an object indicate the marking of the problem. However, the problem does not get its intelligibility from the purely intellectual (and also not purely verbal) attribution but is treated as a visual problem. Here we can speak of a joint work on a collective problem view. This problem manifests in practical terms as revealing a problem facilitated by media—i.e. the problem is made visible here through various methods. Esther’s and Astrid’s further objections illustrate this visualisation of the problem. For example, the complexity of the problem is shown by Esther changing the size of the logo on the screen (l. 20–22). Thematically, the issue here is to prove that a simple modification (of size) cannot solve the problem of unity. In this case, pointing at the graphic object is a pointing with the graphic object via the medium of the computer, more specifically its software. The direct alteration of the object repeatedly occurs parallel to the linguistic production of the objections. This showing in and on the visual can be qualified as a kind of cooperative seeing, since here both graphic artists try to make visual variations tangible or to work towards variations, for example by suggesting and pointing with the finger at which text element could be designed in a single colour. Although only one of the graphic artists, Esther has computer sovereignty, Astrid also repeatedly refers to the materiality of the graphic object on the screen. Mainly with pointing gestures (supported by deictic language signs such as “there”(l. 27) she marks those elements within the object that she considers to be problematic (e.g. the various shades of green). Again, the immediate reference point is the graphical interface. The cooperative situation is created largely through interaction with the technical artefact. Both pointing with and at the graphic object gives the two designers a common reference point of the graphic shape, by means of which they can identify certain elements in the logo design, each of which they indicate using different procedures; the visual traces (of the problem) are thus made visible (cf. also Goodwin, 1994).

2.2.4

Visual Order as Cooperative Orientation

Finally, I would like to suggest another aspect that can be understood as a cooperative orientation. A central feature of working on graphic objects is the specific, routinely arranged layout of individual visual and textual elements. Elements are placed in a specific form, combined and brought into a system during work on the design. This arrangement of the elements suggests a certain form of seeing, which is to some extent oriented towards a cooperative dimension. First, logo 12

The graphic designer does not ‘simply’ hold her hand over the graphic element (l. 7–8) but pulls it away from the element in a disparaging gesture.

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designs are always grouped together on the basis of their visual similarity (see Fig. 2). Each new design is displayed on a separate page, which is arranged horizontally in a program-specific way.13 Variations of the respective designs are displayed on the same pages, so that sometimes one, sometimes several graphic elements are visible on one page. Belonging is revealed here via visual criteria and spatial proximity in the design document.14 In this way, both the individual drafts are grouped together and potential “raw material” at the edge of the page is assigned to these drafts and not saved in an separate document. This arrangement allows the contemporaneity of different “approaches” and their variations within a multi-page document. Depending on the zoom factor, drafts or design elements are brought into focus to be compared with each other by the designers (e.g. in terms of size, composition or position); at the same time, the page-by-page arrangement also allows different drafts to be compared with each other. Furthermore, the classification scheme ‘page-by-page arrangement’ is already oriented towards the presentation, namely in front of customers or within the agency. The respective pages correspond to the design “lines” (see footnote 14), which have to be coordinated with other actors. This classification scheme according to drafts is created early in the design phase. If, for example, a draft is decided upon, the pages that are not selected are removed from the document and not edited any further. The organisation of drafts via visual clustering is therefore an integral part of design practice. By orienting graphic ideas towards classifiable (i.e. thus also distinguishable) designs, they are meant to be socially identifiable and thus also cooperative. These are visual orders that are to be seen. This becomes particularly clear when one considers the discussions during the design process, the task of which is, among other things, to assess the work and its progress. These evaluations on the graphic designers’ computers are usually brief discussions about the type of designs, which begin with a short presentation of the individual drafts by the graphic designers. These are then successively shown and briefly explained on the computer. By separating the drafts on individual pages, they can be presented at a glance—including their respective variations—without the raw drafts or any other material being visible (because they are hidden

13

The computer programs that are frequently used in graphic design work are InDesign, Photoshop and Illustrator, which are all distributed by the market leader, Adobe, in a typical program package, the so-called ‘Creative Suite’. 14 Thus, in verbal interaction, too, the actors distinguish different approaches, so-called ‘lines’, on the basis of their visual form. These include the “leaf-line” (which main design element is a leaf) or the ‘car-line’ (which uses the outline of a motor vehicle for visualisation).

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Fig. 2 Logo position in fullscreen mode (Video HK)

or lie outside the page margin). Ideas for drafts are thus condensed into individual approaches by bringing them into a visual and thus commensurable and commentable form.

3

Conclusion

In this chapter, the focus was less on the formal moments of work coordination within the organisational process, such as meetings of departments structured according to a division of labour, and more on the moments of cooperation within individual work activities—especially work with the technical artefact of the computer. A concept of cooperation was established, which conceives the performance of cooperation as the result of practical activities. Thus it became clear that different mediawise and also physical configurations are involved in the establishment of a willingness to cooperate. It was shown how the computer as a silent companion is shifted into the background of interpersonal cooperative situations, of course without ever being completely ‘out’ of the picture, and how from there it can again become a prominent part of the situation. In contrast to this, further moments could be identified in which the computer becomes an explicit component of the work situation, i.e. in which the technical artefact is used to show and process things in a cooperative manner. Finally, the extent to which the supposedly individualised design activity on the screen already anticipates later cooperative situations in the medium was identified. What is presented here is obviously not a complete reconstruction of all cooperative situations that

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might occur with the computer.15 Rather, the aim was to focus on the routine nature of cooperation and thus also to examine the micro-practices that structure various cooperative situations as incorporated processes. Such an approach gives preference to both informal and small-scale cooperative practices and is less concerned with the other two dimensions of cooperation in labour sociology research mentioned at the beginning of the chapter, namely cooperation as a question of power and cooperation as a lubricant. For a long time, this was interpreted within labour research as a lack of interest in ‘questions of power’ and in the normative content of labour-related cooperation on the part of micrological labour and organisational research. A look at the current research landscape, however, makes it clear that this assessment is by no means conclusive, if not even outdated. Despite the socio-ontological differences of the various approaches and possible incommensurabilities of individual author positions—and building on the analysis of the types of cooperation indicated here—it is possible to ask productive questions about both the processes of power and the chances for cooperation. For example, detailed analyses of work can be used to reconstruct the small-scale power struggles that enable the inertial forces of traditionally hierarchical organisations to become effective and which underlie the prominent interpretation of contemporary organisations as ‘flat hierarchies’ (cf. e.g. Matthews, 2009). Such a view reconstructs power relations in organisations at the level of concrete cooperative situations and practices. Similarly, such an analysis of individual cooperative constellations can shed light on successful and less successful work, for example by identifying the cooperative evaluation procedures that are used to decide on the quality of products and processes (Hutter, 2011), or by focusing on the working atmospheres created in cooperation that bring out affective moods (Krämer, 2014b; Laube, 2016). Thus, while these detail-sensitive reconstructions of working together do not yet allow for a normative theory, they do offer insights into the mechanisms of producing ‘good work’ and into the power-related dimension of individual activities.

15

For example, the use of communication technologies such as Skype, instant messaging or email was not discussed. Also excluded were those situations in which the computer is used for internal and external presentations.

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References Bergmann, J. R. (2006). Studies of work. In F. Rauner (Ed.), Handbuch der Berufsbildungsforschung (pp. 640–646). Bertelsmann. Böhle, F. (2009). Weder rationale Reflexion noch präreflexive Praktik – Erfahrungsgeleitetsubjektivierendes Handeln. In F. Böhle & M. Weihrich (Eds.), Handeln unter Unsicherheit (pp. 203–228). VS Verlag. Böhle, F., & Bolte, A. (2002). Die Entdeckung des Informellen. Der schwierige Umgang mit Kooperation im Arbeitsalltag. Campus. Böhringer, D., & Wolff, S. (2010). Der PC als “Partner” im institutionellen Gespräch. Zeitschrift Für Soziologie, 39(3), 233–251. Bolte, A., Neumer, J., & Porschen, S. (2008). Die alltägliche Last der Kooperation. Abstimmung als Arbeit und das Ende der Meeting-Euphorie. Edition Sigma. Braverman, H. (1974). Labor and monopoly capital. The degradation of work in the twentieth century. Monthly Review Press. Burawoy, M. (1979). Manufacturing consent. Changes in the labor process under monopoly capitalism. University of Chicago Press. Deutschmann, C. (2002). Postindustrielle Industriesoziologie. Theoretische Grundlagen, Arbeitsverhältnisse und soziale Identitäten. Juventa. Garfinkel, H. (1967). Studies in ethnomethodology. Prentice Hall. Garfinkel, H. (2002). Ethnomethodology’s program. Working out Durkheim’s aphorism, In A. Warfield Rawls (Ed.). Rowman & Littlefield. Goodwin, C. (1994). Professional vision. American Anthropologist, 96(3), 606–633. Hassard, J., Hogan, J., & Rowlinson, M. (2001). From labor Process Theory To Critical Management Studies. Administrative Theory & Praxis, 23(3), 339–362. Haug, W. F. (2009). Kritik der Warenästhetik. Gefolgt von Warenästhetik im High-TechKapitalismus. Suhrkamp. Hildebrandt, E., & Seltz, R. (Eds.). (1987). Managementstrategien und Kontrolle. Eine Einführung in die Labour Process Debate. Edition Sigma. Hutter, M. (2011). Infinite Surprises. On the Stabilization of Value in the Creative Industries. In J. Beckert & P. Aspers (Eds.), The worth of goods. Valuation and pricing in the economy (pp. 201–220). Oxford University Press. Knoblauch, H., & Heath, C. (1999). Technologie, Interaktion und Organisation: Die Workplace Studies. Schweizer Zeitschrift Für Soziologie, 25(2), 163–181. Krämer, H. (2014a). Die Praxis der Kreativität. Eine Ethnografie kreativer Arbeit. transcript. Krämer, H. (2014b). Voll dabei. Affektivität und Effektivität in der Arbeitspraxis von Werbern. In M. Seifert (Ed.), Die mentale Seite der Ökonomie. Gefühl und Empathie im Arbeitsleben (pp. 125–139). Thelem. Krämer, H. (2016). Erwerbsarbeit als Praxis. Perspektive und Analysegewinne einer praxistheoretischen Soziologie der Arbeit. In H. Schäfer (Ed.), Praxistheorie. Ein soziologisches Forschungsprogramm (pp. 301–320). transcript. Krämer, H., Lengersdorf, D., Berli, O., & Lutter, M. (2016). DFG-Antrag: Netzwerk zur Untersuchung der Arbeits- und Organisationspraxis in der Kultur- und Kreativwirtschaft. http://gepris.dfg.de/gepris/projekt/324318513. Accessed 31 Mar 2018.

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Latour, B. (2007). Eine neue Soziologie für eine neue Gesellschaft. Einführung in die AkteurNetzwerk-Theorie. Suhrkamp. Laube, S. (2016). Nervöse Märkte. Materielle und leibliche Praktiken im virtuellen Finanzhandel. De Gruyter. Llewellyn, N., & Hindmarsh, J. (Eds.). (2010). Organisation, interaction and practice. studies in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis. Cambridge University Press. Marrs, K. (2010). Herrschaft und Kontrolle in der Arbeit. In F. Böhle, G. Günter Voß, & G. Wachtler (Eds.), Handbuch Arbeitssoziologie (pp. 331–356). VS Verlag. Matthews, B. (2009). Intersections of brainstorming rules and social order. CoDesign, 5(1), 65–76. Popitz, H., Bahrdt, H.-P., August Jüres, E., & Kesting, H. (1957). Technik und Industriearbeit. Soziologische Untersuchungen in der Hüttenindustrie. Mohr. Reckwitz, A. (2003). Grundelemente einer Theorie sozialer Praktiken: Eine sozialtheoretische Perspektive. Zeitschrift Für Soziologie, 32(4), 282–301. Schatzki, T. R. (1996). Social practices. A Wittgensteinian approach to human activity and the social. Cambridge University Press. Schmidt, R. (2008). Praktiken des Programmierens. Zur Morphologie von Wissensarbeit in der Software-Entwicklung. Zeitschrift für Soziologie, 37(4), 282–300. Schüttpelz, E., & Meyer, C. (2017). Ein Glossar zur Praxistheorie. ‘Siegener Version’ (Frühjahr 2017). Navigationen, 17(1), 155–164. Sennett, R. (2012). Zusammenarbeit. Was unsere Gesellschaft zusammenhält. Hanser. Tomasello, M. (2010). Warum wir kooperieren. Berlin: Suhrkamp.

Bodies/Technology on Standby: The Importance of Cooperative Waiting for Digital Work Ronja Trischler

1

Introduction

When entering a visual post-production company for cinema and television, a constant background noise of clicking, typing and computer processor ventilation is perceptible, punctuated by occasional conversation, muttering and swearing. In this local ethnographic panorama, the working day presents a multitude of simultaneous activities between people and computers. However, their temporal order as cooperative elements of digital work only becomes apparent in the methodological focus on individual situations: as part of professional cooperation, these activities are connected in many ways. In and between them, visual effects1 are gradually formed as commissioned work for media productions. Based on an ethnographic case study of digital work, this chapter discusses temporal rapids and bottlenecks in specialised software work that produces visual effects. When computers form the central medium for various work processes neither cooperation nor the resulting work objects can be considered independently of their media composition. Thus this chapter focuses on the role of digital media in the situated coordination of cooperative work activities. In the examined practices of cooperative design, a performative interplay of hardware, software and human bodies becomes apparent. The different paces and temporal (in)stabilities 1 This technical term describes the product of professional computerised animation, simulation and image compositing in the context of audiovisual (mass) media (see Venkatasawmy, 2013; Wood, 2015).

R. Trischler (B) Technical University of Dortmund, Dortmund, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 S. Gießmann et al. (eds.), Materiality of Cooperation, Medien der Kooperation— Media of Cooperation, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-39468-4_8

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of these media practices each influence the situational possibilities of cooperative coordination. Looking at waiting in the production of visual effects, I will show that temporal discrepancies between computational processes, computer operating and human interaction are a constant part of everyday cooperation in digital work. The phenomenon of waiting, hitherto conceived almost exclusively as human (in)activity, is thus made visible as a sociotechnical practice that is fundamental to cooperation. The observable forms of waiting—as situated practices—in visual effects production provide information on how cooperation in digital work is established between different participants on a daily basis.

2

Temporal Coordination of Digital Cooperation

The influence of digital media on the temporal order of social phenomena, including work, is an important argument for their societal impact in social science and media studies discussions. As early as 1996, Castells spoke of a new temporality of a digital ‘network society’.2 The linear, irreversible, measurable and calculable social time standardised by the clock, and tightly coordinated by mass media in the twentieth century, was challenged and relativised: Castells argued that there was a ‘timeless time’ (1996, p. 429 ff.), because social sequentiality was systematically disturbed by processes of digitalisation. Also, media have been considered as important drivers of the acceleration and compression of time in modernity (see Hartmann et al., 2019). In this context, the transmission, documentation and simulation capacities of digital media and particular online communication has been discussed, i.e. the media potential to make the past, future and distant present trans-locally available in ‘real time’. In this section I suggest a sociology of technology perspective on digital work which focuses on the temporal coordination of cooperation. In this view, waiting is conceived as a constitutive part of digital work, which can be distributed among different, also non-human participants in a situation. By examining waiting as a sociotechnical practice, tensions and accomplishments in the coordination of cooperation under digital conditions become apparent. On this basis, I argue that it is an empirical question how cooperation is coordinated in situations involving digital media and how media themselves influence this coordination. As a digital design process based on the division of labour, the production of visual effects 2

An emphasis on fundamental breaks and discontinuities in social phenomena in the course of digitisation can be seen as characteristic of the early debate on digital media, which was subsequently diversified in terms of regional developments and differences in fields of media use, see for example Coleman (2010).

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can be used to investigate both everyday problems of working with digital media cooperatively and strategies for coping with them.

2.1

Waiting as a Sociotechnical Practice

Waiting plays a special role in the course of social events. Social action, generally, takes place at specific times and in specific places, being shaped by and forming (sequences of) events. According to Schütz and Luckmann, for instance, the life-world is structured temporally by means of constant overlaps between subjective and biological time, as well as social time: ‘We live in all these dimensions simultaneously. But since there exists no absolute congruence (so to speak simultaneity) between events in these dimensions, we have as an inevitable consequence of this incongruence the phenomenon of waiting.’ (Schütz & Luckmann, 1974, p. 47) Waiting is thus conceived as an inherently social phenomenon that deserves closer examination. Schütz and Luckmann use the analysis of time to determine the scope of individual action: ‘All of the “unimportant” interludes, partial acts etc. […] are necessary elements of my life in everyday situations in which nature and society, including their temporal structure, give me “resistance”’ (ibid., p. 48). Accordingly, dealing with temporal incongruences can be socially institutionalised or routinised. According to Göttlich (2015, p. 48), such an interpretation of waiting as an (in)activity imposed on the individual has often been narrowed down to an impairment of individual freedom of action and/or as an exercise of power (see for example Schwartz, 1974). From the perspective of social situations, however, I assume that temporal incongruences are a constitutive part of everyday formations of order and cannot be understood per se as a disturbance of interaction. As Göttlich (2017, p. 10) aptly remarks, waiting for the end of a speech contribution in a conversation, for example, forms a decisive part of ‘turn taking’ (Sacks et al., 1974) between conversation participants. Particularly the focus on social events in their sequential unfolding makes it clear that waiting is a fundamental way of enabling a mutual coordination of action. The empirical performance of waiting—as a social practice—can be used to reconstruct how this coordination is achieved (see Ayaß, 2020; Goffman, 1963, p. 79). While waiting may have been recognised as a social phenomenon (or as a ‘cultural pattern’, Kazmaier et al., 2016, p. 7, trans. RT), it has been understood predominantly as (in)activity of human participants. However, the preceding considerations of the function of waiting for interaction also raise doubts as to whether it is necessarily only humans who are involved in waiting. This can be

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demonstrated using the example of queues (see also Potthast in this volume): taking and maintaining a position as well as physical absence from the queue not only require human coordination. Mann (1969, p. 345 ff.) describes layer systems in groups, barriers to guide queues, and the marking of claims by leaving personal objects in place of one’s own body. Likewise, disturbances of order, such as jumping the queue, can be prevented by verbal and physical means. Waiting is therefore understood as a sociomaterial practice to which various human and non-human participants contribute. Furthermore, waiting occurs sociotechnically. In order to capture the situated accomplishment of waiting in digital work, I take a sociology of technology perspective in which ‘the’ technology is not opposed to ‘the’ social. Rather, processes of ‘technicization’ (Rammert, 1999) are understood as inherently social: according to Rammert, ‘[a]ctions, natural sequences of processes or semiotic processes can be considered technicised if they follow a fixed scheme that generates repeatably and reliably expected effects. These forms of technicisation can be embodied, objectified, or inscribed in various media.’ (Rammert, 2016, p. 10 f., trans. RT) By referring to the expectability of effects, the concept of technicisation generally implies repeatable sequences of activities and inactivity. Their frequencies, synchronisations and duration can, however, vary and might require or involve waiting: for digital communication, Sebald (2020) points to the duration of computational processing and technical malfunctions which possibly cause different forms of waiting, including ‘the temporal difference between the expected error-free, smooth functioning of the technical infrastructure and its actual occurrence’ (ibid., p. 1000). Yet, technology not only causes waiting. Waiting in itself can be seen as technicised and, following Rammert, it can imply bodies, things and signs. This refers to the heterogeneity of social time, which in a particular situation does not appear as a given structure. It emerges through the unique activities of a changing ensemble of people and (technological) objects, whose interrelated temporalities influence the situation: how fast or slow bodies move, how devices are operated or processors compute can differ in any given activity, also in relation to one another. Who or what is involved in waiting—as a sociotechnical practice—in what way is an empirical question.3 In this view, digital media are not considered independent of the space, time or matter of their use. Instead, the practical links between bodies, things and signs involved in digital work—their temporal interplay and unfolding—are of interest. Applied to the case under examination in this chapter, this means that even 3

For more general discussion on the empirical relations of technology and time see Hörning et al. (1999), Wacjman (2008).

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if the same software is repeatedly used in a company to create visual effects, the producers can potentially face different requirements in its use, depending on the task (and data) at hand or its point in time in the process of designing. According to Rammert, digital media are indeed characterised by an increased temporal variability: ‘Whereas with conventional technology time only seemed to be shrunk to the repetition of the working process, with current technology it extends to many ramifications and different paths of the process through storage and programming’ (2006, p. 170, trans. RT). This chapter focuses on how such ‘paths’ are cooperatively formed, solidified, shifted and departed from in the cooperation in visual effects production. It looks at sociotechnical practices of waiting as an inherent part of digital work, which can be indicative of the coordination required in the practical accomplishment of cooperation.

2.2

Observing Cooperation and Cooperative Waiting

The following analysis is based on data from a ‘focused ethnography’ (Knoblauch, 2005) in a visual effects company. I visited daily from the beginning to the end of the workday during the periods 14–15 November 2013, 16–26 June 2015 and 5–9 September 2016. Following a Workplace Studies approach, I understand the observed cooperative work not as a predefined, coherent system or goal, but rather as a differentiation of work activities which ‘is an ongoing and contingent allocation, of both self and others’ (Heath et al., 2000, p. 313; see Krämer in this volume). For cooperation, shared media and work objects play an important role (see Star & Griesemer, 1989). Different media participate in digital work, for example bodies, databases, processors, digital files or paper printouts. It is especially the visual effects to be designed that—as central shared objects in specialised work—order practices of cooperation: they require a handling of their specific form (for instance as video files or computer simulations) which can be consulted, edited, claimed and shared in certain ways (see Trischler, 2023). The manner in which the production of cooperation becomes observable in day-to-day work also depends on the technologies used. In the visual effects company, employees at their workstations used specialised software to design. According to Rammert (1999, p. 174), these activities interweave physical ‘habituations’ (such as typing in the ten-finger system) with material ‘mechanizations’ (such as the arrangement and stroke path of the keys) and symbolic ‘algorithmizations’ (such as the automatic text correction of a software). These gradual technicisations can be observed in practice on three interconnected levels: the ‘interactivity’ between humans and computers is intertwined with ‘intra-activity’

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among things and ‘interactions’ among humans (Rammert, 2008, p. 71), each of which places different demands on their observation on site. In a ‘office public’ (Schmidt, 2012, p. 169, trans. RT), co-workers who are physically present in the office can see and hear the execution of their work – also via the screens on which work objects are visualised.4 According to Goffman ‘persons immediately present to one another’ regulate their observable actions in accordance with certain interactional rules (1963, p. 17). The following reconstruction of cooperative waiting thus also takes into account when interruptions and disturbances of software work in the public sphere of the visual effects office are legitimate for participants of this particular type of digital work. Situational and reciprocal performances of waiting in interaction and interactivity become widely observable ethnographically in the corresponding situations, also for the physically present researcher. Work activities can also be tracked digitally, for example via the company server.5 According to Knorr Cetina (2009), in situations in which informational dimensions are gradually integrated into activities in the local space via screens, interaction is regulated differently than in faceto-face situations. She emphasises in particular the bodily mediation between the ‘informational’ and ‘physical’ dimensions of the situation. In the following, I will examine the mutual indications of waiting in the empirical interplay of both dimensions in order to reconstruct practices of digital cooperation in visual effects production. Focusing in particular on incongruences between interaction, interactivity and intra-activity, the analysis highlights ‘ongoing accomplishments’ (Garfinkel, 2004, p. vii) of waiting that occur between people and technical objects of cooperation.

4

Schmidt points out that the boundary of the observable can shift, since this is also dependent on the viewer’s understanding of the technical work processes (2012, p. 169). 5 On site I wrote field notes, made sketches and took photographs, audio and some video recordings of everyday work situations and ethnographic conversations. Since intra-active computational processes are more difficult to comprehend through observation, their disturbances offer a welcome starting point for analysis, in which the integration of technology into a larger social network becomes visible (see Rammert, 2016, p. 7). Due to space constraints, the possibilities of different forms of data to record and show temporal incongruences will not be discussed here. The present analysis as well as the data material are part of my study on the organisation of visual effects production, which provides such a classification (see Trischler, 2021). See also Scheller (2020), which presents a ‘tempography’ as a framework for time-oriented ethnography in organisations.

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179

Standby: Temporal Incongruences of Cooperative Software Work

In post-production for film and television, design of visual effects is usually based on a division of labour. In the companies I visited, employees operated specialised software at individual workstations in the office. Their bodily orientation indicated that their primary attention was usually focused on their own computer. This interactional separation of co-workers was supported by the decentralised arrangement of the desktop computers, dispersing employees’ speaking and viewing positions spatially. Secondary activities that I observed on site, such as listening to music through headphones or loudspeakers, underlined this impression of software work as a separate activity of individuals, in which verbal communication with others was subordinate. Also, occasional desk absences indicated flexible time management. However, these individual settings were highly cooperative. Here I present examples of two digital forms of waiting, to show the cooperative dimension and ordering of these computer activities.

3.1

‘Standby Pose’: The Cooperative Duration of Effects

On site, the software work on visual effects was observable as ‘flows’ of individual computer operating. This habituation of work activities was based on synchronising bodies, hardware and software. On their screens, I typically observed sequences of selecting and deselecting, switching on and off, adding, changing, combining, deleting and reinserting commands in the visual effects software. On a technical level, a continuous ‘flow’ of interactivity was made possible by the reversibility (see Gilje, 2011, p. 47) and ‘real-time’ visualisation of the software instructions, in which information processing occurred ‘below the perception of time differences in the space-time continuum’ (Hickethier, 2002, p. 125, trans. RT). In light of computing-intensive design processes, software companies advertised in particular the fast pace of their visual effects software. For example, in an online promotional video released at the time of my ethnographic visits, the increased speed of a function for image calculation (‘probabilistic shading’) of a preview plugin was emphasised (ChaosGroupTV, 2016, 1 min 13 s–1 min 20 s). In the practical flow of movement, software programming also intertwined with mechanisation. For instance, while mouse and stylus movements were observably synchronised with their cursor representation, but unlimited in their duration as continuous activities, keyboard strokes and mouse clicks had their own time spans: the exceeding or falling short of which

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impaired the desired technical effects in handling. Thus, specialised computer operating required knowledge about algorithmisations and mechanisations of the software and hardware used. It was (partly) a bodily knowing which allowed synchronisation: for example, employees looked at the screen, towards their colleagues or into space—rarely at the keyboard or graphic stylus while operating. In an ethnographic conversation one employee described the usual use of standardised keyboard shortcuts (see the Foundry, 2016) as ‘intuitive’. According to him, these could be mastered while learning the software. This supports the understanding presented here of software work as habitualised. Similar to achieving ‘real-time’ in online practices (see Berry, 2011, p. 142 ff.; Weltevrede et al., 2014; Coleman, 2020), the observable local ‘flow’ of digital designing was a sociotechnical accomplishment. This also implied temporal divergences. On the basis of ethnographic observation, it quickly became clear that technical reactivity in practice varied over time. It cannot be reduced to seamless real-time processes: during designing, newly inserted commands were usually displayed in real-time as nodes in the graphic ‘script’ or as models in the ‘editor’ of the software. But depending on the size of the data being processed and the processing power, in the pictorial ‘preview’ function of the software they often only became visible with a delay as visual effects (i.e. a form of visualization anticipating the resulting film, in contrast to their graphic representation as interrelated commands in the script/editor function of the software). For example, an employee repeatedly changed the size and position of design elements displayed on her screen as ‘wireframe models’6 in a ‘3D scene’. Her bodily movements with the graphic pen were translated into cursor movements without any perceivable delay, moving and resizing the models in the scene. At short intervals she repeatedly created previews in a window on her second screen, in which a photorealistic still image of the modelled scene was calculated by a simulated camera using the aforementioned plugin. During this process, white outlines updated continuously to indicate which areas were currently being calculated. I watched how the employee oriented her face to the loading preview for a few seconds at a time and then aborted the preview several times to continue positioning the models. The real-time visualisation of the white lines made the computing time visible and expectable to her professional eye. This made it easier for the employee to integrate the computing time, which was observably resistant to the habitualised software operation, into her designing.

6

This representation of the edges or ‘skeletons’ of graphic objects in the animation software is defined by points and lines (including arcs).

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Waiting was part of this designing, as can be shown with reference to a waiting pose employees routinely adopted. In the case of slight temporal incongruences between interactivity and computational processes (as intra-activity in Rammert’s sense), visual effects producers kept their bodies ready for the computers: hands waited motionlessly on input devices, bodies (and especially heads) remained directed at screens. The adopting or interrupting of a ‘standby pose’ refers to the participant’s (not necessarily conscious) expectation to resume operation. The readiness gradually decreased as one or both hands were released from the devices and rested instead on the upper body, face or neck. Finally, the gaze moved away from the devices. In everyday work, a delicate synchronisation of activities between computer and user was supported by such regular periods of waiting on ‘standby’. The reason for this is that computing times were a constitutive part of the digital work objects themselves. During designing, visual effects were available as digital simulations, animations, image composites or nodes in a graphic representation of a script. Media theorist Manovich (2011) refers to this variability as ‘view control’: in practice, for employees to access and evaluate how visual effects looked on the spot depended on their individual operating of the particular files in the software. For instance, simulations could be played back at different rates, from different angles or with different elements activated, influencing how long it took for the visualisation to be calculated and to be played back. The different time regimes of specific visual effects (as particular files running on particular software and hardware) gradually required those involved in the design activities to wait in order to design them. The employee in the above example of the wireframe models repeatedly accepted delays in the object placement, which the calculation of a preview obviously entailed. Her design activity was made possible through these typical checks on the preview representation of the work object; they implied short repeated instances of waiting which was carried out in a standby pose. Thereby, a variance in the practices of waiting could be observed, which suggested individual, flexible multitasking. If computing times became prolonged, effects producers also performed other activities: they switched to working on other files, took a look at their smartphone, changed the music that was playing— or started a conversation with the researcher. Suspending readiness in this way meant a (gradual) loss of time in continuing the individual designing. Leaving the desk (for smoke or coffee breaks or meetings), which I also often observed during longer waiting times, completely prevented interactivity with the visual effects. In the last case, the technology waited, partly during processing, but partly independently of that. In principle, this variance reveals a situation order

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in the visual effects office in which short periods of digital waiting were performed and accepted in the public of the office as a matter of course in digital design. Yes, project deadlines were to be met, but everyone involved knew that sometimes you had to wait for the rendering in order to continue your work (similar to waiting for dough to become a cake while it is in the oven). However, waiting and a ‘standby pose’ not only were symptoms of time efficiency, but also characterised creative digital work. In drafting visual effects, comparable to other design practices, it might take time to craft the right look. In an ethnographic conversation, another employee described a temporal tension between computing time and project time which structured the tentative procedure during software work. As he explained, when designing a simulation for a water fountain, the playback of the fountain became slower if he increased the number of particles it comprised. He called this adjustment of the particle number a ‘balancing act’: the goal was a water fountain that he (as well as the project management or clients) liked,7 but whose preview during designing varied in visual design and accuracy depending on the density, number and movement of the particles. He explained that if he were to use too many particles at first, the computer would become too slow during processing. Yet, he could only see and evaluate his design of this particular, comparably big water fountain adequately if he used more particles (which he consequently did in selected moments, causing him to wait for the preview). Such a variable utilisation of the available computing power was not an exception in my observations on site. In visual effects production, in view of the limited time available for the job, computing times consequently had an influence on how reversible and open designs were. Waiting for the simulation in a ‘standby pose’ can therefore—as an activity of software work in digital design which participants deem appropriate—be regarded as time efficient and creative. Employees often waited in order to (better) see what they had designed and thus to improve their designs; yet, by waiting on standby they also allowed for time efficiency. Knorr Cetina understands forms of ‘embodiment’ as demonstrated in the ‘standby pose’ as a way ‘to achieve what one might call response adequacy—the sort of responsiveness elicited and conducive to success in a particular context’ (2009, p. 77, original emphasis): individual producers and the resulting effects were habitually linked during software work. Significantly, the practical readiness displayed by the ‘standby pose’ in the office public

7

Although aesthetic criteria were important to design evaluation in digital effects production, they will not be discussed further here for reasons of space. They were a constitutive part of different specialised sociotechnical ways of seeing (Trischler, 2021).

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could hardly be distinguished from another typical design practice during software work: the employees regularly assessed the visual effects they created by looking at them playing on a loop on their monitors (sometimes holding a firm gaze on them for minutes). In the public display of the employee’s professional ‘eye’ in the office, waiting and drafting were therefore closely connected.

3.2

‘Render Queue’: Waiting Online

The described individual software work was part of a division of labour coordinated beyond individual situations of drafting and evaluating (such as those discussed in the previous section). The cooperative transition of work objects from one employee to another was also influenced by computing time. For example, in the company I visited it was common that the modelling of an animation and its integration into a camera shot were performed in separate tasks by different employees. Due to the required precision of image calculation, the export of visual effects files from the design software known as ‘rendering’ was more computationally intensive than the preview function described so far. Rendering therefore took place on a computer cluster in the company, whose combined computing power allowed for increased data processing. However, this ‘render farm’ also had its limits. It calculated continuously during working hours and was often operating at full capacity. Synchronously running computing jobs submitted by different employees and the associated waiting times had to be coordinated. It was possible to adjust when and what was being rendered. One employee explained, for example, that rendering several elements of an animation made it possible to ‘deal with customer wishes more flexibly’, as they could still be changed individually in the next work step (in contrast to rendering all elements together into one file). Because such a procedure led to longer computing time during rendering, another ‘balancing act’ (see above) appeared: a temporal coordination between the different involved parties. Here, co-workers had to negotiate the degree of flexibility of their (shared) work objects between each other and the given processing power beyond their individual work steps. The coordination of the ‘render farm’ in the company was partly automated. By default, renderings were processed in the order in which they were triggered. Thus, an algorithmic equal treatment of individual computing processes was standard. This normalised the individual waiting and the associated completion of a work step as a queue which created a basic predictability regarding the order of the jobs and the associated waiting times. However, employees started ‘their’ renderings themselves and could initially assign them a higher priority,

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so that they were allowed to jump the queue for processing. The percentagebased prioritisation in the company allowed for a high degree of differentiation in terms of coordination: in theory, employees could increase (or decrease) the priority from a default of 50% to any number between 1 and 100. Yet, this range was not exploited in practice. Instead, intermediate steps had been established in the company as one employee explained to me: everyone knew that prioritised rendering processes ran at 65% (in comparison to the default of 50%). This convention made the duration of individual rendering processes more reliable and expectable cooperatively, which would be made more difficult by a larger plurality of priorities. Similarly, ‘jumping of the queue’ was organized (or rather restricted) by the technological feature of the plugin for render processes which only allowed for attributing a priority once at the start of a rendering. The coordination of the prioritising, as a distinct moment of cooperation, thus became an individual responsibility when submitting files to the queue. For example, one employee explained that he ‘would always ask before increasing the priority’. In the interaction order of a ‘synthetic situation’ (Knorr Cetina, 2009) a reciprocal coordination of the queue could take place in different ways—or it could also be actively avoided. For example, I observed another employee increasing the priority without consultation, and with no reactions or sanctions from colleagues. To understand the coordinative activities, it should be mentioned that their settings were visible to all employees via the company server and the shared plugin. A ‘render queue’ displayed the sequence of the calculation processes in a list (see Fig. 1). Its live visualisation made intra-activities in the form of computational processes accessible to the participants in a specific way: since it facilitated the anticipatory estimation of the duration of processes (by separately specifying entry, start and end time and progress) for everyone, individual time management became possible—but also addressable or even demandable cooperatively. It created an addressability in the informational cooperative context, since render files were assigned to specific colleagues. For example, a project manager who wanted to send effects to customers explained to me, while looking at the render list, that an employee had just started a rendering that he was still waiting for. During software work, employees also regularly checked the queue, which often remained open on the screen in the background. Computational processes could only be anticipated vaguely and were prone to errors (see ‘fail’, Fig. 1). As in the physical office environment, employees were not always able to monitor all rendering processes digitally as they focused on their individual design. At the same time, digital observation was almost invisible to those who were being observed (yet it could be anticipated as a potential). This resulted in difficulties

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Fig. 1 Categories of the ‘render queue’ (shortened and anonymised representation, RT)

in the digital queue which I illustrate with the following series of ethnographic sequences, in which the prioritisation of two work tasks was conveyed. One of the project managers informed an employee in the morning that a colleague had to ‘move forward’ in the render queue after he had instructed the latter to render an animation so that another colleague could ‘continue’ in her consecutive work step. The day before, the client had ordered a change to the task now being prioritised, which came at an inconvenient time because it was very late in the process and required quick changes to a time-consuming task that involved multiple steps and colleagues. The observation that, in this example, prioritisation of rendering could no longer take place tacitly points to its situational conflict potential. In his statement, the project manager elevated prioritisation from its usual status of individual responsibility. However, this proved to be of limited success: in the afternoon of the same day, I heard the prioritised employee ask the other employee from his desk whether the latter could suspend his renderings, since his should be finished in an hour. His colleague agreed and asked him to let him know when they were ‘done’. In this sequence, physical and informational addressability and responsibility coincided: it was informally recognisable for the prioritised person that the similarly complex renderings of the colleague were delaying his own computing processes—despite the instruction of the project manager. Since his colleague’s renderings were beyond his technological control via the rendering software, he tried to make sure that he would meet the deadline by addressing his colleague verbally in the public of the office. After a few minutes, however, the deprioritised colleague came over to the prioritised one and

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said that he ‘had to render a bit now though’, explaining that his was going to be done ‘very quickly’. He pointed to the overview of the renderings on his screen. The practical accomplishment of physical proximity between employees overrode the previously established form of public office communication, and reduced it down to a face-to-face conversation. As the three situations progressed, coordination work intensified: the anticipatory hierarchical conflict mediation by the project manager proved to be insufficient, as it violated the principle of equality of the employees, which was also inscribed in the ‘render farm’. In his study of queues outside a stadium, Mann observed that jostlers become the responsibility of those directly—that is, spatially—affected; community prevention would be made more difficult by the indistinguishability of legitimate and illegitimate jostling from afar (1969, p. 348 f.). This can be applied to the case under examination here: in software work, however, positioning and persevering in the queue did not take place bodily as they did outside the stadium in Mann’s study (ibid., p. 344), but were partly delegated to technical ‘computers’. Nevertheless, these generate the visibility and addressability of those who push to the front of the queue, thereby enabling certain forms of local face-to-face communication. By displaying the intra-activity, making the current state of affairs available to all participants in the queue, the company’s digital queue contributed to the standardisation of prioritisation and the associated waiting times—and at the same time to the interactional flexibilisation of work on site, in the processing of which interactivity and interaction intertwined.

4

Concatenations of Cooperative Waiting

As has been shown, various media were involved in waiting in visual effects productions: hardware, software and the bodies of the producers alternately remained on cooperative standby with and for each other. Cooperation was established daily in the form of continuous synchronisation of computing processes, software operating and interactions between co-workers, which often required waiting. ‘Technicization’ (Rammert, 1999) in this digital work was characterised by a relatively low level of predictability about the course and duration of (creative) activities—which appear as temporary and provisional—but it nevertheless allowed for clear individual addressability. Possible intricacies in practice included the runtime of renderings changing at any point, or visual effects only slowly and partially coming into view in a computer simulation. Here, a complex coordination of interlocked activities with and beyond the computer was observable on site. Both digital forms of waiting presented in this chapter, waiting in

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a standby pose as well as waiting in rendering queues, contributed to making design processes accountable for those involved. This chapter has argued, firstly, that waiting is an essential part of cooperative work, and, secondly, that it is sociotechnically accomplished. How visual effects production routinely dealt with computing times supports this argument. This perspective can enrich the interdisciplinary investigation of waiting: waiting is then not only an expression of an ‘imposed’ social time structure—and thus of the ‘whole problem field of the subject’ (Kazmaier et al., 2016, p. 8, trans. RT)— but also a productive part of sociotechnical processes. In this perspective, people are assigned an important role in managing their everyday life and cooperation in the workplace. At the same time, however, they share the skilful performance of these tasks constituting cooperative work with technological counterparts.8 Beyond that, what can be said about digital work and the possibilities of its investigation based on the presented forms of digital waiting? Firstly, co-operators in various social spheres mediate between screen and (office) space in everyday working life. However, their cooperative accomplishments are not sufficiently captured by a binary differentiation between physical and informational components of a ‘synthetic situation’ (Knorr Cetina, 2009). Digital work practices link, merge and separate different components in gradually technicised interactions, intra-activity and interactivities. Waiting indicates the practically situated, detailed and specialized interplays and interconnections between particular hardware, software, files, ideas, bodies, etc. in digital cooperation. When investigating digital work, the multiplicity of the objects and people involved should be taken into account, as well as their situated mutability and relationality: in practice, designers, designs and means of designing shape each other. This also refers to Rammert’s call that the sociological analysis of technicisation should not stop with individual situations, but that individual processes should always be understood as enabled by others in a ‘context of action’ (2006, p. 183, trans. RT). Thus, the concrete effects of digital media on (work) events can be systematised more precisely through their specific performative runtimes and temporal coordination. Secondly, more attention in the study of digital work should be paid to organisational temporalities and durations. During a project, visual effects were gradually charged with meaning and materialised in different media—in the sense of ‘formative objects’ (see Scheffer in this volume; Trischler 2023). This sequence of transitions meant that at certain points in the production process, some design changes were necessary, while others were possible or could only be realised 8

This double-edged approach can be considered typical for Workplace Studies (see Lengersdorf, 2011, p. 48).

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with difficulty and practical (including aesthetic, economic, material, symbolic, etc.) costs for the participants. Since visual effects were produced step-by-step, an object-centred analysis of the process helps to reconstruct the organisation of work. In this context, the empirical analysis of waiting allows one to understand which incongruences are (or can be) accepted at the present time, depending on past and future instances of the shared organisation of post-production. Recently, the management of the future in particular has been emphasised for understanding organisations (Krämer & Wenzel, 2018). Waiting is certainly a ‘future-oriented’ (Ayaß, 2020, p. 6) practice and thus important in this context. Yet, as a cooperative practice, waiting also includes the past. It follows on from previous episodes and foresees subsequent ones. From a micro-sociological perspective, waiting can thus frame a situation (see Goffman, 1963, p. 79)—as a situation of waiting. Further, it reveals concatenations of past, concurrent and future situations, which play an important role in digital cooperation.9 If conceived as sociotechnical practice, waiting also reveals theoretical difficulties in identifying clearly separable cooperative situations since an interactivity focused on the screen can expand into physical space at any time. These difficulties in dealing with digital technology can be examined as participants’ problems by asking whether or how they frame, close or connect situations in time (and space) under digital conditions. Finally, the contribution of digital media to the temporal order of societal phenomena testifies to their social relevance. However, there is no given digital time structure in digital work, but different technicisations that interlock in practice and consolidate themselves organisationally. Based on the temporal order of visual effects production it should be noted that time efficiency takes up considerable relevance for cooperation, as can be seen from the ‘standby pose’ or the ‘render queue’. Nevertheless, in practice, the temporal constitution of computational processes also contributes to the tentative character of habitualised software work in visual effects production, which enables an open-ended ‘creative’ process. For instance, the step-by-step, sometimes slow visualisation during a visual effects preview provides employees with time for a detailed view of the image parts already calculated in it. Consequently, ethnographic data can be used to trace tensions between optimisation, standardisation and flexibilisation in digital design—and their practical conciliations. This is analytically helpful, not least with regard to the much discussed ‘creativity dispositif’ (Reckwitz, 2017): if one understands processes of technicisation as involving bodies, things and signs in practice (see Rammert, 1999, p. 173 ff.), narratives of ‘creative’ actors on the one 9

The conceptualisation of such relations occupies a prominent position in contemporary German social theory (see Hirschauer, 2015; Schindler and Scheffer in this volume).

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hand and ‘enabling’ or ‘disruptive’ technology on the other can be criticised and depolarised. In this view, temporal variations emerge as a central feature of cooperative, technicised design practices—and how they are brought forth, stabilised and suspended in practice deserves further attention.

References Ayaß, R. (2020). Doing waiting: An ethnomethodological analysis. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 49(4), 419–455. Berry, D. M. (2011). The philosophy of software: Code and mediation in the digital age. Palgrave. Castells, M. (1996). The rise of the network society. The information age: Economy, society and culture (Vol. I). Blackwell. ChaosGroupTV. (2016). V-Ray 3.3 for Maya. http://youtu.be/2P3pHrqJTDE. 1 March. Accessed 17 Oct 2016. Coleman, R. (2020). Making, managing and experiencing ‘the now’: Digital media and the compression and pacing of ‘real-time.’ New Media & Society, 22(9), 1680–1698. Coleman, E. G. (2010). Ethnographic approaches to digital media. Annual Review of Anthropology, 39(1), 487–505. Garfinkel, H. (2004 [1967]). Studies in ethnomethodology. Polity Press. Gilje, Ø. (2011). Working in tandem with editing tools: Iterative meaning-making in filmmaking practices. Visual Communication, 10(1), 45–62. Goffman, E. (1963). Behaviour in public places: Notes on the social organization of gatherings. Free Press. Göttlich, A. (2015). To wait and let wait: Reflections on the social imposition of time. Schutzian Research, 7, 47–64. Göttlich, A. (2017). Einleitung. Warten – Gesellschaftliche Dimensionen und kulturelle Formen. Sociologia Internationalis, 54, 1–25. Hartmann, M., Prommer, E., Deckner, K., & Görland, S. O. (Eds.). (2019). Mediated time. Palgrave Macmillan. Heath, C., Knoblauch, H., & Luff, P. (2000). Technology and social interaction: The emergence of ‘workplace studies.’ British Journal of Sociology, 51(2), 299–320. Hickethier, K. (2002). Synchron. Gleichzeitigkeit, Vertaktung und Synchronisation der Medien. In W. Faulstich & C. Steininger (Eds.), Zeit in den Medien – Medien in der Zeit (pp. 109–129). Wilhelm Fink. Hirschauer, S. (2015). Intersituativität. Teleinteraktionen und Koaktivitäten jenseits von Mikro und Makro. In B. Heintz (Ed.), Interaktion, Organisation und Gesellschaft revisited. Anwendungen, Erweiterungen, Alternativen (pp. 109–133). Lucius & Lucius. Hörning, K., Ahrens, D., & Gerhard, A. (1999). Do technologies have time? Time & Society, 8, 293–308. Kazmaier, D., Kerscher, J., & Wotschal, X. (2016). Warten als Kulturmuster. In D. Kazmaier, J. Kerscher, & X. Wotschal (Eds.), Warten als Kulturmuster (pp. 7–22). Königshausen und Neumann.

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Knoblauch, H. (2005). Focused ethnography. Forum Qualitative Social Research, 6(3). https://doi.org/10.17169/fqs-6.3.20. Knorr Cetina, K. (2009) The synthetic situation: Interactionism for a global world. Symbolic Interaction, 32(1), 61–87, Krämer, H., & Wenzel, M. (Eds.). (2018). How organizations manage the future. Palgrave Macmillan. Lengersdorf, D. (2011). Arbeitsalltag ordnen. Soziale Praktiken in einer Internetagentur. Springer VS. Mann, L. (1969). Queue culture: The waiting line as a social system. American Journal of Sociology, 75(3), 340–354. Manovich, L. (2011). Inside photoshop. Computational Studies, 63, 124–147. Rammert, W. (1999). Relations that constitute technology and media that make a difference: Toward a social pragmatic theory of technicization. Philosophy & Technology, 4(3), 165– 177. Rammert, W. (2006). Technik in Aktion. In W. Rammert & C. Schubert (Eds.), Technografie. Zur Mikrosoziologie der Technik (pp. 163–195). Campus. Rammert, W. (2008). Where the Action Is: Distributed Agency between Humans, Machines, and Programs. In U. Seifert, J. H. Kim, & A. Moore (Eds.), Paradoxes of interactivity: Perspectives for media theory, human computer interaction, and artistic investigations (pp. 62–92). transcript. Rammert, W. (2016). Technik – Handeln – Wissen. Zu einer pragmatistischen Technik- und Sozialtheorie (2nd ed.). Springer VS. Reckwitz, A. (2017). The invention of creativity: Modern society and the culture of the new (S. Black, Trans.). Polity. Sacks, H., Schegloff, E. A., & Jefferson, G. (1974). A simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taking for conversation. Language, 50, 696–735. Scheller, V. K. (2020). Understanding, seeing and representing time in tempography. Forum Qualitative Research, 21(2). Schmidt, R. (2012). Soziologie der Praktiken. Konzeptionelle Studien und empirische Analysen. Suhrkamp. Schütz, A., & Luckmann, T. (1974). The structures of the life-world (R. M. Zaner & H. Tristram Engelhardt, Trans.). Heinemann. Schwartz, B. (1974). Waiting, exchange and power: The distribution of time in social systems. American Journal of Sociology, 79, 841–871. Sebald, G. (2020). ‘Loading, please wait’—temporality and (bodily) presence in mobile digital communication. Time & Society, 29(4), 990–1008. https://doi.org/10.1177/0961463X2 0916566. Star, S. L., & Griesemer, J. R. (1989). Institutional ecology, ‘translations’ and boundary objects: Amateurs and professionals in Berkeley’s museum of vertebrate zoology, 1907– 39. Social Studies of Science, 19(3), 387–420. The Foundry. (2016). Appendix B: Keyboard shortcuts. http://help.thefoundry.co.uk/nuke/9. 0/content/appendices/appendixb/hotkeys_studio.html. Accessed 24 Mar 2022. Trischler, R. (2023). Digital objects? Materialities in the trans-sequential analysis of digital work. In M. Kolanoski, C. Küffner, M. Löffler, & C. Terjung (Eds.), Trans-Sequentiell Forschen: Neue Perspektiven und Anwendungsfelder (pp. 175–210). Springer VS.

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Trischler, R. (2021). Digitale Materialität. Eine Ethnografie arbeitsteiliger Visual-EffectsProduktion. transcript. Venkatasawmy, R. (2013). The digitalization of cinematic visual effects: Hollywood’s coming of age. Lexington Books. Wacjman, J. (2008). Life in the fast lane? Towards a sociology of technology and time. British Journal of Sociology, 59(1), 59–77. Weltevrede, E., Helmond, A., & Gerlitz, C. (2014). The politics of real-time: A device perspective on social media platforms and search engines. Theory, Culture and Society, 31(6), 125–150. Wood, A. (2015). Software, animation and the moving image: What’s in the box? Palgrave Macmillan.

Strapping and Stacking: An Ethnography in Search of a New Medium Götz Bachmann

Engineers who are trying to develop new paradigms for the digital medium aim for more than just technical solutions. They work on thinking and building new iterations of a computer-assisted medium. Science and Technology Studies, Media Studies and Marxist or Feminist approaches to analysing digital cultures, beyond all dissent on other issues, are in consensus and have good reasons to distrust such ambitions. Heroic inventor figures and paradigm-setting moments of invention are discredited here. We know: the retrospective topos of the invention suggests the overestimation of such moments and often conceals more than it can explain. The promises in the historical texts of the engineers often originated in the context of attempts to raise funds—in other words, a waxing lyrical to get your hand into the public purse. The oral histories of technology are mostly the stories of old men who write their life’s work into history and in doing so write more out than in. And many of the books that tell us about engineers are written by journalists, who often also have the tendency to tell computer and media history as the story of the breakthroughs of brilliant engineers. But that is precisely why it is important to keep an eye on those ambitions, texts, ideas, biographies, artefacts and laboratories. After all, they remain a way—albeit one among others, and one to be taken with caution—to explore how digital cultures became what they are and will become what they will be. It is this strange hybridity that originally motivated me to situate an ethnography in a contemporary engineering laboratory. Between the summers of 2015 and 2017, I spent some time in the San Francisco Bay Area, also known as the Silicon Valley. I focused on a group of six to eight engineers led by Bret Victor G. Bachmann (B) University of Bremen, Bremen, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 S. Gießmann et al. (eds.), Materiality of Cooperation, Medien der Kooperation— Media of Cooperation, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-39468-4_9

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(from now on I’ll just use his first name as I did during my fieldwork), an engineer with a cult of genius around him, and supported by the legendary engineer Alan Kay as their patron. My sources, besides my research diaries in which I document the lab’s working methods, are: the prototypes and their documentation; the technical systems and the considerations developed on whiteboards and posters that preceded them; internal emails; open interviews with members of the research group (including those who left the group); presentations and self-portraits; books and technical papers to which the lab refers; research on the historical references circulating in the lab; and discussions of the lab’s ideas with fans and critics outside the lab. The goal is an ethnography that examines invention as a process and practice, but also the inventions; that explores prototypes and technologies, but also the notions and ideas; that focuses on the present as well as historical references and imagined futures; that asks by what means the research group sets itself apart from Silicon Valley, but also takes a look at its context; and that takes into account the work on the ‘dynamic medium’ (Kay, 1996, p. 523), but also on the “re-invention of the computer” (according to Alan Kay in an email on 15 March 2013). The present essay focuses on one of the topics of this ethnography: the working method of Bret’s research group. This working method is guided by the “metaphor of ‘Engelbart in the twenty-first century’” (Alan Kay, personal communication, 15 March 2013). Alan Kay refers here to the work of Doug Engelbart in the 1960s and thus also to a methodology that relies on research groups building new media technologies that they themselves apply. Engelbart believed that research groups that did this could transform themselves. The basis for Engelbart’s belief that this was possible was his conviction that research groups, like all human formations, were alliances of ‘HLAM-T Systems’: ‘Human using Language, Artefacts, Methodology, in which he is Trained’ (Engelbart, 1962, p. 11). If new media technologies were suitable, research groups would use them to improve their own ‘intellectual effectiveness’ (ibid., p. 5). This would enable them to develop further technologies, which in turn could be used by the research group—a recursive process that could be iterated. Engelbart referred to this as ‘bootstrapping’ (Bardini, 2000; Engelbart & English, 1968). In this essay, I am interested in whether and how and in what ways the cybernetic figure of ‘bootstrapping’ functions as a practice and process in Bret’s research group, and how this process results in the formation not only of series of prototypes, but also socio-technical imaginaries (Jasanoff, 2015). It will be decades before we know whether future media and technology histories will ascribe to the long-term work of Bret’s research group—an impact comparable

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to that which we now attribute to Engelbart’s or Kay’s historical research groups. So, while Bret is an engineer whom many of Silicon Valley’s citizens believe to be capable of creating new paradigms, we (of course) do not know yet whether that will be the result. Even less predictable is whether the imaginaries circulating in the lab will come true. And of course, the work in historical laboratories is not simply reflected exactly in the present. Nevertheless, the work of Bret’s research group provides an insight into what goes on in research and development labs that use bootstrapping methodology to develop new paradigms for media technologies. The following paper is a descriptive analysis of one phase of an ongoing project: the time between 2015–2018. It is meant to create a reflection about the complex process of attempting to build a new media paradigm.

1

Inside the Brain: My First Look in 2015

In the summer of 2015, I spent the first of my four field trips in the Bay Area. Bret’s group had already been working for two years on the question of how to rethink the “dynamic medium” and thus “the computer”.1 Innumerable prototypes filled a loft measuring around 150 m2 that the group had rented in the SoMa district of San Francisco—at the time the stronghold of start-ups in Silicon Valley. The group was supported by a larger research association initiated by Alan Kay called “Communication Design Group”, which was financed by the software and database company SAP (from 2016 on, the entire group became part of a larger basic research association called “YC Research”, which was affiliated with the influential start-up incubator “Y Combinator” in Silicon Valley). So even though this was industry-funded research, these settings still allowed Bret’s group great freedom. True to one of Alan Kay’s creeds, ‘fund people, not projects’ (2017), Bret was able to set the agenda of his research group himself. There were no deadlines. The development was not aimed at commercial exploitation. The results were part of the commons. And the “dog and pony show” for managers, which is necessary from time to time, was seen as a distraction, but not as a moment for the client to judge results. In other words, it was a paradise for engineers who hate little as much as they hate “suits”, optionally also called “corporate types”, who intervene in their work. 1

Double quotation marks without indication of source denote formulations and expressions from the field of investigation that were collected through interviews and participant observations.

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Under these luxurious conditions, Bret had hired a select group of employees. At the time, Bret himself was in his late thirties. He had started out as an electrical engineer trained at Caltech and UC Berkeley. After a turn to information design inspired by Edward Tufte, among others, he had worked in Apple’s Human Interface Device Prototyping Team and had given a series of highly noteworthy lectures and written essays before setting up his research group (e.g. Victor, 2011). The other members were mostly ten to fifteen years younger. Glenn Chiaccheri had worked as a developer at the Massachusetts Institute for Technology (MIT) after studying computer engineering; Chaim Gingold was a game designer and theorist trained in digital media design; Toby Schachmann and Michael Nagle had both studied mathematics at MIT; and Robert Ochshorn had been working as a research assistant at MIT after studying computer science. Some of them had grown up as child prodigies, almost all of them had elite educations, and many had connections to the MIT East Campus/Senior House scene in Boston: student dormitories located in the east of MIT, where a local elite counterculture had developed that differed from Silicon Valley and also from the mainstream of the industry-oriented MIT (Süßbrich, 2005) and was instead characterised by mixtures of technical and mathematical expertise, artistic practices and an interest in pedagogy and self-realisation. So, Bret had not hired people who were attracted by Silicon Valley’s promise of social advancement. The members of the core group had biographies marked by mathematical talent and cultural capital, and their working methods were often shaped by artistic ethos, but always also by conceiving and developing technical projects “from first principles”. In the two years before my arrival, the members of the research group had filled the lab with prototypes as well as books, manifestos, computers and machines. Bret had placed his own private library in the lab, well stocked in areas such as mathematics, electrical engineering, information design, media theory and the history of computing. Devotional objects from the 1960s and 1970s such as Steward Brands’ “Whole Earth Catalog” took pride of place and a small “Bucky Dome”, a Buckminster Fuller-inspired “Geodesic Dome”, was also included (see Turner, 2006). Essays by Alan Kay filled a screen, and an interactive poster was dedicated to Doug Engelbart’s 1968 presentation “A Research Center for Augmenting Human Intellect” (better known under the misleading title “Mother of all Demos”). A photo hung up in the library was one of the things I liked most in the first months of my research: In this picture was a wall full of graffiti in the Mission District in San Francisco, in public space, on which Bret, in a night action, had pasted Doug Engelbart’s research report “Augmenting Human Intellect—A Conceptional Framework” from 1962. Sticking it on a wall in San Francisco as if it were the pamphlet of an underground organisation was a joke, an outstretched

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Fig. 1 Engelbart on a wall in San Francisco’s Mission District (Photo GB)

middle finger and a programmatic act all at once. The message was that in Silicon Valley, with its mixture of capital, control, and trivial and inhuman technology, Engelbart had more subversive potential than his museumisation would suggest. And here in the lab, this potential would be revived (Fig. 1). And indeed, the wealth of prototypes, books and manifestos scattered around the room soon made me feel as if I were sitting in a “giant brain” (according to my research diaries at the time): a shared, associatively interwoven, growing space of ideas. However, this feeling stood in strange contrast to the fact that, at least at first glance, I found conspicuously little collaboration. Direct communication also rarely took place. The members of the group often seemed not to notice each other. They did not greet each other. They went out for lunch together, but even this was often a silent affair. And when they had finished their work in the evening, they went home without a word. During the day, many of the engineers worked on their own projects. While Bret’s work at that time was mainly conceptual, many other members’ projects were long-term software projects. The goals of these were, for example, new ways to integrate data directly into programming environments (such as the “Flowsheets” project) or to link geometry- and algebra-based interfaces more closely together (the “Apparatus” project). In the

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lab, these projects had the state of “working prototypes”, functional versions in an early state, which aimed to become “ready to ship” at some point, to be used, maintained and further developed by other “communities”. In these projects, recursive self-references were quite common: For example, instead of working on “explorable explanations” (a special form of interactive information design for complex issues for which Bret had become known a few years earlier), the “Apparatus” project aimed at better software for creating them—and the improvement of the tool itself also meant, among other things, that it satisfied the ethos of “explorability”. Since Toby Schachmann, who built this software, had created “explorable explanations” himself and saw a great future in them, he therefore built software for others, but also for himself. Thus, such practice was quite similar to the ‘recursive publics’ of free software described by Kelty (2008, p. 27 ff.). In terms of the software’s characteristics as possibly emerging media technologies, however, this was a one-time recursion, but not the iterative-recursive and open-ended development envisaged by Engelbart. To be sure, the tools took on properties that would also shape the results to be produced with them. But since these results were already known in principle— “explorable explanations” were an established genre of interactive design at that time—the whole set-up of these software projects was predictable, at least in theory. However, there were other prototypes that were far more experimental. In many cases, they worked entirely without a screen or monitor. In the lab, for example, if you picked up a laser with your hand, you could use the laser to open up and manipulate fields on the walls that could be filled with anything a projector could project, a camera could film, and a laser could manipulate. The background for such projects was that the “rectangle”, i.e. the screen, became more and more of a problem at that time. It was said to be the reason why the digital medium had become stuck in a state of “peekaboo”. Toby Schachmann explained to me what the problem was: because a screen always shows only sections, someone who wanted to understand or solve a problem had to contribute the far greater complexity, so to speak, in their head. Instead of the computer doing what it can do much better than a human, it forces people to do what they cannot do well without help: simulate complex, detailed models for systems in their entirety. The computer as a “dynamic medium”, as it had been conceived in the 1960s and 1970s by Alan Kay, among others, and then successively popularised and trivialised as a Graphical User Interface-based PC, laptop, smartphone or tablet, had failed. A new “dynamic medium” was needed, and this had to be “spatial”. At this point a lot would have to be said about what exactly this “dynamic spatial medium” could be, and what references are evoked by such a vision. In

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Fig. 2 The lab in SoMa in the spring of 2016 (Photograph GB)

this essay, however, I will focus on the ways in which the group worked on these ideas. And here, I found forms of collaboration, albeit more indirect ones (Fig. 2). One form was so-called “riffing”. As soon as an engineer had finished one of the experimental prototypes, he wrote an email to the group. The other members then often commented in this email thread not only on the prototype documented there. In their answers, they improvised other prototypes as well. The latter took up themes from the respective predecessor and continued them, often in surprising ways. “Riffing” thus led to cascades of prototypes, which were documented in email threads. Related to “riffing” was the practice of “dropping”. In that case, engineers built prototypes or filled posters and silently left them in the room for the others to see. Only “jams” required the engineers to meet in physical co-presence. Here they set topics for themselves. In the format of “imagination jams” one of the topics was for example “Memex of the 21st Century”. In a “jam”, “mock-ups”, i.e. preliminary stages for prototypes, were developed in a short period of time, usually within thirty to sixty minutes, and then presented to the others. These jams would often be transformed into co-present “riffing”. There were also “jams” with guests, which could last up to two days.

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All prototypes created in this way had different characteristics than the software projects mentioned above. They were shorter, sketchier and did not have the goal of eventually reaching the state of “ready to ship”. In building these experimental prototypes, the members let their intuitions run wild and then asked the prototypes created in this way what they had to tell them. Prototypes thus functioned as ‘working artefacts’ as described by Suchman et al. (2002, p. 175). They were, to quote Alberto Corsín Jiménez, ‘traps’ for the possible, precisely because they were based on ‘illusions of self-movement’ (2014, p. 391). In a sense, this was about poking around in a space of possibility, which at that time was outlined by a concept of a new “dynamic spatial medium” that was only rudimentarily recognisable. The preferred genre of prototype was less defensive than, for example, “proofs of concepts”, which are intended to demonstrate that something actually has directly usable properties or is feasible. The genre was also different from “demos”, i.e. prototypes that demonstrate already finished ideas and are often designed to impress recipients—a genre in which Bret had developed mastery, but which he deliberately did not use here. It was all about speculating together and in artefact form in order to get a sense of the properties of a new medium—“it feels like …” was therefore a phrase that played an important role both in the creation and analysis of the prototypes. The engineers were interested not only in the properties of the prototypes themselves, or the direction in which they pointed, but also in the experiences the engineers made in the process of creating them. Not always, but at least sometimes, the engineers worked directly together in the creation of these prototypes and they experienced this cooperation as easier and more fluid than the work on the software projects. Another word that increasingly characterised the self-descriptions of the engineers’ work at that time was “scaffolding”. The metaphor of scaffolding had several meanings. First of all, it pointed out that, between the many experimental prototypes, the intention was, as it were, to give rise to those ideas that were actually at issue, just as a scaffolding is not an end in itself but serves to create a house in its centre. But “scaffolding” was also able to point out that in the construction of experimental prototypes the engineers often used technologies with properties that contradicted the ideas explored in their own prototypes. For example, they kept working with Linux, even though its 15 million “lines of messy code” stood for everything they wanted to leave behind. Hence, Linux was the scaffolding here, which was to be dismantled as soon as better technologies had emerged. And finally, “scaffolding” also stood for the opposite, i.e. for better tools to create other tools. In this case, “scaffolding” was a framework of tools that piled up and on which other tools could be stacked.

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The “big board” took a special position in this context: On a whiteboard, a code printed out on slips of paper was combined with projected windows in which data on the currently reached states in sub-areas of the system (e.g. the position of a laser) were displayed in “real-time” in the form of numbers. Firstly, the big board thus adopted some of the principles that were also considered desirable in the “explorable explanations”: In order to provide it with more “explorability”, data on states in sub-areas of the system were also explicitly presented in direct connection with the code. If a change occurred, a person standing in front of the “big board” could directly observe the cascade-like changes in the various windows. Secondly, the “big board” had escaped the screen and therefore had some characteristics of a possible “spatial medium”. Thirdly, the “big board” controlled the “room system”, which in turn enabled some of the other prototypes distributed in the room: it was thus a prototype for the creation of other prototypes. And fourthly and finally, the big board also controlled parts of itself: The “live data” fields of the “big board” were projected onto it through the “room system”, which itself was at least partially represented by the “big board” with its “live data” fields. So there were clear recursive moments here. After my first stay in the field I was convinced that I had cracked the mystery of bootstrapping. Luxurious working conditions without “deliverables”, based on Silicon Valley’s abundance of resources; conceptual considerations and historical references that stood in opposition to the mainstream of Silicon Valley; an ethos of the playful such as the work of “from first principles”; a collectively shared space full of artefacts, books and manifestos; speculative forms of prototyping; the associative intensities of “riffing”, “dropping” and “jams”; a shared space of possibility emerging in the midst of “scaffolding” and various fragments of recursivity in the prototypes: this, I thought, is what constituted the lived practice of “bootstrapping”. And yes, I was by no means entirely wrong. When I joyfully shared my idea with the engineers, they listened with interest and confirmed my partial observations. My overall diagnosis, however, they denied: they felt that I was being kind with it, but that they were far from living up to the ideal of “bootstrapping”. It was definitely their goal, but they had only been working for two years and could not achieve it that quickly. I was astonished. The engineers obviously took Engelbart’s descriptions of recursive upscaling more literally than I did at the time. They saw bootstrapping not only as practices and techniques with recursive fragments, but also as a process. As it turned out, they were right.

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Off Up and Down: The “Staircase” and the “Yak Stack”

When I returned to the group in February 2016 during my second research stay, I found them in a state of unease. After a peak the year before, Bret had become increasingly dissatisfied. He said that the lab was losing its focus. The work on the “room system”, which he had developed together with Robert Ochshorn, had begun enthusiastically and a successor called “Hypercard-in-the-World” had expanded these ideas. Nevertheless, most of the engineers still worked mainly on their own projects and on normal screens, so they rarely used the new system. Bret’s own programmatic work was also merely noted with interest by the other engineers. He himself had tried out the new system in several projects and was quite successful. But in other ambitious projects he had reached new limits. All this convinced Bret that the way the group worked needed to change. And even though he was afraid to use hierarchical power directly, as Principal Investigator in a setting of “people, not projects” he had the opportunity to do so. So, what was this all about? The research process had to be reorganised, as a “staircase” formed by “platforms”. The area where experimental prototyping had developed the greatest intensity needed to be transformed into a “platform”. In order to achieve a new platform, the group would not only have to rethink individual characteristics, but at the same time change a number of elements and interlock them solidly as a new overall arrangement. Among other things, this would require a new operating system but also a completely new hardware architecture and programming languages and environments. Bret was aware that working on so many nooks and crannies at once could quickly lead to unmanageable complexity. But it was worth the risk. Only in this way is a “jump” possible. As soon as the “platform” was built, the group would use it as a basis for returning to experimental, sketchy prototyping, in order to explore the contours of the next “platform” of the “staircase” from the “platform” now reached. Bret had developed his variant of “bootstrapping”. He writes in an email: The platform we’re building this year is not the ‘dynamic medium’. The platform will be ‘technology’, not timeless or transcendent. But it should make possible the exploration and perhaps invention of new kinds of representation-for-understanding, which will then make a bit clearer what the medium for these representations should be, which will then inform the design of the next platform ad transcendum. (Bret Victor, personal communication, 18 April 2016)

The goal of the “staircase” would thus only be reached at some point, in ways not yet known and after many iterated “platforms”. After two years of work,

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however, this goal could at least be anticipated. And these intuitions should be taken more seriously. The goal was to be “the dynamic spatial medium”. In the email quoted above, Bret described it as follows: Our goal is to invent an in-the-world dynamic medium, capable of hosting in-theworld dynamic representations of systems, which enable the people, who need to understand these systems to mutually understand them together. (Bret Victor, personal communication, 18 April 2016)

This medium, which was to be both dynamic and spatial, took up crucial ideas coming out of the previous experimental prototyping. But it was also the area to which Bret’s programmatic and theoretical work had increasingly been directed in previous years. In order to build the “staircase” oriented towards this “dynamic spatial medium”, the work of the group should in future always be dedicated in one year to building a “platform” and in the next year to more experimental forms of prototyping. In the phases of building a “platform”, the group would have to work closely together. Individual prototypes, projects and ideas would have to be put on hold. Once the “platform” was built, it would serve as a programming environment. Thus, the aim was to stop working on PCs and laptops already in a year’s time, because the next “platform” would have to take their place. While the “dynamic spatial medium” was not only intended for programming, it should also be able to serve this purpose. In terms of “bootstrapping”, this would also have to apply to the research group. The entire change of course was supported by a new framework. The real motivation was not clever software solutions, not interesting prototypes, not the reinvention of the “computer”, not even a new “medium”. It was to be the salvation of the world. In the words of Bret: On a given day, you might be designing a messaging protocol to implement a pub/sub system to make a network of IMPs to make sensor data easily accessible throughout the room to implement an object model, based on observation to enable authoring of dynamic media in-the-world to represent complex systems that used to be unseeable to understand complex systems that used to be ungraspable to introduce new forms of human thought and communication to expand humanity’s thinkable territory to escape tribalism and lift humanity to a sufficient level of enlightenment that technological power can be used responsibly, not destructively to prevent the world from tearing itself apart (Bret Victor, personal communication, 18 April 2016)

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Bret called what is described in this engineering poem the “yak stack”. In technical jargon, “yak” refers to “yak shaving”: losing oneself in the non-target. In technical contexts, the “stack” refers to an arrangement in which what is added as new is done first, while what came earlier is hidden deeper in the stack. “Yak stack” thus means: we get stuck in the upper, unimportant, technical areas, in that we keep piling up and solving new problems there. So we are in danger of losing sight of what is really at stake. Bret writes in the same email: The items at the top of the yak stack are easy to talk about, they lend themselves to lunch chat and status reports. The items at the bottom are abstract, hard to articulate, emotionally charged, unfashionable, easy to mock, even embarrassing. At least, I often feel like I can’t discuss these things with anyone. (Bret Victor, personal communication, 18 April 2016)

The image that Bret is trying to create here can quickly become confusing, as his placement is inverse to that of the “staircase”. The “staircase” represents an image of ascent. The goal is at the top. In the “stack”, however, what is most important to him is at the bottom: the greatest ambitions. While what is at the top of the staircase is not identical to what is at the bottom of the stack, it is at least similar, i.e. that which is most important. At the same time, we should still read the “yak stack” from top to bottom. A “stack” does not contain a sequence that would result if we read it from bottom to top. So, the “yak stack” does not describe “If you want to save the world, you have to do this and then that”. Only the “staircase” describes a sequence. It remains open and focuses on the research process itself. Criticism of what can be found in the techno-solutionist figures of thought in the “staircase” and “yak stack” would therefore be too crude if it did not distinguish between “stack-shaped” exploration of motivation and “staircase-shaped” search. “Staircase” and “stack” are rather constructed in such a way that they represent attempts to contrast simple techno-solutionist Silicon Valley metaphors à la “make the world a better place” with more subtle and honest figures of thought. Hence, the “stack” was about exploring motivation and drilling into the depths of ever greater ambitions. Bret Victor was no stranger to megalomania, but he was of course aware that the activities described in the upper levels of the “stack” could not simply fulfil the desires formulated in the deeper levels of the stack. The upper levels of the yak stack are explained by the fact that Bret Victor’s research group was made up of engineers: they were doing what they do best. With the lower levels of the “stack”, Bret Victor underpinned this activity with his motivations. The lower part of the yak stack was a personal document of

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his motivations against the background of a deeply pessimistic and desperately optimistic view of the world—one that is, by the way, found again and again in the history of technology, including with Kay and Engelbart. There would be much more to say about the “yak stack” and its relationship to the “staircase”—after all, it was also a complex, epistemological, political, social, system and media-theoretical arrangement in terms of content and theory. Once again, however, I do not want to deal with the contents further here, but rather describe what all this meant for the work of the group over the next one and a half years. In the context of the transition to new ways of working, the “yak stack” was a document of despair. At the same time, it was a defensive figure of thought: it was defensive because it understood everything that actually happened as a “not-yet”, which also means that it is more than what had been seen and shown before. Above all, however, it was an attempt to justify the change in working methods to the “staircase”. The deeper-seated motivations, so the message, made it worth the effort of using the “staircase”. And thus the “yak stack” was also—not only, but among other things—a means of power, because who could dare to contradict such motivations? The change in the group’s working methods was not without consequences. First the most painful one: almost all members of the research group of the first phase left. The reasons for leaving were manifold, complex and sometimes personal. Many were unwilling to subordinate their own projects, ideas and ways of working to the common construction of a “platform” guided by Bret Victor’s ideas. In addition, there were doubts about the idea of the “dynamic spatial medium”, i.e. the orientation of the “staircase”. Some engineers found its contours too unclear and too far removed into the future. Others were not sure whether this was the right direction at all: “I am not ready to give up on screens yet” wrote one of the engineers. Another engineer, who also dropped out, began to have more and more doubts about cognitivist and, in his view, male-dominated reductions of what constituted a medium. Bret Victor’s explicit motivation for world salvation was excessive for some and offensive for others. Yet it also led other engineers to decide that they no longer wanted to be engineers at all: If what convinced them had to be about nothing less than saving the world, the work as an engineer no longer made sense. The group slipped into a sequence of crises that I witnessed during my field trips in 2016 and 2017. At the same time, however, it gradually reconstituted itself. New members joined the group: Paula Te (trained in mechanical engineering and interaction design at MIT and in Copenhagen), Josh Horowitz (mathematics, MIT), Luke Iannini (the only one without formal training, but an experienced programmer) and Virginia McArthur (Executive Producer, formerly

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Electronic Arts). Of the original line-up, only Bret Victor and Toby Schachmann remained in the group. A number of figures who had consultative roles in the group’s environment—such as May-Li Khoe (formerly Apple, now Khan) and Dave Cerf (formerly Apple, now independent)—also contributed to the group’s continuity. They began work on the new “platform”, which soon took on the name “Dynamicland”. The new operating system required for this was christened “Realtalk”: an allusion to the programming environment Smalltalk, which Alan Kay, among others, had developed in the 1970s, as can be read in his essay “The Early History of Smalltalk” (Kay, 1996). Realtalk was now at the centre of the work of the newly formed group.

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Realtalk is the operating system for a “new kind of computer”. It was to be based on a “strange and wonderful mix of computational and physical material” (according to the group in a pamphlet they wrote later). This “mix” was based on an idea that Bret had been developing largely on his own since the spring of 2016, parallel to the crises already described in the group—partly in dreams, partly in exploratory discussions, partly in conceptual posters full of technical details, and partly from the analysis of dozens of historical and contemporary programming languages and environments. The initial idea was captivatingly simple and yet had tricky consequences: Realtalk was supposed to make it possible for some of the “physical things” found in a room to turn into “objects”. Anyone who thinks of “physical things” as something like a piece of paper or a stone the size of a marble is right. As soon as such things became objects in the context of Realtalk, they were to be given functions and properties similar to those of objects in common variants of the paradigm of object-oriented programming (OOP)—but with a whole series of completely new properties that turn many things that are considered proven and correct in the established field of the OOP paradigm upside down. The OOP paradigm emerged in the 1960s and 1970s and is widely used today for organising programming languages and environments and the associated work processes in such a way that goals such as overview, controllability and flexibility are guaranteed. The objects that give this paradigm its name are small, largely self-contained virtual units of code and data. The OOP paradigm is based on the idea that such virtual objects can act autonomously to a certain degree, communicate with other virtual objects via interfaces, or nest within each other by forming classes (depending on the variant of the OOP paradigm, the focus is somewhat

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different). Realtalk’s objects adopted some of these characteristics from the OOP paradigm (more on this in a moment). At the same time, objects in Realtalk were no longer supposed to be virtual units of code and data, but also always things, and thus should have not only object properties but also thing properties, such as contour, position, weight or colour. Even more: All additional properties of these object/thing composites should now also be represented in the form of things, either in the object itself or in their interaction with other things. People should be able to manipulate all these things directly, for example by cutting a piece of paper or writing code on it, by drawing something on it or by pushing a stone around. Some of these manipulations would involve objects, others would simply involve things. Some of these manipulations, whether on the objects themselves or on other things, would then lead to consequences in the system—namely those which the material objects claimed to have interpreted (“as long as an object claims to have interpreted it”). Since material objects should always remain directly “in the world”, they would have to be organised and relate to each other in a different way than the virtual objects in the classic variants of the OOP paradigm. Breaking with almost everything that is considered proven in the OOP paradigm, Realtalk was to be based on a “broadcast model” in which material objects broadcast “claims” and “wishes” in step with the system time and react to them. The material objects should therefore be able to make and send out statements and wishes in relation to themselves (e.g. the claim to be called “Frieda” or the wish to be illuminated in red), but also in relation to other material objects and to the space between the material objects called “canvas”. The aim was to enable forms of systemic coupling that were unusually loose, sometimes deliberately diffuse and at the same time, from the point of view of common variants of the OOP paradigm, almost obscenely invasive. Bret modelled these forms of coupling upon the world in which these objects were located. There, according to Bret, interrelationships are of a different nature than in systems that are constituted by virtual objects, because in the world, material objects are less controllable (hence, for example, the cautious desires of material objects), but sometimes also influence each other more directly (hence the possibility of material objects to intervene directly in other material objects by means of assertions). These are only fragments, albeit important ones, in which first Bret alone and then the whole group worked on new solutions. Realtalk also organised the temporality inherent in the system in new ways. A new “kernel”, a system core, was built. The hardware set-up varied the experiments with cameras and projectors, which had proven themselves in “Hypercard-in-the-World”, but which were now no longer connected to lasers but to the material objects scattered in space. This

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in turn required a technical solution for visual recognition. Since Bret refused on principle to use the machine learning system, which was otherwise highly popular in Silicon Valley, the group had to come up with new solutions here too. All these tasks were labour-intensive and therefore led to the focus on technical work, which Bret complained about in the above-mentioned mail on the “yak stack” (where one of the issues was that the group was threatening to wear itself out in the upper technical levels of the “yak stack”). And as if all this was not yet enough of a challenge, Realtalk was now being built within itself—similar to the “big board”, but now more consistently. In other words: Realtalk itself was made of filmed paper. In its decisive parts, it consisted of exactly the same kind of material objects that made it such in the first place (Fig. 3). This technical recursion of the self-generating Realtalk was also described by the engineers as “bootstrapping”—in other words, they used the same word for this technical process that they used when describing the idea of a socio-technical recursion in the development of new paradigms that goes back to Engelbart. The two meanings of the word are not the same. However, they are connected, and not only because both are recursions. “Bootstrapping” as a technical recursion is not too unusual an achievement, although it is not a trivial one either. In the

Fig. 3 Realtalk, built within itself (Photo GB)

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case of Realtalk, however, not only was a programming language built in itself, but also, if we take the view of the group, a nascent new medium was formed in itself. This, in turn, should enable the research group to bootstrap itself in the socio-technical sense as well, i.e. as a network of people and technology in search of a new medium. This was to be done in Dynamicland. To build Dynamicland, the group moved into a loft of approximately 200 m2 in Oakland. Dynamicland was to be many things: a first iteration of the new medium, “a place for all people to build, study, play, speak, learn in fundamentally new ways”, but also “a new kind of computer”, powered by Realtalk as the operating system. In this space, which as a space was a “new kind of computer”, the characteristics of a new spatial medium were thus to appear in new social practices. In addition to the intensive technical work, the group had repeatedly worked on how to describe and classify this medium: One example was a reading session called “why?”, in which the group discussed authors such as Theodore Roszak, Noam Chomsky (the political writings), Marshall McLuhan or John Durham Peters; another was the work on a “zine”, which included a comic strip that imagined future ways of using it, as well as references to the history of technology and media strung together in lines of traditions. There was now consensus on the initial problem which was clearly identifiable retrospectively: “Computers are anti-social, they make limited use of the human body’s capabilities, and their true power (reprogrammability) is inaccessible to most people” (according to Toby Schachmann in an email in September 2017). But the group struggled to find words and images to describe what could replace this form of computer, and also different visions of such a substitute. Some engineers, like Schachmann, emphasised the social aspects of the nascent medium (often referred to with the adjective “together”), others, like Bret, the ability to understand complex systems, and yet others, like Paula Te or Luke Iannini, saw in the medium above all its political potential. All this should now become a reality in Dynamicland. Of course, this was not without compromise. Step by step the group downgraded its technical ambitions—after all, Dynamicland was also a great prototype for itself. So, the group did not succeed in making laptops completely superfluous in Dynamicland either. Written code also played an even greater role than the group had anticipated and was therefore printed on the things that were to function as objects. The printed code could not yet be read by the system because common forms of camera resolution and character recognition were not reliable enough. The transitional solution required that all objects be framed by dots that encoded numbers and were easy to recognise by machines. Soon Dynamicland was full of colourful dots and in early summer 2017 Realtalk became operational in Dynamicland

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for the first time. But it was also so slow that it was soon internally renamed “Slowtalk”. In order to move faster into the state of experimenting with media properties, the group built a new iteration of Realtalk called “Demotalk”. The latter made further compromises in the periphery without abandoning Realtalk’s radical core ideas. Demotalk was not seen as a step backwards, but rather as a step to the side, because it was based on the proof that the conceptually more consistent version of Realtalk was slow but possible “in principle”. Demotalk worked and was fast. Dynamicland was born. In the process of creating Realtalk and Dynamicland, the group had gained new experiences of cooperation. At times, they had worked under the premise that each member of the group had to fully understand everything that everyone else was doing, both technically and conceptually, at all times—an enormously complex process that led to almost symbiotic forms of cooperation (Fig. 4). Now that a first version of Dynamicland was working, forms of cooperation emerged, which were often more loosely knitted, but without falling back into the old, lonely state. And so, there was tinkering, cutting, shaping, pushing, printing, projecting, copying and programming, resulting in genuine pleasure for all. All the prototypes that were now built consisted of alliances of things and thing-like

Fig. 4 Work in Dynamicland (Photo GB)

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objects. After a short time, these prototypes filled the walls, tables, floors of the laboratory and even the kitchen counter was beeping and flashing. Instruments and simulations, tools and animations, games and interactive books were created—and their creation no longer took years, but hours or days. The processes that controlled the prototypes were now truly exposed “in the world”. The prototypes were an invitation to approach them at any time to inspect and modify them. Imitation was as much a part of the system as “riffing”, a process-related “riffing” that did not simply string prototypes together one after the other, but allowed them to emerge from their spatial, parallel juxtaposition. Prototypes interweaved without destabilising each other. They now remained “in progress” much more often, because they were functional much earlier and at the same time continued to develop together with other projects. In fact, they often acted not only as sources of imitation, but also as “tools” for creating other prototypes. Visitors described the system as “multiplayer-by-default” and “inherently against individual property and individual control”. To what extent such experiences were really due to Dynamicland’s media characteristics and to what extent other factors, such as its novelty, the social process of the group or the dynamics of a “jam”, is difficult to say. But every day the engineers seemed to discover new features and new possibilities of the system. Even now, nobody could know whether the group’s “staircase” would eventually lead to the next “platform” or even to a goal. Nevertheless, in the summer of 2017, the members of the group had the feeling that they would soon succeed in stabilising Dynamicland as a “platform” from which something new would become visible. In a searching and sometimes chaotic process they had tried out different forms of recursion, but also more than these. And in this way, they had created a space in which it became possible to experience what it might mean if we were one day to liberate a more spatial and social form of combinatorics from the computer as a “box with a screen”. The future will show whether a new medium will one day emerge from this.

References Bardini, T. (2000). Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, co-evolution and the origin of personal computing. Stanford University Press. Engelbart, D. (1962). Augmenting human intellect: A conceptual framework. Summary report. AFO SR 3223. Stanford Research Institute.

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Engelbart, D., & English, W. (1968). A research center for augmenting human intellect. In AFIPS Conference Proceedings of the 1968 Fall Joint Computer Conference 33, San Francisco (pp. 395–410). ACM. Jasanoff, S. (2015). Imagined and invented worlds. In S. Jasanoff & S.-H. Kim (Eds.), Dreamscapes of modernity (pp. 321–341). University of Chicago Press. Jiménez, A. C. (2014). Introduction—The prototype: More than many and less than one. Journal of Cultural Economy, 7(4), 381–398. Kay, A. C. (1996). The early history of smalltalk. In T. J. Bergin & R. G. Gibson (Eds.), History of programming languages II (pp. 511–578). ACM Press. Kay, A. C. (2017). What made Xerox PARC special? Who else today is like them? Quora. https://www.quora.com/What-made-Xerox-PARC-special-Who-else-today-is-like-them/ answer/Alan-Kay-11. Accessed 1 Dec 2017. Kelty, C. (2008). Two bits: The cultural significance of free software. Duke University Press. Suchman, L., Trigg, R., & Blomberg, J. (2002). Working artefacts: Ethnomethods of the prototype. British Journal of Sociology, 53(2), 163–179. Süßbrich, U. (2005). Vision Forschung. Wie interaktive Schnittstellen in Medienlaboratorien entwickelt werden. Eine ethnographische Studie. Lang. Turner, F. (2006). From counterculture to cyberculture. University of Chicago Press. Victor, B. (2011). Up and down the ladder of abstraction: A systematic approach to interactive visualisation. http://worrydream.com/LadderOfAbstraction. Accessed 8 Feb 2017.

Part IV Beyond the Situation

Creating Trans-Situativity: Air Travel and Its Media Larissa Schindler

When Erving Goffman published ‘The Neglected Situation’ (1964) in the mid1960s, sociology was hardly interested in situationist studies, but primarily in social structure and the development of statistical methods. Today situationist approaches are part of the standard repertoire of sociology. Moreover, it is not only situationist approaches that are interested in the inherent dynamics of situations and interactions: Luhmann’s systems theory also considers systems of interaction to be indispensable. Heintz (2014), for example, has shown that even global systems cannot do without interaction, whereby she represents the narrower definition of temporal and spatial co-presence in line with Luhmann and Goffman. In this sense, various studies in recent decades have enabled a detailed and deep knowledge of situational dynamics, of ‘moments and their [people]’ (Goffman, 2005 [1967], p. 3),1 their bodies and their things. In doing so, many answer the call for a ‘methodological situationism’ which Knorr Cetina (1981, p. 7 ff.; 1988, p. 22 ff.) already formulated in the early 1980s as part of a ‘microsociological challenge’. According to Knorr Cetina (1988, p. 27 ff. following Goffman, 1964, p. 134) situations form a reality sui generis, for which she puts forward three arguments: Firstly, she claims that social phenomena occur with reference to the respective environment; secondly, she argues that there are emergent phenomena (dynamics) that can only be understood through precise

1 I have replaced the original ‘men’ for ‘people’, since it seems to reflect more adequately the contemporary use of language.

L. Schindler (B) University of Bayreuth, Bayreuth, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 S. Gießmann et al. (eds.), Materiality of Cooperation, Medien der Kooperation— Media of Cooperation, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-39468-4_10

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microanalyses; thirdly, she maintains that social phenomena are highly contingent and cannot be predicted, partly because rules and structures are not always reproduced. The co-presence of social actors in situations (or in the terminology of systems theory: in the interaction system) thus has a decisive significance in the sociological description of social dynamics. However, situations do not exist just like that, but must be created and framed by the participants through cooperation in various forms (Goffman, 1986 [1974]). The interactively produced boundaries of situations are therefore always fragile (Bergmann, 2013). In this sense, the existence of trans-situational phenomena is by no means ignored in situationist approaches. In particular, three theoretical discussions that challenge situationism are worthy of mention in this respect: 1. Among the representatives of micro-sociological approaches in particular, there is a pronounced interest in an analytical concept that can establish a link to macro-sociological phenomena, the famous ‘micro–macro-link’ (Alexander et al., 1987). Work on this goes back a long way, for example to Goffman’s proposals on framework analysis (1986 [1974]) and loose coupling (1983) or Randall Collins’ reflections on ritual chains of interaction (2000).2 2. Mobility studies (Sheller & Urry, 2006, 2016; Urry, 2007), which have been established since the 1990s, build a bridge between sociology and cultural geography. Like micro-sociological and praxeological research, they are interested in cultural practices, but distance themselves from a sociology that uses ‘social mobility’ as a metaphor for the analysis of social structures, largely ignoring geographical mobility. Social sciences have fallen into a sedentarism (Malkki, 1992, pp. 31–37). This critique can also be levelled against the methodological situationism of micro-sociology as long as it reduces mobility to its inner-situational dimension. 3. For several decades now, digital media have been almost omnipresent in modern everyday life, and the distinction between online and offline is hardly noticeable anymore. This constant expansion of interactions to include nonco-present participants or at least their communications in the context of a mediatisation of social worlds (Grenz & Möll, 2014; Krotz & Hepp, 2014) also pushes conventional situational analysis to its limits. Media studies therefore offer innovative challenges for situationalism, especially its interactive or

2

The micro–macro link is still a widely discussed topic today, as a recently published special issue of the Zeitschrift für Soziologie shows (Heintz & Tyrell, 2014).

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praxeological approaches (Knorr Cetina, 2009; Schüttpelz & Gießmann, 2015; Schüttpelz, 2016). All three perspectives challenge situationalism both theoretically and empirically, because they take into account changes in scale and range. In the following I will refer to the last two, i.e. mobility studies and the discussion about the mediatisation of everyday life. The starting point of my considerations is that situations are usually not self-contained, but have a before, an after and several besides. As many (especially micro-sociological) works emphasise, situations connect to others, for example by taking up imports from other situations (e.g. Scheffer, 2001, 2007) or by making connections across distance and time zones through scopic media (e.g. Knorr Cetina, 2009). In various forms, situations are linked in this way. This highlights that situations do not only have a communicative and symbolic dimension, but also a material one. Such material connections are ignored if one focuses on only one situation. Against this background I understand media here less in their function as mediators of communication between people (e.g. Hickethier, 2003), but rather as mediators between situations. In this way it becomes clear how connections between situations are created by the execution of cooperative actions of different participants. At the same time, this cooperative action ‘on site’ in a situation practically mediatises different participants, temporarily turning them into media (Boll, 2018). In the following, I will therefore focus on the following questions: How do situations link with external events, how do they change their boundaries or connect to each other? What forms of passage can take place between situations and how do different participants become media in which form? How is trans-situativity realised in practice? For this purpose, I refer to empirical material from an ethnographic study on the physical performance of technical mobility in the context of air travel.3 Of course, air travel is only one possible subject among many where such connections and links can be discussed. However, it is a particularly promising subject, because air travel is a trans-situational practice that involves a particularly large number of such links and connections. A series of practices already takes place in the run-up to the actual flight: planning, booking, packing, getting to the airport, checking in, security checks and waiting phases. Usually, a large number of means of transport are also involved in making a trip by aircraft: car, taxi, train

3

This study was funded by the German Research Foundation from March 2016 until June 2020 (project number 271437443; project leader: Larissa Schindler).

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to the airport, escalators, moving walkways, bus to the tarmac, etc. At the airport, various procedures such as check-in, security checks, waiting for boarding, etc. have to be carried out, while luggage is transported by, among other things, conveyor belts, transport baskets, elevators and trucks. Human and material participants (Hirschauer, 2004) must be mobile, and various media are used. From the participants’ point of view, air travel is primarily experienced as a passage between two situations, between ‘here’ (e.g. at home) and ‘there’ (on holiday, at the destination). But if one wants to understand the practical realisation of its trans-situativity, one has to concentrate on the individual stations of this journey, on the many interruptions of the flow that occur again and again within its framework, and on the connections between the many situations that arise as a result. In a sense, one has to do the exact opposite of what travellers do who want to make the fastest possible progress and who hardly (want to) notice interruptions, if at all possible. Trans-situativity arises when different situations are brought into connection, which very often happens through material linkage via things, bodies, spaces, etc. The trans-situative practice of air travel only takes place when different (material) connections are made. They can therefore be well researched within this framework. After a description of the methodology (1), I will focus in the following on three variants of linking: linking situations by different mobile participants (2), linking places and settings by an infrastructure of mobility (3) and linking with the extra-situational by mobile media practices (4).

1

Methods

As already mentioned, the empirical data for the following observations comes from an ethnographic study on the physical implementation of technical mobility in the context of air travel. Following the rules of ethnographic research (e.g. Breidenstein et al., 2013; Kalthoff, 2010, 2013), the study relies on a plurality of context-sensitive research methods. The empirical corpus so far comprises field notes from participant observations on short, medium and long-haul flights as well as interviews, photos and short video recordings. These different types of data and corresponding methods are associated with varying degrees of proximity or distance to the field. Especially participant observation is often viewed critically because of its autoethnographic moments.4 Nevertheless, it provides a sensory 4

In this context, the question of reflexivity becomes particularly relevant. However, these considerations do not go far enough if they relate reflection primarily to the person of the

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enculturation of the researchers like no other method. Goffman (1989, p. 125 f.) already emphasised in a lecture in the mid-1970s that one’s own body must be ‘tuned’ to the practice under investigation, that one must not only observe events as closely as possible, but also experience them with one’s own body in order to perceive what guides those people whose lives and habits one wants to describe.5 Ethnographic research therefore does particular justice to the ‘silence of the social’ (Hirschauer, 2006), and writing thus takes on a special significance in this context. These somewhat classical methods of ethnography cannot be viewed separately from the activity of travelling. The literary scholar Grivel (1994, p. 254), for example, formulated the connection between writing and travelling as follows: ‘Sitting down at a desk, at a typewriter, in front of the paper, this is all setting something in motion—getting out of traffic, taking the phone off the hook, not being available, in short: disappearing’. Both writing and travelling, but above all ‘travel writing’ (Grivel, 1994), thus form a simultaneous presence and absence. This requires a constant shifting of one’s own distance to the object of research. However, the aforementioned sedentariness bias of the social and cultural sciences is particularly evident in the research of mobile phenomena. Since travel is not absorbed in a single situation, but rather arises through several situations, interactions and settings, its exploration requires a mobilisation of research methods, which can succeed to varying degrees. Therefore, ‘mobile methods’ (Büscher et al., 2010; Merriman, 2014) are constantly being developed. In my research project, such a mobilisation of research methods takes place through a rather unusual type of material, namely logbooks.6 Iasked travellers to write down their impressions during or shortly after a flight trip.7 Like interviews, these logbooks are ‘invited stories’ (Cuff & Francis, 1978), because they would researcher and not also to the practice of research. Müller (2016) and Lichterman (2017) make particularly instructive suggestions in this regard. 5 The cited essay is a publication edited and annotated by Lyn H. Lofland of the lecture Goffman gave at the conference of the Pacific Sociological Association in 1974. 6 For a detailed discussion of this data, see Schindler (2020). Kunz (2015) also works with a method known as ‘logbooks’. However, this differs from my approach: Kunz uses prestructured questionnaires as a survey instrument, in which the research subjects enter and comment on campus use and study behaviour along predetermined questions. 7 They differ from the aforementioned travel writing, which Grivel (1994) sketches, because their content refers to the actual journey. There is a similarity, however, in that they are about writing while travelling. This is certainly physically easier to do when travelling by air than when cycling, for example, but it still requires a specific concentration from the writers. In some cases, the writing of logbooks failed, for example because of fatigue or because there were no writing utensils in a traveller’s hand luggage.

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not have been written without my intervention. Similar to diaries (Hirschauer & Hofmann, 2012), however, their production is a documentary activity largely independent of me as a researcher. Because I am not present during the writing process, I cannot—unlike in an interview—influence it by asking questions. For this reason and because of their spatial and temporal location, logbooks are socially much closer to the events of the flight than interviews. At the same time, they are an interesting supplement to the logs of participant observations, because they induce an observer triangulation and thus make it possible to experience different aspects of an air journey from different perspectives. This is particularly interesting in those passages of the flight—such as security checks—, which are only accessible to empirical research to a very limited extent (for more details see Pütz, 2012, pp. 159–164). Created alongside my own observations the logbooks modified the focus of my records in a fruitful way: They described flight habits and strategies that I would not have thought of myself. These include dealing with baggage restrictions, but also making targeted reservations in the rear of the aircraft, because the experience gained from many flights suggests that there is less seat occupancy there. I have used these inputs on my own flights as a starting point to try out new avenues of travelling and to frame experiences differently. In a way, they inspired me to experiment with my own flying habits and strategies and thus to expand and explore the scope of possibilities. Morever, these logbooks—like interviews—also provide access to the explicit knowledge of air passengers. They give hints about what is ‘worth’ describing and what will be lost in writing. In this way, they also modify the always theoretically inspired view of participant observation and direct it back to what is relevant to the participants. The evaluation of the data follows the logic of qualitative research, as it has been exemplarily formulated in Grounded Theory (Glaser & Strauss, 1967). Alternating data collection and analysis phases ensure that the focus is constantly sharpened and adjusted, thus enabling continuous quality assurance. The triangulating evaluation of different data types is based in particular on the considerations of Kalthoff (2010). He calls for keeping in mind that different methods produce differing forms of empirical phenomena and for using the resulting differences productively.

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Mobile Participants in Air Travel: The Situational Linking of Bodies and Things

Air travel can be seen as the epitome of modern travel, as airplanes transport human bodies (and some of their belongings) over particularly long distances in a particularly short time. However, with the invention of teleconferencing and the development of virtual travel worlds, flying could have become obsolete. Interestingly, however, the constant development of technically mediated communication is accompanied by a steady increase in passenger flights. According to statistics from the German Airports Association (ADV), for example, by 2018 Germany had seen a 30% increase in airline passengers over the previous ten years. Even in the (at first glance disembodied) mediatised worlds (Krotz & Hepp, 2014), many social processes seem to require the physical meeting of people and thus the travelling of bodies. These include business and private meetings as well as tourist activities aimed at the sensory experience of foreign spaces and people. In this context the mobility researcher John Urry speaks of the phenomenon of meetingness (2003). Heintz (2014) explains this phenomenon from a perspective of systems theory with the intrinsic quality of systems of interaction, which in a particular way promote consensus and thus strengthen the binding nature of joint decisions.8 Human bodies thus become media of cooperation. However, this involves a serious effort. It is precisely the materiality of this cooperation that requires a mobilisation of bodies (and things) whose trans-situational character entails a constant linking of situations. Physical travel in general requires the creation of a mobile formation of bodies and things, a vehicular unit (Goffman, 1971, pp. 5–18) that moves through various situations. Air travel has particularly high prerequisites in this respect, because stricter regulations apply to the transport of things and because it is usually booked well in advance. Very often, therefore, extensive preparations and planning take place early on, which makes air travel relevant in various situations, sometimes long before it actually takes place. The following extract from a logbook deals with such preparations: The travel preparations on my list also include: cleaning and tidying up, writing and laying down instructions for friends who will be watering our plants, washing and 8

The same is most likely true for the sensorial nature of tourist activities. Here it should be repeated that physical co-presence is of course by no means a contradiction to situations communicated through media or that it would in any way create an ‘offline area’. The fact that physical co-presence has a quality of its own does not mean that one can avoid the mediatisation of situations.

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hanging up the last bit of laundry, moving leftover food from the fridge to the freezer. So somehow getting everything on standby for the time we are not there. Take out the rubbish, for example, because otherwise the organic waste in particular will continue to grow by itself. And only the plants should do that. The list does not seem to end at all. What else is there to do before you can start travelling?? (logbook N, intercontinental flight, September 2015)

In this section of the logbook, the main focus is on preparing to leave one’s own home, which should continue to function or be functional again when returning, independently occurring biological processes are kept in check as much as possible. The situation in the here and now and the future situation of the ‘here again and then’ are therefore performed not only mentally, but also through a material arrangement of the situation in which returnees will find themselves. For this purpose, the interim period is managed as a ‘state’ that remains virtually static until the time the traveller returns.9 In a similar vein, communication expectations on site (family, friends, work) are often put on hold, for example by writing an out-of-office message for professional email communication. In addition, the body has to be adapted for the journey (clothing, vaccinations, compression stockings, medication for fear of flying or motion sickness), and those things that are taken along have to be selected and made ready for the journey. The situation of preparation thus anticipates other situations: for example, the situation in the aircraft cabin, where the body will have little movement. Knorr Cetina (e.g. 2006, p. 236 ff.) has repeatedly pointed out the binding forces of things. Grivel has formulated the withdrawal from these binds particularly drastically. ‘Normally I am what I use up, the unending series of things that I purchase. As a traveler I only resemble the contents of my suitcase: I have nothing, I am nothing’ (1994, p. 249; emphasis in original). Most logbooks describe packing and thus the selection of ‘travel things’ and the creation of the necessary travel documents as rather laborious, for example as follows: What looks so easy for my friend, who works as a representative for a software company, takes me a whole afternoon: I buy transparent plastic bottles and fill them with my personal hygiene products. I measure and weigh my suitcase. I try my hand at online check-in. [...] I call the Lufthansa hotline. I get the wrong department. Try again, etc. Eventually I manage to do it and send a text message to the co-worker who has organised everything, telling him that I will be meeting the others only at the gate. 9

Fuller (2009, p. 67 ff.) points out that airports produce a present that is primarily shaped by the future. However, this phenomenon is not only to be found at the airport, but throughout the entire journey.

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Finally, I finish packing and put my suitcase next to the door of my flat – at 4:30 in the morning, I’m probably still half delirious and will otherwise forget half of the things I meant to take along. (logbook I, October 2015)

In addition to the efforts of preparation, strategies for dealing with one’s own body and habits are also touched upon in this section. Here, the suitcase is placed in such a way that it reminds one of itself, so to speak, to ensure that it becomes part of the travelling body/thing formation. In this way the suitcase links the situation of packing with that of departure. It will also be present in various other situations of travelling as an import from the preceding stages. In the context of air travel, the mobile body/thing formation is particularly flexible. It has to be reorganised again and again in the course of the journey, for example by storing luggage in different carriers and means of transport. Finally, at the airport, a gradual decomposition takes place on the way to the seat on the plane. Not only are travellers often separated from their checked baggage, which goes its own way with its own chances for getting lost (Potthast, 2007). In the course of the screening procedures there is also a further temporary separation of the travellers from their things, which is often experienced as particularly drastic: Here too, I immediately have the feeling that even something small could be enough to prevent me from travelling. The scan cabin, into which I then go virtually naked, i.e. without my belongings, does nothing to relieve my tension. It’s a strange feeling to be X-rayed for the second time today, once as a person and once as a body, in search of things, so to speak. When the machine beeps and the woman pats me down again, for a moment I’m really nervous. Totally stupid. But then it’s all over, I scrape my things back together from the conveyor belt and pack everything up again. (logbook N, September 2015)

Particularly in the course of the screening procedures, a de- and re-composition of the body/thing formation takes place within a relatively short period of time, which creates its own unique atmosphere (Adey, 2009). This flexibility also becomes relevant after the various checks when boarding the aircraft. Here, many travellers separate themselves from their hand luggage, all settle into the material infrastructure of the seats and remain almost motionless for the duration of the flight. In a way, the body is also stored in this process. Only after landing, on the way out of the plane and through the destination airport, are bodies and things mobilised again and successively returned to their original formation, re-composed. Here too, various participants are involved. The hand luggage is taken by the passengers, the checked luggage is loaded from the aircraft onto trucks using lifting trolleys, which transport it on their own routes

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to an agreed meeting point (the conveyor belt), where the passengers are then allowed to take it themselves. Bodies and things thus become relevant in various formations through the many stations of the journey, allowing at various points a recourse or anticipation of coming events and situations. The trans-situational practice of air travel is brought about by such a material linking of different situations. But how are the transitions between the situations managed?

3

Infrastructures of Mobility: Connecting Places

The mobilisation of people, their bodies and things does not take place in a vacuum. Various authors have pointed out that media also require a specific infrastructure. Parks (2015), for example, has promoted the concept of media infrastructures against previously existing discussions in media studies that tended to focus on networks. Urs Stäheli has highlighted the importance of infrastructures for the emergence of collectives, whereby the individual becomes the medium of flows of imitation and movement (2012, p. 102). In the following, I am interested in how the linking of situations described above is made possible by material infrastructures of air travel. In other words, how are those places where the desired situations can take place linked? Which settings are made relevant in the context of the trans-situative practice of air travel and in what form? Methodologically, this focus requires a more analytical view of the details of the event. Only in this way can the complexity of materiality be understood in detail. However, this is accompanied by a more selective description of social processes—at the expense of completeness. In the following I will concentrate on three intersections that become relevant in the course of an air journey: the railway station as a link between city and airport, the airport as a link between city and airplane, and the gate as a link between airport and airplane. The infrastructure of air travel does not start at the airport. One can, for example, find elements of the airport infrastructure explicitly designated as such in the surrounding urban infrastructure. Particularly obvious are the airport trains present in some cities, such as the Arlanda Express (Stockholm), the Malpensa Express (Milan) or the CAT (Vienna). They produce a material demarcation of flying in relation to the space outside the airport and at the same time form a link with the urban infrastructure.10 Another element of airport infrastructure within cities are signs and their electronic variant, displays. They can also be found on 10

An interesting case for such a link between the infrastructure of the airport and the city is the Vienna City Check In Terminal (VCT) at Wien Mitte station, the departure station of the CAT (City Airport Train). Here, passengers of certain airlines can check in outside the airport

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the various routes to the airport and thus form material links, transitions from the urban to the airport infrastructure. A variant of such a link between the city train station and the airport can be found in the following notes excerpt: On the day of departure, I have some time in the morning to visit Tokyo if I can store my luggage at the city train station. That’s why I go there the day before departure and check, first of all, where the train is departing from. I find a terminal with a display that shows me connections in English. For lack of pen and paper I take a picture of three possible connections. Secondly I check where it is possible to leave my luggage. There are lockers, but only very few for such a large station. I ask a woman at the tourist information office. She gives me a small piece of paper with the connection from here to the airport. Nice, I think, but I’ve already got that far. Second try. She points behind me, there are a few lockers. She notices that they are all full and points to a shop, asks if I see it, and says that there are some lockers there as well. (notes by the author, March 2016)

The setting of this railway station offers a functioning infrastructure not only for train travel, but also for sightseeing and air travel. In this way, it is also possible to link all three practices. Lockers offer the possibility of temporarily ‘freeing’ the already formed mobile body-thing assemblage of air travel from all those elements that are not suitable for sightseeing.11 In this case, the terminal also replaces an Internet search for the way to the airport, but cannot fully guarantee orientation at a large, unknown railway station. The staff at the tourist information office are apparently prepared for the fact that the infrastructure does not provide complete orientation for travellers and are available to answer the questions that tourists are likely to ask frequently. So here, where communication between people and things is not always reliable, it is people who replace this communication (with things or technologies). People thus become, as Simone (2004) argues, part of the urban infrastructure. If some signs and displays are already found on the way to the airport as part of the airport infrastructure, they become a characteristic element at the airport itself. The path through the airport is usually full of signs, pictograms and displays. at the City Terminal located in the centre of the city and, if necessary, check in their baggage. Only then they travel to the airport on the CAT, saving time and travelling in comfort without baggage. Another exciting phenomenon is airport hotels that are booked for business meetings without any direct connection to flying (McNeill, 2009). 11 In this case it is empirically unclear and analytically irrelevant whether the lockers were built for this purpose or rather for the many shops in this part of the station. According to Potthast (2016, p. 143), railway stations can also be regarded as ‘architectures of compromise’ in which competing interests are taken into account. The selected excerpt shows a productive element of this phenomenon.

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Then there are the displays of mobile phones, tablets and laptops, which many travellers carry with them. At the same time, redundant instructions for movement can be found again and again: Following the signs, we arrive at the check-in area. We use the screens at the counters to find out where our airline is. When we see the logo, a friendly man approaches us and asks if we are flying with this airline and to which destination. He seems unusually friendly, but maybe that is only because he is the first human sign in this organism. Signs don’t usually smile. He shows us the right counters. (logbook N, intercontinental flight, September 2015)

This logbook also describes how people compensate for potentially unsuccessful orientation by displays or signs. It shows how strongly the architectural and organisational design of airports is oriented towards guiding passengers to their aircraft, even when airports simultaneously serve many other competing interests. Airports are a setting that connects city and airplane. On the one hand, they are settings for many different practices (e.g. commerce, sightseeing, but sometimes also simply a transfer station for train passengers) and thus, as described above for train stations, they allow different practices to take place simultaneously and to be combined. On the other hand, however, the architectural and organisational design of airports is very much oriented towards processing a separation between flight-related people (passengers, staff) and all others. The mobile body-thing assemblage of travellers will be gradually brought into flight formation, while all non-air passengers will be excluded from the event at the latest at the boundary between ground- and air/flight-related activities. The airport is thus a setting that increasingly focuses on flight-related practices by preventing many other practices as far as possible. This diminishing connectivity to non-airport-related practices is accompanied by a certain passivity on the part of travellers, which—according to Potthast (2016, p. 134)—begins with the separation from their baggage. In the other air/flight-related stations (identification and screening of passengers and their hand luggage, boarding), queuing and waiting become the determining activities. Although it is possible to be distracted by consumerism and opportunities for reading and working, this ultimately confirms the abundance of time. The gate is one of the places where waiting is the order of the day. At the same time, it is the setting that processes boarding and thus the transition from ground to air, from the building to the aircraft: At the gate there are again huge numbers of people waiting. We first try to get an overview and then look for two seats far away from the screaming children and hope

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that they will not sit near us. [...] The Lufthansa service team starts the check-in. As always, First Class, Business, parents with children and people with disabilities first. We wait for the call of our row. Boarding starts with the back rows, so we proceed to the gate. As always, we tried to catch one of the back rows. It’s usually quieter there and in the new A380, the flight crew has the least to do there and is therefore more friendly. In addition, if the flight is not fully booked, you have the chance of an empty seat next to you. [...] And although boarding is actually regulated, we wait in a line and move towards the plane at a snail’s pace. At the aircraft entrance the staff greet us, checks the boarding pass once more, and tells us whether we have to go left or right. All of this is superfluous, as we sometimes master these processes better than the flight crew. (logbook B, intercontinental flight, May 2014)

On the level of interaction, as the logbook describes, boarding is characterised by waiting and checks. If one focuses on the material dimension of the setting, the meticulously processed drawing of boundaries is striking. Passengers who have already been checked several times are checked again before they can pass the barrier of the revolving door and go to the aircraft. In Europe, this route is often made materially imperative by a tubular passenger bridge or almost imperative by buses and a gangway. Walking across the airfield to the gangway is only possible at small airports. This setting ultimately links ground and air by excluding—at least in civil mass transport aviation—all other possible practices. Even the way back, i.e. moving against the given direction, is only possible to a limited extent, and in some places is completely prohibited. The plane itself then forms the medium that links two airports and thus two places by transporting human bodies (and things). If bodies form media of cooperation for temporal and local co-presence, public transport spaces such as railway stations, roads and airports form the infrastructure for mobility and its media. After leaving the airplane at the destination airport, not only does a (re-) mobilisation of bodies and things and a re-formation of the original body/thing formation by picking up the flight baggage take place, but also an increasing opening of the setting for competing practices and non-flight related people.

4

Mobile Media Practices: Linking with the Extra-Situational

In the context of air travel, mobile media practices also appear in a variety of ways: Online check-in, smartphone tickets, text messages and calls during travel, social media postings and so on. Dodge and Kitchin (2004) point out that these media practices not only appear here but are constitutive for the functioning of

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air travel. The flight ticket, for example, is always integrated into the electronic system of airlines and airports. Without access to this system, it is not possible to purchase a flight ticket. Dodge and Kitchin therefore see air travel as a prime example of the convergence of virtual communication networks (code) and material movement (space) in a ‘code/space’. In various ways, media link what is happening on site with other situations that lie in the future or the past or take place in parallel in other places. ‘Synthetic situations’ emerge that also make spatially absent elements a part of the situation (Knorr Cetina, 2009). How and in what form do mobile media practices create such links? A frequently used option for air travel is online check-in.12 As with many other practices, it can be carried out using different devices: smartphone, tablet or computer. The following excerpt from the protocol of my trip to Japan shows how firmly online check-in has become established: I arrive at the airport almost two hours before departure because this time I have to check in the ‘classic’ way – I think. This is because my flight to Tokyo was booked in Japan. I stand at the check-in terminal and enter my data. The boarding pass comes out of the machine, but there is no seat number on it. I ask one of the staff, she tells me to ask at the boarding desk. So, I set off. At the gate there is an announcement that the flight is overbooked and that they are looking for volunteers to fly tomorrow instead of today. I think about the fact that such offers never come when I am able to take advantage of them, and I look around. After a while I randomly look at a display and see the waiting list for the flight AND there is an abbreviation ‘schin’. I can’t believe my eyes and go to the counter to ask. I am actually on the waiting list! I ask how this is possible; the lady explains the overbooking system to me, not why it affects me. But it’s probably because I haven’t checked in online. I am appalled. But she says that normally enough passengers don’t show up, so it should work out anyway, and she thinks that there is a good chance. One thing seems clear to me, though, and that is that I won’t get a good seat. (notes by the author, March 2016)

First of all, this shows the impact that the lack of media-based preparation for a flight can have. Behind this lies a change in the network of involved actors, as Bruno Latour has repeatedly described (Johnson, 1988; Latour, 1996).13 It would be conceivable to simply distribute the seats on the plane locally, similar to seats at a joint meal or the free choice of seats at the cinema. However, the spatial arrangement of the aircraft is not ideal for this purpose, at least in economy class. The ‘old’ solution was to shift the distribution of seats to the check-in at the airport. The establishment of online check-in shifts it both temporally and 12

But conventional check-in at the airport also creates a new integration into the electronic system of the airline and the airport. Here, too, Dodge’s and Kitchin’s thesis is confirmed. 13 Latour published the first of these texts under the pseudonym of Johnson.

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spatially away from the airport into the everyday world of the passengers. At the same time, the technology of online check-in links the situation of sitting in front of a display (smartphone, tablet, computer) with the situation of sitting in an airplane; in a way, it connects the present with the future. This is often also done visually, for example by showing a top view of an aircraft in which you can choose ‘your’ seat with a click of the mouse. Materially, this process is based on the generation of an (electronic) document that will be imported via various media (paper, smartphone, tablet) on the day of travel into various interactions at the airport: to get baggage checked in and to the at least two ticket inspections. In doing so, not only does the respective carrier medium (e.g. the smartphone) temporarily become a ‘ticket’ that can be pulled over the scanner; it also becomes a medium of interaction taking place on site, in which the successful passing of the check triggers, for example, an approving glance from the checking employees and/or a friendly ‘Bon voyage’. Step by step, the still-virtual arrangement of passengers on seats stored in the system is thus materially realised. A further link is already made when booking the ticket and is confirmed with the online check-in: linking the situation in front of the screen with the airline’s security systems. By entering the data in online forms long before departure, personal checks are anticipated. Profiling is used to assess the ‘security risk’ posed by passengers (Adey, 2002). In addition, when passengers check in online, they usually receive instructions for orientation at the airport, such as from which terminal the flight will depart. Online check-in and guiding systems such as signs, icons and displays integrate potential external elements into the practice of air travel by keeping people on track on their way to the aircraft. At most airports this route is organised as a stop-and-go movement, people walk and wait, walk and wait. The waiting phases, which vary in length, provide opportunities for communication with people who are not present. Therefore, text messages and postings on various social media channels are also frequent components of air travel. In contrast to the various guiding systems, these media practices serve less to integrate people bit by bit into the flight, but operate as a link to the outside world, to people who are currently not present. In an interview, a traveller tells me that before departure she uses text messaging to positively confirm her relationship with particular people: Well, I know I’ll survive (laughs) and I also know that the plane probably won’t crash, but I always do it anyway, for example by sending a nice text message or something before I get on the plane (laughs). I don’t want to leave someone behind in a conflict or something like that (laughs). I think of it all in such a way that if something does happen my last text message I write to my boyfriend or something like that is not something stupid. (interview P, October 2016)

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The large presence of screen media in everyday life and their function in face-toface interactions become particularly noticeable when one considers their absence in the passenger cabin of airplanes. In contrast to pilots in the cockpit, who are constantly supplied with external information and are in a synthetic situation (Knorr Cetina, 2009, p. 80), passengers have so far been in an environment that is unusually poor in communication technology for modern-day life: On many flights, electronic devices must be switched off or put into ‘flight mode’ and radio communication is prohibited.14 Conversations are limited to fellow travellers and flight attendants, and thus mostly to strangers with whom one inescapably shares time and place. This creates a temporary togetherness that cannot be interrupted for the time of the flight, a total situation, so to speak (Schindler, 2015, pp. 300– 305, from which one cannot escape completely, but can only temporarily escape through media practices (reading, listening to music, watching films) or by falling asleep. Stefan Hirschauer points to a specific intensity inherent in face-to-face interaction: Being exposed to the situatedness of interactions means that one can use sites of events, artefacts at hand, bodies that make themselves noticed, people that are present, and ideas that impose themselves, all to capture the indexical meaning of communication. Bodies and artefacts have always been part of situations in that they provide the material infrastructure for processes of interaction. (Hirschauer, 2014, p. 119; transl. LS)

This material infrastructure for interactions is relatively pronounced, especially in airplanes. Although conversations are not forced upon you by the spatial setting, opportunities for retreat are severely limited and the only place where you can be completely unobserved is in the toilet. The virtual absence of telephone and Internet connections draws attention to the specific quality of these media: They reduce this intensity. This is exactly what their use is sometimes criticised for, but on the plane, this very quality seems to be strangely absent, it is missed. The reduction of intensity happens in two ways: On the one hand, mobile media practices create less dense forms of interaction (‘synthetic situations’); on the other hand, they create opportunities for retreat despite co-presence. This is precisely

14

However, some flights now have Wi-Fi connections, so this aspect will probably soon be a thing of the past. Nevertheless, the issue of smartphone connections in particular seems to be controversial; there are certainly voices against it, partly because you cannot freely choose your seat on a plane (The Economist, 1.3.2017).

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what is restricted in the aircraft—the situation becomes so intense that some passengers find it difficult to bear (Allert, 2008). Therefore, a common practice is to flee from presence. Displays provide an infrastructure of distraction: On the screen in the row in front of me I read that there are still ten hours of flight to go, local time at the destination airport 9:13. How is that actually meant? Should we stay awake? Or do we sleep a little? Actually, it would be fun, of course, but I can’t imagine that I can manage a 32-hour day. 17:13 Japanese time. That would mean I would stay awake until 4:00 in the morning? And then I’d have to stay awake for a few more hours in Germany to get into that rhythm. What I am really looking forward to is coffee. (notes by the author, March 2016)

Here the display allows a distraction from the permanent co-presence with other people; it is part of the practice of associating distant places and times, which is characteristic of flying. This practice produces a connection between the time zones of departure and arrival airports, thus presenting and creating the situation of flying as an ‘intermediate zone’, a kind of capsule between time zones, a zone that evades its own time. If there is no display available, other media can be used to distract oneself from the situation overburdened by presence: Once again, I ask myself why people have to be transported sitting down and who came up with the idea that we have to be awake when doing so. There is no television in this little plane either – because I can’t sleep anymore, I put my nose back in the book. (logbook P, domestic European holiday flight, May 2015)

In this excerpt, the situation in the aircraft is commented on in a particularly striking way. Flight time seems to have to be filled with activity somehow: sleeping, watching television or reading make such a filling of time possible. At the same time, the selection of activities, which apparently does not include conversations with seat neighbours, suggests that what is truly desired is the possibility of withdrawing from being co-present with the other passengers. In the course of an air journey, cooperation often seems to take place without consensus. Passengers and staff maintain the normally peaceful situation, although it sometimes seems unbearable. The extent to which many passengers want to escape from it is also evident in the way that shortly after landing a standing queue of people forms in the aisle long before you can disembark the aircraft. Many passengers use this moment to get back into the world of telephone and Internet connections.

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Air Travel and Its Material Links

For good reasons, many micro-sociological approaches follow a ‘methodological situationism’. This raises the question of the before, after and beside of situations, which have been problematised in various discussions, including those on the mobilisation and mediatisation of modern societies. I have taken up this question by drawing on empirical data from an ethnographic study on air travel, with the aim of understanding the material link between situations, including the link created by mobile media practices. In the process, three variants of such links were presented: Firstly, bodies can (be) turned into media of cooperation by travelling long distances to establish copresence with other people and/or in certain places. Their mobility enables them to be physically present in different situations, which are thus linked in a material (instead of virtual) form. Secondly, the infrastructure for such connections is formed by various settings that are available as vehicles for this mobility. Means of transport (in this case airplanes) form media that connect places in material form and thus make the above-mentioned cooperation possible. Thirdly, mobile media practices create a link that serves to integrate outsiders into the practice of air travel. Thereby things are turned into media in various forms through the cooperative actions of different participants. Online booking, online check-in, signs, displays and other things focus travellers on their way to the aircraft. In doing so, they link the practice of air travel in time and/or space with the private or professional everyday life of the passengers. Telephone calls, text messages or social media postings, on the other hand, are used and function as a contact to the world outside the respective situation. Their virtual absence in the passenger cabin of airplanes to date makes it clear just how much such external contacts can not only burden but also relieve face-to-face interaction in situations. In their place, many passengers use media such as books or films as a way of partially withdrawing from the situation.

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Varieties of Trans-Sequentiality: Diagnostics of Contemporary Capacities for Problem-Work, Developed from Ethnographies of the State Thomas Scheffer ‘What is going on here?’1 Studies in methodological situationalism set off with this basic question (see Goffman, 1983: 2), providing detailed analyses of social occurrences and performances such as gossip and joke telling, doctors’ visits and police patrols, marijuana smoking or joint TV consumption. In such studies, the locally ordered, methodical and self-sufficient execution of a joint social activity was ‘placed under the microscope’ (Ayaß & Meyer, 2012, trans. TS). From here, countless micro-studies took off and moved to extended and more complex collaborations in apparatuses, meaning in socio-material sites of stabilised problem-work. With the analysis of laboratory work, court hearings or asylum interviews, the focus shifted to longer stretches of ongoing joint efforts. Such activities could expand over several episodes and social situations. For the researcher, wider contexts, thus, meant having to stay a long while, just as ethnographers do, or having to return again and again in order to, as Marcus stresses, ‘to follow the object’ (1995, p. 96). Research processes, formal court or administrative proceedings, material or media productions—all of those episodes–process relations are, most of all, time consuming, both for members and for researchers. All of this is, even more so, practically tricky, again for those doing the work and for those studying it. In the following, I sketch out how members and, 1 I am thankful for helpful comments by Ronja Trischler, Martina Kolanoski and Robert Schmidt. The discussions in the Working Group on Political Ethnography at the HU Berlin and at the Goethe University Frankfurt provided crucial encouragement and inspiration.

T. Scheffer (B) Goethe-Universität Frankfurt Am Main, Frankfurt Am Main, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 S. Gießmann et al. (eds.), Materiality of Cooperation, Medien der Kooperation— Media of Cooperation, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-39468-4_11

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perhaps, apparatuses relate episodes and processes of work differently. Transsequential analysis, thus, follows closely what is going on and how by focusing on the practical relatings of work episodes and their process, work process and its episodes. Understanding ‘what is going on’ implicates a certain status of the current occasion in a wider process of meaning formation, fed into by a whole series of episodes. The episodes-in-process are gathered around a certain matter and/or object to be observable for all practical purposes. According to this analytical extension of Goffman’s methodical situationalism, a current social situation might not necessarily become the starting point for a trans-sequential endeavour. Members may agree or find themselves in a position to actually continue with this or to follow up on the matter-at-hand. They may find themselves at a moment when things are somehow already set prior to this, or when they need to remember what happened ‘last time’ in order to follow up on the interim result. The members try to avoid starting all over again. It seems some kind of practical wisdom. However, often the members just claim, but do not achieve a building up or an accumulative series of episodes. Members, then, simply forget or fail to reconstruct ‘where we were last time’. ‘Here and now’, members find themselves at a certain point within a work process in relation to a certain matter, which, like any of our sociological research itself, requires certain objects to collectively orient towards across various episodes: a draft version of a text, a sketch of a plan, a growing corpus of data, etc. The objects mark out or frame social situations as episodes of something. A single episode, what is more, retrospectively builds on already accumulated achievements and is prospectively oriented towards upcoming tasks to be completed. This work of relating situations as episodes requires some shared objectifications, meaning some ‘accountability’ (Garfinkel, 1967) of practices in regard to the members ‘object’ demonstrating ‘where we are right now’ “for all practical purposes” (ibid.). Joint object-orientation, this is our first claim, is crucial for any kind of work with its urge for efficacy. This is our second claim: often, members are more ambitious than just getting through a current social situation; frequently, they orient towards relatively lasting effects, for example by forming certain objects across a whole series of episodes. Something more is supposed to take shape, but requires continuities exceeding the single social situation. We call the objects that allow for this ‘extra’ or ‘surplus’ formative objects. A formative object gets formed over turns and episodes; it demands specific formats for possible contributions to it and it forms a collective of joint efforts. The formative object is worked on by collectives, whereas the collective is no longer limited to those co-present. The readily formed object

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promises social relevance and value once put into circulation, for example on markets (as commodity), discourses (as statement, judgment, etc.) and publics (as story, news, etc.). The three dimensions—formed, formatting, forming—define the formative character of the object. Members as well as researchers encounter a formative object in its current ‘interim’ state, meaning as being more than nothing and less than completed: certain aspects are to be worked out still, while others are already invested. The current state of the object-in-becoming translates into next tasks-at-hand for the members in charge or concerned. What is more, there are certain aims, ambitions or problems of reference2 attached to the formative object. To put it differently, the object-in-formation shall apply to certain extended problems. The joint problem-work is, via some kind of operationalisation, objectified and accountable. The completed object promises that it could serve as a response to certain problems. The members, while working on the formative object, demonstrate how they live up to or account for their responsibilities as somebody in charge, concerned or capable.3 They even might be obliged to deliver—and at times, they fail to do so due to some trouble regarding the work process. In the course of situated work episodes, specific practices take on a transsequential character. They contribute to a suitable social situation including its rituals and decorum; they contribute, by the same token, to a formative object, while assuming that the object formation will take a whole series of episodes.4 By way of the formative object, the members conduct a series of work episodes. They adopt the already invested and objectified work and orient towards the work that the object demands for next. This is true for the series of work episodes that turn towards a legal case-in-the-making (cf. Scheffer, 2010; Stoll, 2018), a political position-in-fabrication (Scheffer, 2014), a military command-to-be-completed 2

Ethnomethodological studies of institutional settings name such reference problems or tasks as follows: ‘to delimit a therapeutically relevant problem’ (Roca-Cuberes, 2014, p. 314) for psychiatric admission interviews, or ‘to probe politicians’ answers’ (ibid.) for interviews with politicians, or even the elimination of threats in military ‘counter-insurgency’ (cf. Elsey et al., 2018). 3 By reference to the object and its practical implications, trans-sequential analysis gains distance from methodological individualism. The latter is not rejected, but empirically relativised. This means that the practical relevance of motives and intentions for action, but also of agency, is not generally decided in advance, but empirically questionable (cf. Schmidt, 2012). 4 Trans-sequentiality differs from ‘inter-situativity’ (Hirschauer, 2014) by centring on the object. The concatenation does not remain ‘flat’ between situations but becomes available at the object. It is not chains of situations but ‘object careers’ (Scheffer, 2012). The object is promoted in its status.

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(Kolanoski, 2017; Mair et al., 2012) or, as in my writing here, a version of the research article (Knorr, 1986; Latour, 1999). Members, thus, contribute within their situated affairs towards rather extended discourses-in-formation: a legal discourse, a political discourse, a military discourse, a scientific discourse. The discourse work surpasses and links up various modalities and medialities: from speech to writing, from scribbled notes to speech, from fully drafted script to performance, etc. Digital media are able to liquefy all these media crossings by adding provisional facets to the formative object, including easier ways to circulate, assess, correct or test. We just need to think here of the possibilities of shared text files: members of a work group can access them simultaneously ‘in a cloud’, adding their commentaries, change suggestions or highlighted changes. Furthermore, in the name of topicality, transparency and efficacy, social media platforms invite risky shortcuts towards completion. Some contributions are then still provisional, but already out there in the public open.5 It is symptomatic that this practical trans-sequentiality first came into view with the ethnographic recapitulation of asylum interviews (Scheffer, 2001), committees of inquiry (Scheffer et al., 2010a, b) and court hearings (Scheffer, 2010). Formal procedures lend themselves nearly perfectly to trans-sequential analysis (TSA). With their scheduled events, their meticulous documentation, their ongoing record keeping and their reliable archiving they cultivate a vast traceability across longer periods for members and researchers alike. Procedures, due to their advanced and disciplined accounting, ongoingly produce a kind of transsequential transcript, readily at hand for TSA purposes. Does this mean, in turn, that trans-sequentiality is limited to procedures? A basic response would stress a practical urge for efficacy driving a large variety of private and public, of volunteer and professional fields. For a more elaborated response, I would offer a heuristic, which distinguishes between different trans-sequential modes. The heuristic can serve as an initial framework for a casuistry of sociological, objectcentred work and discourse studies. These in turn offer cross-sectional starting points for a diagnosis of the stabilisation of local problem-work and, furthermore, the mobilisation of those capacities in times of climate change and pandemics. After a brief introduction to TSA (1), the following article will distinguish between three typical trans-sequential modes (2): an occasional mode (bringing 5

See, for instance, the popular, quick and dirty interjections of the forty-fifth US President Donald Trump. Here, the risk of immature contributions is reduced by lowering expectations of his public speech. Something should then no longer be taken literally, be binding, meet higher consistency requirements, etc. All in all, a hyperactive loquaciousness institutionalises itself here, which undermines the relevance of state representation and the binding force of democratic publicity.

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about ad hoc creation), an organised mode (with its preconfigured apparatuses for specialised object fabrication) and a programmed mode (with its guaranteed object career path). Following on from this, I justify (3) the special capacity and demands of procedures and their affinity with TSA, meaning procedures enact and account for trans-sequentiality as a formal duty. This leads (4) to reflections on the conditional processing capacities of the respective types, which (5) are, at times, combined and mobilised in concerted actions especially in the face of pressing existential problems. The mobilisation of apparatuses is, according to their specialisations, not preferred in a differentiated society, even where the society’s ability to reproduce itself is at risk. All these may provide the micro- and meso-foundations for a sociology that appreciates the capacities of problem-work, without bracketing out their existential limitations.

1

Trans-Sequentiality and Trans-Sequential Analysis

Trans-sequentiality highlights the conditioned capacity of social practices to create and accumulate objects as investments of wider relevance. Why have legal and parliamentary procedures been particularly suitable for investigating this capacity? And how are other event-processes such as everyday initiatives or entrepreneurial projects similar to and different from those carefully drafted trials, inquiries or law making? In order to open up the variation of practical object formation, we must first define trans-sequentiality as a common, but relatively demanding social achievement. Practical trans-sequentiality links contributions to single work episodes and these in turn to the ongoing process of object formation. Examples of this would be the production of a parliamentary position paper through a series of office meetings (Scheffer et al., 2017), school lessons to work through the annual curriculum (Kalthoff, 1997) or training sessions in sports that build team capabilities (Alkemeyer & Michaeler, 2013). Here, objected values are formed that would not be feasible within a single episode. TSA methodically traces these added values by starting from social situations during which members aim to jointly create ‘something more’. This initially gives rise to praxeological claims that any object formation is accomplished through situated inter-/activities. Secondly, TSA studies the chaining of situated inter/actions. It identifies certain regular imports into the social situation, which the members (must) practically assume in order to ‘go on with something’. The same applies to members’ orientation towards regular exports meant to equip future episodes. Thirdly, TSA reconstructs the

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practical arraying of (work) episodes through objects. Members utilise ‘something’ to make visible and accountable for each other what has been achieved so far and what needs to be done in the upcoming or projected episodes.6 This practical proliferation takes place by jointly orienting towards certain objectsin-the-making. Fourthly, observing a whole sequence of episodes can show how some (members’) contributions succeed, while others fail in (trans-)forming the object. TSA shows how the members’ methods keep certain social situations and specific object creations within resonant range. Rather than text–context relations, we find interrelated work–object ones. Finally, there is the practically anticipated full value of the completed formative objects (e.g. as a political position, a legal judgment, an economic contract), which then can function as fully fledged contributions to the wider discourse formation (e.g. the political debate on climate change, the legal proceeding against the client, the sale of the office building). The judgment or position, as discourse units, are detached from their original episodic production. They are available for systematic reception and criticism disregarding the productions’ specificities. The discourse formation appears, thus, as a practical achievement that is no longer practical in nature. Members accomplish this value production and consumption by methodically responding to a hierarchy of different tasks or problems: from immediate to mediated ones, from direct to rather indirect ones. Direct problems emerge ongoingly, when members actually do what they (jointly) do, meaning certain joint activities that count as talk, a hearing, a debate, etc. With approaching the creation of added value, another problem- dimension emerges. The members refer to a certain matter in its operationalised form (e.g. the production of hearing minutes that save good reasons for the binding judgement). To give another example: police officers in prevention work (cf. Scheffer et al., 2017) not only master a wide variety of social situations, but also work on or refer to matters such as ‘violence at school XY’. Such a referenced problem requires an object form that ensures shared workability. For example, the problem is broken down into anti-violence training courses with certain participants or to educational counselling services provided for the most difficult classes. Later on, the officers account for their prevention work (softly) by providing figures on the number of pupils ‘treated’. Another problem-dimension plays in, when members orient towards certain formative objects; once established, the object brings about enforcement problems (e.g. establishing one discourse value against competing others). The referenced 6

Thus, strictly speaking, it is not social situations but episodes that are linked. The episodes have to be wrested from social situations, as it were. Certain social events, such as committee meetings, sometimes transport different objects one after the other into a new status, for example from ‘1st version’ to ‘draft’ (Scheffer et al., 2010a, b, trans. TS).

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problems or matters build another layer into the hierarchy of problems, here those within the competence of the apparatus developed. Pressing existential problems differ from these regularly referenced matters by being put to all apparatuses of problem-work at once, disregarding their acquired special capacities. Existential problems have to be solved; they press towards a general mobilisation of all means. They put the established capacities and their division to the test. The set of problem-dimensions is helpful to orient TSA from immediate connections to mediated formations. But how do we set up a TSA in practice? Firstly, the field- and discourse-study needs to identify and collect (meaning access, visit, document, etc.) work episodes that add up to a work process. The researcher would explore these event–process relations via a formative object that the members work on over a series of episodes across various social situations and, often, work sites. In this way, we can start each study with a minimal trans-sequential constellation. The following steps lead us towards a directed, methodical reconstruction of two sequences on two resonating layers, one within unfolding episodes of work and one across those episodes: 1. Based on one or more social situations, TSA identifies at least three related episodes in the course of which members take ‘something’ into focus. Thanks to the first of these episodes, the second one is relieved and prepared. While using resources prepared by the first episode, the second episode already sets up the ground for the third one. In other words, the second episode refers back to the preceding episode (E1 E2 E3) by adopting some of its preselections; the second episode also anticipates a certain retrospection carried out by the episode to follow (E1 E2 E3). 2. The entire process (from E1 to E3) appears as such because all episodes are directed towards one object-in-becoming.7 This object gradually takes shape (O1 > O2 > O3). The collaborating members work on the formative object in its current state towards its completion. Statements like ‘Done!’ or ‘We’re still missing this …!’ estimate intermediate states of the object in light of certain requirements and expectations. They categorise the object according to its reached and assigned status. Status markers (‘first draft’, ‘second version’ or ‘proposal version’; Laube et al., 2016a, b) are defined as stages of its completion. They know what can be and should be done with, worked at, 7

The practical need for objectivisation is greater where episodes are spread over different social situations and the memory functions of co-presence are not available. At the same time, objectification is also found where a situation is assumed to be conflictual or the perspectives involved are assumed to be antagonistic. Here, the members seek to document intermediate states in order to secure progress in negotiations, for example.

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expected by or avoided at this object-stage. They know when it is just time or too late to add to the object depending on its current state. 3. The members frame situated contributions, such as commentaries or notes, and they do so at least twice. As parts of the episodes-in-process, any contribution is ambiguous or ‘double-edged’ (Holly, 1981, trans. TS). They concern: (a) the realisation of the current social situation; (b) the formative object in its current state. An orderly contribution to the current situation may seem inappropriate in light of what the formative object demands; a contribution that seems rather impolite or misplaced in this situation might fit the current object status very well. The members need to learn to play on two claviers, on two practical ranges. 4. Turning to the subsequent episode (E3), TSA looks at the practical connections to the object as it has been developed thus far. The situated contributions coagulated in the object (O2) convey and stabilise pre-selections ‘for everything that follows’ from here for the last work episode of the set. The object-state reached offers certain practical possibilities and prevents others from the point of view of the work. The object (O2) that is now available for the new episode is less open to modifications than it was in its earlier state (O1).8 It awaits more contributions in order to be moved closer to completion. The final product (O3) absorbs the benefits of the work process (E1–E3) and may reach the stage of ascribed usability within a wider public or among others, whether for purposes of exchange, debate or struggle. The minimal constellation of just three successive episodes helps us identify trans-sequentiality in various fields of praxis, work and discourse. Central for this identification is the resonance range in which episodes and process are related. They are so thanks to a formative object under work: the episodes gain process character due to the object-in-becoming; the process gains episodic or event character due to the object-to-be. TSA thus maintains at least two dynamic dimensions—in contrast to approaches relating to structure vs. action. The intra-episode sequences and the inter-episodes sequence leave lasting marks on the emerging object. In light of the latter, the sequences run staggered and rather selective. Thus, words are exchanged, but not every word finds its way into, for example, the minutes of a meeting and, later on, into the case quoting them. In radio interviews—another example—in the course of the dialogue the politician’s answers 8

Other object formations come into play where the work—of the psychologist, for example—refers to the unlocking, dismantling, opening of already pre-consolidated objects. Here too, however, the work on the object leads to a limited ability to retrieve changes once they have been made. Once a loosening or opening has taken place, it cannot be reversed.

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to the journalist’s questions are being fought over, are self-repaired or rephrased, but not all these interview turns later become newsworthy. It is just a monological statement in the name of a party, faction or government that drives the public debate forward. Trans-sequentiality is a core, but somehow neglected, mechanism of our wider relevancy production and reception. TSA expands the ethnomethodological microanalytical framework via those minimal constellations towards meso- and macro-dimensions: through the episodic object orientation to the relatively stable apparatuses that methodically put together these objects and the utilisation of them in wider formations of value creation in diverse exchange systems. The analysis can show what it takes to bring about certain objects and how they serve as contributions on a bigger scale. TSA diagnoses methods and maxims that guide the situated practices and that help members to do more than just coming through certain social situations with their orienting rituals and conventions. Trans-sequentiality kicks in when members develop certain practical ambitions on top and, in the course of their interactive involvement, become a factor in vested apparatuses of production or take functions in formal procedures, the latter guaranteeing certain outcomes to be accepted by the society at large.

2

Varieties of Trans-sequentiality

Not every member’s undertaking aims at the production of formative objects. We know a number of everyday contexts in which such transactions only occasionally arise, if at all: all those skirmishes, game nights, gossip sessions, chitchats, all that small talk, strolling, etc. However, there might be favourable opportunities (e.g. shared enthusiasm) that set in motion some joint and persistent transsequentiality. This happens, at times, to everybody’s surprise and joy (among friends, neighbours, patients, etc., who share some concern, hobby, ambition). Such an occasional trans-sequentiality (TS) does not necessarily develop something of a binding character that lasts longer than the activities of the occasional group. Its outcome is neither expected nor demanded. This trans-sequential mode rather shows unexpected capacities, for instance when a local football club sets up some ad hoc refugee aid or when workers resist the company’s plan for regular overtime. In other fields and aspects of praxis, we find work practices that involve preconfigured and organised trans-sequentiality. They can count on resources, infrastructures and competencies, all of which turn the success of the objectcentred efforts rather expectable. The practical efforts are oriented towards

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material problems—again referring to concerns on top of the normal problems that come with any joint activity. Such directed problems, meaning problems that refer to specific matters, are an integral part of the organised trans-sequentiality. As a response to this, members act as members of an organisation, or, more accurately, of an apparatus stabilised in an overarching organisation (like an enterprise or a political party) providing the personnel with the means of production including skills, equipment, raw materials and pre-products. The collaborative apparatus, thus, pre-structures how members work on the set of defined directed problems, whereas the personnel develops the repertoire for dealing with the tasks. Here, TS is instrumental: a directed set of practices that too often neglects those ‘mundane’ practical problems involved in the joint activities as such, while focusing solely on the object-related technical matters. The devil, however, is in the situated details. Organised trans-sequentiality, specialised in certain ‘objective’ directed problems, is different from yet another rationalisation of symbolic-material production. In the programmed TS, the series of episodes and the related process to be covered, plus the formative objects to be delivered, follow a mandatory script of steps and points of no return. The programme prescribes not only the division of labour, the formats of contributions and the order of episodes, but also the status career of the formative object up to its conclusive binding character. This programmed TS, guaranteed in legal procedure, public inquiries or standardised research, claims authority ‘in any case’. Here it is not primarily technical skill and technology but rather rules and formality which are supposed to ensure conclusive as well as socially binding answers to any debated question (cf. Scheffer et al., 2010). Programmed TS promises such a solution including its legitimisation against resistance. From this sketch results a rough gradation of varieties of trans-sequential modes: I. Occasional TS: for example, at lunch, on a hike or on the fringes of a summer party, whenever an encounter is directed ad hoc towards a matter-at-hand and devotes itself to it. In these cases, the casual act of realising something is achieved by a provisional reference used over a period of time. The singular encounter becomes, ex post, the starting point of such a project or endeavour (‘We had the idea of …’; ‘Do you remember when we first talked about this’). Rituals or scripts (e.g. brainstorming) can stimulate a degree of transformative value orientation in a ‘methodically casual/creative’ manner.9 9

On ‘gossip’, for example, see Bergmann (1993).

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II. Organised TS: for example in industrial, craft or professional manufacturing (e.g. car repair, see Streeck, 2017) or in knowledge and symbolic work (e.g. journalistic reporting or the scientific project), whereby here texts10 like things11 form connectable objects that are ultimately sold as goods on markets or as contributions to discourse arenas. This is organised because the members are educated, equipped and asked to do this regularly and accountably. They are part and parcel of an integrated apparatus that makes such transactions more likely and stabilises the work and orientation on directed problems. III. Programmed TS: for example criminal proceedings through which a generally binding judgment is passed and that is symbolically endowed with authority and legitimacy. The orderliness of the procedure and the justification of the case history (Luhmann, 1989) are in turn produced and presented by the parties involved using and competing with formative semi-objects, here, for instance, the facts of the case (Scheffer, 2010). Depending on the formal status of the conclusive object, it demands to be regarded as a preliminary, a definitive or an irrevocable representation of what happened in this case. The programmed character creates what one could call thick accountability. The latter makes this a preferred site of TSA since the joint work leaves so many traces of and across the episodes.

3

The Procedure as Programmed Trans-sequentiality

In the following, I will explore the trans-sequential formation as a research subject on the grounds of thick accountability (minutes, documents, archive) co-produced in the procedural course. Let me give one concrete example of programmed TS: the asylum interviews as part of the German administrative procedure. Following the translated question and answer, the individual decision maker dictates purified exchanges for the record (one formative semi-object). Via dictaphone and as an 10

An interesting case here would be the ‘incidental’ production of symbols. In this case, for example, ‘inference-richness’ (Sacks, 1992) can be understood as a process of successive accumulation of information: a term or name (‘Kunduz’) with further permitted, obvious conclusions (‘many civil victims’). 11 Here it is mainly workplace studies that focus on specific objects in organised settings. Cf. for example Rawls (2002) and Schatzki (2006). Such studies can be seen as a countermovement to Organisational Studies and their reduction of complex work processes and their practical demands to mere rule-governed decisions.

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orientation for these record-keeping practices, he or she places possible good reasons into the hearing minutes, i.e. formulations on which the ruling can be based in its final judgement (the formative object). In this way, the decision maker as procedural administrator anticipates the review, the demanded reasoning for the decision, and the appropriate review criteria. She knows, for instance, when she has gathered enough reasons in the record for all practical purposes. Interviews are longer or shorter due to this ongoing calculation in terms of the formative semi-object that is in production during the interview. Another episode in the course of programmed TS: two barristers meet for tea in the court canteen, armed with their ‘briefs’. After some witty small talk, they discuss the case at hand as prosecuting and defending barristers. They show each other their ‘trump cards’—in the form of witness statements as evidence of the competing case histories—which they intend to play out in open court. The defence counsel, my ethnographic informant, proposes a ‘deal’. He suggests to his colleague that the allegation of ‘physical assault’ involves risks that are difficult to calculate for both parties, given the foreseeable rather open balance of the competing cases’ potentials for a trial hearing. Better for both parties plus the court, he says, would be—in terms of a plea bargaining—an admission of guilt to a less severe criminal charge. Such episodes demand an analysis that lives up to the trans-sequential nature of the work done. Data collection and data analysis have to cover word and text plus the modes of translating one into the other. Such episodes not only provide certain formative (semi-)objects: they also form the grounds for legitimate bureaucratic, juridical or political operations. The procedural course builds these grounds through a series of formally scripted episodes and a number of formatted interim results, most of it kept in minutes and records. This thick accountability through various sequences of what ethnomethodologists call natural data (since it is produced with or without the researcher) explains the affinity of formal procedures with TSA. The peculiarity of procedures exists thereby first in their multi-modal building up and in their generally obligatory character to do so. By way of this programmed work, they promise comprehensible decisions with a binding effect. Here, every matter is trans-sequentially worked out such that a conclusive decision is not just possible every now and then, but in each case. How do procedures manage this? Luhmann’s ‘Legitimation through Procedures’ (1989), along with ethnographic studies in juridical (e.g. Conley & O’Barr, 1990; Latour, 2002; Scheffer et al., 2010a, b; Travers, 1997) or political (e.g. Brichzin, 2016; Cambrosio et al., 1990; Scheffer, 2014) settings, provide answers here. Procedures operate not only as more or less stretched interactions: procedures accomplish and are accomplished by frequent media and register switches,

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the to and fro between rather fluid (conversations) and rather solid (documents, files, archives) contributions (cf. Scheffer et al., 2010). This switching successively narrows the contingency space of subsequent contributions. Situated performances coagulate into permanent values: here judgements that count for each member of society. The programming of procedures assures the thick accountability, meaning the traceability and calculability in detail across the chain of relevant procedural events. They determine the status of both episodes and formative objects for the contingent process: (a) Procedural cause: Not every problem can put the procedure into motion. Some matters count as minor or inferior. Preliminary or pre-trail procedures have a filtering effect here. They assess whether a matter qualifies for the intense procedural efforts. On the other hand, once it is qualified the case has to be judged or decided upon when it enters the procedure, no matter what. (b) Procedural memory: The procedural course is, event by event, ‘sufficiently’ documented and archived. This applies to certain stages of the procedure as well as to intermediate states of the processed matter. The procedural memory becomes the vanishing point of the shared efforts—because it is here that the possible outcomes are stepwise narrowed and preconfigured. The casein-formation becomes immanently assessable. This does not exclude phases and zones of intransparency such as invisible work. Every procedural memory relies on forgetting, maintains its back stages, counts on implicit norms and absorbs preliminary input. (c) Cohesion: A shared procedural tendency lies in the increasingly binding nature of contributions. Possibilities are stepwise excluded on the procedural path. Relevant contributions have to be authorised and are classified according to their degree of validity. These statements turn irreversible or can only be modified under certain circumstances. A binding character of contributions is procedurally accomplished by certain ritual markers, such as interrogation under oath, recording the rephrased wording or signing the written statement. (d) Forms of knowledge: Degrees of truth and validity claims on the matterin-question are themselves defined in value (e.g. an ‘eyewitness testimony’ compared to ‘hearsay’). They count similarly to different coloured chips in a board game. These values go together with defined import allowances and prohibitions: what has to be taken into account; what has to be discussed

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and weighed by the authorities; what can be or even has to be ignored.12 In addition, there are quasi-experimental settings for the examination and legitimate critique of claims. They mark an epistemic culture specific to the procedural apparatus, such as a court.13 (e) Decision-making process: Procedures offer a highly distributed decisionmaking process. The decision making is distributed in terms of media (from the oral to the written and back), of the personnel (pre-decision makers, reviewers, final authority, etc.), of the times (periods for pre-decisions, time limits, deadlines, decisive events) and the spaces (offices, regions, arenas, etc.). The distributed decision making allows a decision to emerge, to slowly thicken, to come together. Rational choice theories erase this time-consuming trans-sequential maturing of decisions by reducing it to just one event and one actor, overloaded with parameters and reasons. The programmed trans-sequentiality defines series of pre-selections, which successively reduce the range of what members can reasonably expect ‘at this point in the ongoing course’. For Luhmann (1989) this is the decisive feature of any procedure, which is why they take time. They make everybody wait and see, while certain outcomes become, in the meanwhile, more likely than others. Participants learn to adjust their expectations, which prepares them to accept the final decision—a decision that was perhaps impossible to accept at the start of it all. With these programmed features, procedures seem a pretty effective social technology that succeeds in containing conflicts, flattening out even huge decision-making problems and creating some certainty of expectations even for rather new developments. At the same time, as Habermas (1992) pointed out, ‘rational’ procedures themselves can be the subject of reflexive reprogramming. The procedural programme can be sharpened for new and pressing demands. For example, criminal proceedings for the prosecution of rape have been the subject of repeated reform efforts due to a diagnosed ‘justice gap’—a statistically significant discrepancy between the number of filed charges and the actual convictions (cf. Matoesian, 1993). Here, programming was extrapolated to trends for typical outcomes. Procedural criticism aims at changes in the procedural programme including its inherent biases or tendencies. 12

The establishment of judgement in proceedings has a retroactive effect on fields of practice as a formal claim of accountability. Cf. the project ‘Military Accounting’ and the relevant work by Mair et al. (2012, 2013). 13 With the distinction between ‘strong and weak procedures’ (Scheffer et al., 2010), we have also referred to the variance of more or less self-referential and separate procedural systems.

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In principle, procedures open up their own fields of action including conditioned social and material capacities. Procedures cannot be reduced to and are not identical with their programmes or rules; instead, the members mobilise the programmed features alongside preconfigured resources (such as files and precedence) and infrastructures (such as archives, courthouses, or libraries). This includes the specialist staff for the expectable range of matters, and issues. Looking at the problem-oriented capacity of procedure, Garfinkel’s concept of ‘accountability’ (1967, italics TS) is particularly pertinent here. The procedure produces a constant documentation of itself including the members’ contributions feeding right into the procedural memory meaning its archive. Documentation or inscription devices provide a basic prerequisite of any procedural apparatus. In light of the obligatory accountability, certain procedural contributions prove to be more and others less suitable for trans-sequential formation. Some social problems fit perfectly with this mode of programmed trans-sequentiality, while others seem rather intractable. They require other modes.

4

Comparable Tendencies of the Different Varieties

The trans-sequential modes of the object-oriented and object-guided merging of work episodes and work processes (Scheffer, 2007, 2008) are indeed characterised by their very own capacities. Those capacities can be and are mobilised for certain problems and the respective problem-work. The capacities depend on the ability to operationalise problem-work through formative objects, on the ability to fold or accumulate assorted knowledges and properties in those objects, on the ability to remember and to fix what has been worked out so far in previous episodes, and the ability to translate and narrow down even complex issues and matters out there. The first fundamental factor, I claim, is the degree to which even longer, distributed, accumulative series of work episodes can be stabilised and secured. In the occasional TS, we encounter rather simple episode–process relations, which translate ‘whatever’ into objects that can travel to some extent, for example stories and symbols. The programmed TS, on the other hand, guarantees for all practical purposes a directed production over many episodes, sites and media switches, in which extensive object careers can be calculated, re-traced and checked in terms of restricted accounting demands. The programmed TS, though, accounts only for a pre-defined range of qualified occasions and matters. It excludes a whole lot of others due to the efforts guaranteed. From variety to variety (Fig. 1), trans-sequentiality takes different shapes, requires different equipment, involves different sets of media and offers different

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Concerted

Occasional

Varieties of TS

Organised Programmed

Fig. 1 Varieties of trans-sequentiality

capacities of problem-work. Such extended and assorted productions as feature films, buildings or population statistics are made possible by the increasing determination of what can be considered suitable imports such as film scenes, building materials or individual data. The same applies to suitable occasions and outcomes of problem solving. The organised and programmed modes, while stabilising or even guaranteeing problem-work, demand vast preconfigurations before being set into motion. In addition, procedures employ techniques of thinning out matter and content in order to make the promised conclusion possible in any case. The capacity to accumulate knowledges, statements, pros and cons, predecisions, etc. comes with the prize of operative closure: Standardised social research, for instance, carries out collective surveys on extended spatio-temporal scales by employing rather thin categories and measurements. Complex empirical matters are reduced to a manageable size and level for this purpose. This allows for far-reaching divisions of knowing integrating a number of diverse research processes across time and space. In addition to elaborate individual research facilities, such research apparatuses use data from official statistics, for example on people with a, so-called, ‘migration background’. This wording found its way into official German administrative forms after ‘facilitated naturalisation’ made the category ‘German’ appear (too) ambiguous. Social structure analysis adopted this membership category and based a large number of further analyses in migration sociology, criminal sociology, educational research or research on social inequality on it. However, importing the official data sets requires the bracketing out of sociological terminology and theorising in vast parts of the research process. Only the final discussion of the results attempts to (re-)fill the membership category with sociological insights. The borrowed and utilised membership category becomes ‘inference-rich’ (Sacks, 1992) in relation to ‘their’ norm structure, relationship patterns or cultural content.

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The conditional and limited character of the apparatuses’ capacities to uphold and stabilise certain TS and by doing so working on or even settling appropriated directed problems becomes apparent in the course of societal change. The latter takes the shape of a natural crisis experiment whenever existential problems, such as climate change or military conflict, turn into omnipresent pressing questions. As part and in the course of their realisation, they confront a vast variety of apparatuses all at the same time despite existing divisions of labour. Climate change, for instance, calls established forms of transportation, housing, agriculture, generation of energy, etc. into question. What have appeared to be solutions so far now turn into parts of the problem. Where otherwise well-rehearsed solutions could provide widespread satisfaction, an existential problem recalls socio-material prerequisites, infrastructural vulnerabilities (Folkers, 2018), factual weak spots and externalised side effects. Politicised publics may assert, with the help of social movements or even revolts, such shortcomings while pushing the established order towards radical change. Distrust of the political authorities and a crisis of legitimacy are rampant, while institutional certainties are dwindling. Right-wing populism, with its aggressive denial of unwelcome existential problems, the personification of the causes of such problems and the widespread passive rejection of dealing with them, is possibly an expression of a deep social incapacity in the face of such multiplying existential challenges. The varieties of TS thus tend to differ in their proximity to the formative object, in the amount of accumulating work episodes, in the extent to which the work presupposes others’ pre-work and in the selectivity of the matter that the collaboration can deal with. In procedures, as formally programmed TS, factual occasions are strongly pre-selected. At the same time, administrators are obliged to work out socially binding decisions, no matter the specifics of the subject matter. In this way, legitimisation is obtained: the work invested accounts for the programmed demands and by doing so stabilises expectations for everyone involved. It is such self-referential consistency requirements that distance procedures from existential queries. In light of ‘all the requests’, whatever question is put to an answer is methodically relativised and levelled out.14 In addition, procedural capacities are pre-assigned with traditional, perhaps equally existential directed problems, such as the social question. Organised TS suggests a different resistance, where the cultural techniques and methods that have been designed for certain, now established problems cannot be easily diverted to novel ones. For 14

In law today, aspects such as customary rights, individual rights, the reconciliation of interests, the weighing up of norms, etc. serve as levelling factors. Problems are thus (initially) placed in the series of cases. As an effect, they are normalised and relativized without regard to the existential distress.

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the time being, then, there is an organised preference for those problems which can be dealt with using the preconfigured responses. Occasional TS has its own conditions and capacities to offer. On the one hand, it tends to be highly variable, open15 and reactive. Here, in the style of ‘bricolage’ (Lévi-Strauss, 1966), it is rather something like scattered ‘handicraft circles’ that tackle whatever seemingly manageable objects on an ad hoc basis. On the other hand, those locally developed, artful and creative adaptations are not yet available to other folk ways elsewhere. They remain bound to the local parties and conditions. Occasional TS, as a social asset, presupposes social proximity and improvisation, an immediate sense of community and openness for inventiveness and experimentation. Scholars claim occasional TS, above all—in the pragmatic and communitarian tradition (cf. Dewey, 1952)—for democratic cultures and lifeworlds. However, the orientation towards shared objects may itself reduce social distances and provide for the conditions of solidarity: a dynamic with which, for example, municipal police prevention (cf. Scheffer et al., 2017) attempts to mobilise local resources and defuse problems that are otherwise highly conflictual and potentially violent. The different types of trans-sequentiality are a reminder of various problemdimensions that social practices deal with. On top of seemingly apparent execution problems (by conducting a joint activity) and of problems of power (when competing with other objects), the trans-sequential efforts of relating event and process may be dedicated to directed problems, meaning problems that arise by working on certain matters. TSA, then, asks how capacities are used and generated due to event–process relations. Capacities are, then, ways and methods of dealing with problems via certain formative objects that operationalise the problem-work. TSA is concerned, moreover, with how certain versions of problems are rendered possible in response to certain capacities. Only those solidified, to some degree routinised capacities allow for certain problem-works including their respective problems to be fully accepted, rather than being suppressed. Certain problem treatments and their problematisation can be regarded here as a practical and cultural achievement. They keep certain directed problems in check. The three basic types of TS mode do not deny but rather presuppose the fact that in the daily work routines of composite apparatuses a whole mix of modes of episodes-process-relating dominates. Kolanoski, for example, shows how in the 15

Here there are parallels to Habermas’ (1981) ‘idealising’ conception of the ‘lifeworld’ and its discursive openness to all claims to validity, which in turn is achieved by the broad formation of problem views for delegation to politics and law. By means of routine, ritual, script or method, however, a thematisation of or a reference to an object can become disputed and unlikely. A life-world context would then actually be averse to certain problems.

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course of military ‘targeting’ (2017) the members pragmatically integrate diverse aspects of rather occasional knowledge production, of organised chains of command and of programmed accountability (in light of international criminal law) into an approach that seems ‘situationally appropriate’. The military way of doing things is inseparably interwoven with juridical reasoning (e.g. where legal formulas are recited in the soldiers’ radio communications). Preiser (2016) shows, for the work of doormen in clubs, how the members’ ‘anger’ is contained by minimally programmed team-coordination plus the occasional creation of anti-objects (e.g. the collective refusal to testify vis-à-vis the police against a team-member, ‘who briefly lost it’). Porsché (2018) in turn explores multi-modal interactions in museum exhibitions. The programmed course through the exhibition, including stops and brief explanations, both offers and prevents opportunities for critical debate among the visitors. In all these cases, occasional, organised and/or programmed treatments are interwoven in particular ways. They form their own ‘bundles of practices’ (Schatzki, 2006) in the face of problems that are partially problems of execution and partially of direction. They stabilise their own methods, tendencies and (in-)capacities of doing this all at once. For TSA, thus, these ways of doing things are not self-sufficient routines (with their own practical challenges), but attempts to respond to certain prevalent problems, such as racism (museum), civil casualties (military) or ‘violent’ escalation (doormen). We can expect that those problems that are somehow customised and anticipated are more welcome, whereas new and unknown problems, no matter how pressing, might be met with hesitation.

5

Concerted Trans-sequentiality and Existential Problems

In addition to the varieties of TS mentioned above there are two kinds of responses that the diagram in Fig. 1 hints at: overall renouncement or concertation across modes and apparatuses. Whereas renouncement is the art of neglecting the pressing problem, concertation is rather the opposite. It points at efforts to mobilise all capacities of problem-work available, even those that have been concerned with other matters so far. As a performative act, concertation shows to everybody that indeed ‘we have a problem’. Concerted TS seeks to mobilise the capacities in the entire spectrum of modi kept and stabilised in apparatuses

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after experiences of confrontation with generally pressing risks, dangers, disasters, etc.16 This pressure to concert across modes and apparatuses increases when those problems put the reproduction of society as such into question. These existential problems (Scheffer, 2021) call for concertation, because they threaten the capacities available while laying bare the limitations of each mode and apparatus, calling for the respective others to accommodate or help. Concerted TS is, hence, problem driven and, despite its urgent cause, rather controversial. Historic examples include the ‘general mobilisation’ in times of war (cf. Holzinger, 2014), the Leninist ‘war economy’ (cf. Malm, 2020) when facing starvation or extinction, or the call for an authoritarian ‘state of emergency’ (cf. Agamben, 2005), including its corresponding juridical exceptions.17 Quarantine measures during a pandemic, a concerted ‘War on Drugs’ across borders or measures aimed at managing economic shortages in times of recession may also be seen as examples of such de-differentiation. In contrast, ‘We can do it’ (German chancellor Angela Merkel’s famous dictum during the 2015, so called, ‘refugee crisis’) calls for a concertation with appeal character ‘to all’: ranging from institutions-in-charge to responsible citizens. The concerted TS restricts the obstinacy of different ways of working, demands something in favour of ‘the cause’ and seeks to mobilise the capacities available right now: organised apparatuses, for example, by target values or market regulation; programmed procedures by purpose or selectivity; the art of ad hoc collaboration by moralisation and solidarity. In the face of existential problems, the collective capacity is challenged to confront the serious threat with the available means. Concertation is, thus, an attempt to meet necessity and possibility. Concerted action contradicts the idea of a liberal and differentiated society: a ‘society without a centre’ (Luhmann, 1997). At the same time, public debates— for example during the oil crisis or with the slow-motion disaster of climate change—regularly contain appeals for everyone to ‘help out’ or ‘to wake up’. 16

Certain problems are emerging and becoming much noticed, where recurring events that can be named, described and explained—such as hurricanes, heat waves and floods as manifestations of climate change—interrupt, disrupt or destabilise the usual hustle and bustle, including the shared assumptions of normality (cf. Hoppe & Lemke, 2015). The same applies, in relation to other existential questions, to the performance of outbreaks of violence, epidemics or famine. Some ‘urgent’ problems become almost undeniable in their discursivity. 17 The examples show how concertation in response to existential threats is somehow paradoxical: society as such is called into question and restored. Some narratives would argue that it is only here when society comes into existence at all—in the moments of concertation of an otherwise disintegrated differentiation or even fragmentation.

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The address for these attempts at concertation are preferably ‘discursive communities’ (Habermas, 1992), mainly fragmented life-worlds on the one hand and, compared to global networks, rather well integrated nation states on the other hand, since these rely to some extent on general publics, a common sense and a system trust.18 However, the geographical narrowness easily fails to reflect the peculiar (global or trans-national) reach of existential problems, which in turn makes effective concertation more difficult. Problems imply their own ‘doing society’, with climate change, for instance, calling for global efforts, if not global governance in terms of CO2 pricing and CO2 accounting. But what are existential problems? And how do they challenge the modes of TS? I define existential problems as a specific problem category by the following characteristics: • They concern the reproductive capacity and the conditions of the possibility of a society. • Their processing must not fail if the ways of life, accepted by society, are not to be undermined all at once. • They recursively wear away the capacities of problem-work of the society. • They come with some urgency, if and because they pass certain ‘chain reactions’ and/or ‘tipping points’ in the course of their unfolding. • They perform societal integration and even lead to societies by ways of members and apparatuses collectively responding to those. An existential problem, in this understanding, exceeds the ‘very personal problem’ as it is raised in philosophical existentialism. It is, by its pressing urgency, the drastic counterpart to a luxury problem. Taking into account those characteristics, existential problems are not limited to the ecological question: the social question (here of poverty with all its effects), the question of war (especially with the threat of massive organised destruction and killing) and the question of tyranny (or dictatorship, as the total domination of a public sphere) also threaten a society and its capacities at large. A ‘doing existential problems’ realises and demonstrates that the reproduction of the collective as a whole is threatened here and that drastic countermeasures are inevitable.19 Existential questions push for a 18

In critical terms, this is understood as the construction of an ‘ideological apparatus’ in Althusser’s sense (1977). Studies critical of power interpret problem-solving regimes as presumptions of power. Accordingly, their reference problems are regarded as illusory problems or ideological creations (cf. Latour, 2004). 19 In this sense, the Green demand for Veggie Day in German canteens was both a ‘doing’ and an ‘undoing of an existential problem’. It recalled a far-reaching, general problem of the

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‘politics of answers’ (Hoppe, 2017) or a socio-material ‘response-ability’ (ibid., p. 20), which is gained to some extent from the—more than ethical or political— composition of all the capacities available. This includes apparatuses and modes that are able to replace negative capacities such as fossil energy production in times of climate change or factory farming in times of species extinction. The sociological focus here moves away from the idea of the members’ or collectives’ social construction of a problem to the rather involved question of whether and how members or collectives are capable of realising an existential problem, meaning of living up to it by means of countermeasures based on ad hoc, organised or/and programmed problem-work. In the face of climate change or species extinction, for example, a constructively critical sociology exploring the scope of possibilities can pursue the question of how attempts at general mobilisation can be initiated. These existential, problem-driven attempts encounter a series of resistances: (a) Some of the apparatuses to be mobilised are themselves part of the problem rather than part of the solution. They are challenged along with the existential responses and, in turn, push for self-preservation. (b) In the face of existential problems, the collaborative, solidary tendencies between the apparatuses are not per se strengthened. Rather, the competition for increasingly scarce resources is becoming more radical, including that between nation states. (c) Due to the fact that they are tied to traditional problems, the reorientation of ad hoc, organised and programmed capacities is complicated. The capacities of apparatuses are already occupied and therefore easily overstrained. (d) It is questionable to what extent the capacities of problem solving, especially in historical periods of simultaneously pressing existential problems, can prove to be productive. The mobilised response to one problem may increase another one and vice versa. (e) Different ideological orientations make it difficult to consent to one shared hierarchy of existential problems. More likely is the occurrence of political polarisation including the undermining of common sense, of a system trust and of the potentially problem-realising institutions such as science or journalism. For such contemporary diagnostic questions, existential problems do not have to be sociologically defined as pre-given. We do not have to turn into naïve realists in order to study the responses to existential threats. We can study the in-/capacities of realisation, just by assuming (in light of what and how societies are capable of certainty) that they might exist. It is interesting here how the ways relationship between meat consumption and climate change and biodiversity on the one hand; it negated the drastic nature of the situation by greatly mitigating the necessary action on the other hand. Thus the ‘seriousness of the situation’ was simultaneously denied by the request.

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of knowing, ranging from everyday experience to scientific findings, are kept at a distance, relativised or levelled out—and thus how they repeatedly thwart efforts at concerted responses. Here, existential problems as formative objects pass through a contingent, labyrinthine and hard-fought status passage, with farreaching consequences for ‘us’ studying all these—as researchers and as members of society faced with existential problems.

6

Conclusion

In this contribution, I have traced the development of trans-sequential analysis (TSA) from the logic of procedural practice. At the core is the procedural accountability that produces quasi-transcripts as ‘natural data’ of the transsequential formation of formative objects such as evidence, cases and judgements. They offer (nearly) perfect data to study trans-sequentiality-in-action. By reconstructing the fabrication of discursive objects (e.g. statements, judgements, news, scientific facts), we better understand the formation of relevancies and powers, themselves crucial to mobilise and direct problem-work-capacities for the common good. A sociology of capacities (‘What are we capable of?’) may take shape, which differs markedly from the sociology of identities (‘Who are we?’) or a sociology of social construction (‘How do people take for real the social world they live in/by?’). Procedures may be regarded as the sole examples of trans-sequential practice and their praxeological explorability. At the same time, I argued throughout the chapter, procedures are reminiscent of other modes of trans-sequentiality, where they are elaborately organised through infrastructures, equipment and resources or where members, by way of inventiveness, creativity and solidarity, jointly explore contingency spaces and opportunity structures. Programmed, organised and occasional TS are the basic types of variations, each of which has its own conditioned capacities that are related and stabilised in and by apparatuses of problem-work. Overall, this heuristics enables empirical case study research, such as workplace studies and ethnographies of problem-spaces, for a broad casuistic grounding of the sociology of capacities in times of existential crises. For all this, the starting and reference point remains—in the ethnomethodological stance—the observable situated doings. They turn out to create a work episode that may contributes to a whole series of episodes. They, themselves, turn out to be part of the formation of formative objects, all contributing to struggles over meaning as the (de-)formation of capacities to respond to pressing problems. The varieties of trans-sequentiality thus open up a broad-based casuistry of ‘Studies of Work’ (Garfinkel, 1986), or, in the context of scientific work, of

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‘laboratory studies’ (see Knorr, 1986). The range of trans-sequentiality shows how differently ordered object-centred episodes-in-process tackle the problemsat-hand and –at-length. Ad hoc creations, organised fabrications or programmed decision making do not necessarily mark separate fields of practice, but rather crucial assets in an evolving social division of apparatuses. In other words, they may offer preconditions for each other’s capacities to turn towards shared or common interests. They become valuable in/for societies and vis-à-vis their reproductive problems. These interdependencies and conditions show where well-rehearsed problem solutions are confronted with new existential questions. In this sense, pressing existential problems not only function as tests of reality for the various modes and apparatuses of value creation; they also mark a historical moment in which the limited capacities become relevant for the members themselves and observable for research, not unlike Garfinkel’s crisis experiments on the micro-level. The non-simultaneity between the urgent problems here and their actual processing there raises the (functionalist) question of societal capacities to a ‘higher’ level: it makes visible how the division of problem-tackling apparatuses is no longer in tune with each other, no longer supporting each other, no longer ensuring societal reproduction, as it were. Conversely, the question is how, in these times of coemerging existential problems, apparatuses of stabilised problem-work are called into question due to their capacities opposing or even excluding each other.20 In this context, TSA may feed into a diagnosis of the present when no longer limited to specialized fields of practice as if they were separated and enclosed. TSA offers a technique to locate the ‘historical’ moment of a situated practice and its objects. This localisation in time is easier in the case of procedures than in nested fabrications or occasional creations. Accordingly, the task of contemporary praxeology consists not only in recording regularly successful added value creation, but also in relating these values to the pressing problems at the time being. Generating reliable answers to existential questions is an increasing external as well as internal demand of a whole range of ‘promising’ apparatuses. However, their capacities reach their limits the more existential questions turn homeless, without address. Those untackled problems affect even the most advanced problem-work by calling into question its very preconditions. This also applies to scientific research, because this too depends on social conditions that 20

The concept of the ‘zero option’ (Offe, 1986), i.e. the forward-looking prevention of organised developments such as nuclear energy or genetic engineering, was an expression of a stated overstretch. In contrast, even for existential questions the mere announcement of a problem solution dominates. This indicates the conditionality of current capacities and the need to find a solution.

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existential problems tend to undermine. Research thus becomes part of precarious contemporary societies in the shadow of existential threats and driven by them! My contribution argued for opening up and thickening case studies by realising this common and contemporary stress—even if studying seemingly disconnected practices.

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Ecologies of Media Practices Petra Löffler

‘What I call an ecology of practice is a tool for thinking, and a tool is never neutral.’ (Stengers, 2005a, p. 185)

1

Praxeological Requirements

The term ‘ecology of practices’ was coined by the feminist science theorist Isabelle Stengers and has been developed continuously for more than twenty years. In her seven-volume study Cosmopolitiques, published in 1997, she already used the term to outline the emergence and coexistence of acting entities in experimental scientific cultures. For her, these heterogeneous actants acquire identity and stability only in a network of relations that allows heterogeneous modes of existence and practices to emerge. Stengers’ intervention in science policy consists primarily in determining the circumstances in which practices become effective, i.e. to relate each practice to the particular circumstances determined by the interests of all actants.1 Stengers understands the entanglement of particular interests in socio-technical environments as an immanent process of ‘reciprocal

1 Accordingly, Stengers (2008, p. 174, trans. PL) has described chemistry as an ‘art of cumstances’, which aims to create for chemical agents the kind of ‘circumstances in which they are enabled to produce what the chemist wants’ by doing ‘what they can do’. For a shorter version of this section see Stengers (2005b, p. 1001).

P. Löffler (B) University of Oldenburg, Oldenburg, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 S. Gießmann et al. (eds.), Materiality of Cooperation, Medien der Kooperation— Media of Cooperation, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-39468-4_12

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capture’, through which mutual relationships are created and values are produced.2 An ecology of practices thus aims to multiply the relations between the participating actants and thus to increase the options for action. Constraints and needs or requirements and obligations also play an important role here. They not only stabilise the respective practice, but also limit the interests of the actants involved and ultimately keep the heterogeneous collective of participants together: ‘Requirements and obligations do not function in terms of reciprocity and, as constraints, what they help keep together is […] a heterogeneous collective of competent specialists, devices, arguments, and “material at risk”, that is, phenomena, whose interpretation is at stake’ (Stengers, 2010, p. 52). These constraints and needs, on the one hand, and requirements and obligations, on the other, also highlight the risks of any practice. It is therefore important for Stengers to disclose them and to prove their relevance in each new situation, thereby multiplying the opportunities to relate with others and their needs and obligations. Such an idea of experimental practices is based on the assumption that materials, things, tools or infrastructures also act or cause action and establish relations. Therein lies their praxeological potential. Stengers reaffirmed this view in her ‘Introductory Notes on an Ecology of Practices’, published in 2005, and at the same time described it as a tool of thought that, like all tools, is never neutral. For her, a tool is only determined by its specific use and the particular situation and environment in which it is used. Tools of thought also unfold their potential in concrete situations and environments, as part of specific practices and as an expression of specific concerns and interests: ‘The relevant tools, tools for thinking, are then the ones that address and actualize the power of the situation, that make it a matter of particular concern, in other words, make us think and not recognize’ (Stengers, 2005a, p. 185). Practices are therefore always concrete and situated.3 However, they are not only dependent on specific circumstances and environments, but also linked to other practices. Reckwitz (2003, p. 289, trans. PL) therefore speaks of a practice (as opposed to a homogeneous praxis) as a heterogeneous ‘bundle of activities’, which are held together by specific practical skills, by applied knowledge and collective behaviour.4 To this extent, for him, practices always express social 2

Stengers’ term ‘reciprocal capture’ has parallels to Karen Barad’s scientific concept of the ‘entanglement’. Stengers emphasises that in elementary particle physics ‘the neutrino exists for the physicists, and, somewhat differently, the physicists exist for the neutrino’ (2010, p. 38). 3 I use the term ‘situated’ in reference to Donna Haraway’s concept of ‘situated knowledges’ (Haraway, 1988). 4 For an earlier, different English version of the essay see Reckwitz 2002.

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conditions. From this point of view, there are only social practices that are characterised by processes of negotiation, of dealing with tools and bodies. A social practice is therefore ‘a practice of negotiation, a practice of dealing with a tool, a practice of dealing with one’s own body’ (ibid., p. 290, trans. PL). In the following, I will apply Stengers’ reflections on an ecology of practices to media technologies and infrastructures. I am particularly interested in the premises and preconditions under which an ‘ecology of media practices’ can not only be conceived, but also negotiated and exercised. In this context, the term ‘media practices’ refers to socio-technical environments that are equally shaped by specific materials, technologies, networked infrastructures, and subjectivations. I will pay particular attention to media practices of sharing and distributing images on social media. It is therefore necessary to investigate how specific media practices are exercised in such digital environments and how they are negotiated in terms of media ecology. Media ecology understands technical media not as tools, but as environments that create interactions between heterogeneous actants, linking levels of the material, social and political and thus multiplying options for action. It can therefore be understood as ‘a logic or logistics of relations’ (Löffler & Sprenger, 2016, p. 13, trans. PL). This kind of ecology of media practices not only brings out heterogeneous actants and open-ended processes, but also brings together different fields of practice and cultures of knowledge. A media-ecological approach also has the advantage, as Stengers (2010, p. 34) again emphasised, of focusing on unpredictable connections and interactions within socio-technical environments and between different practices: ‘Ecology is, then, the science of multiplicities, disparate causalities, and unintentional creations of meaning’. I will therefore take up Stengers’ cosmopolitan proposal of an ecology of practices that distributes the risk of the success of a scientific experiment among all participating entities. An ecology of practices can be understood equally as a tool of thought, and I am going to apply it to the environments and situations of digital image circulation, to media practices of everyday culture through which images are communicated with and through images in social networks. In this vein, Couldry (2004, p. 117) has argued that media should be understood as an ‘open set of practices’, as a variable set of practices that brings forth materialisations, representations and subjectivations. For this shift in perspective, Stengers herself offers an important clue when she asserts: ‘An ecology of practice […] aims at the construction of new “practical identities” for practices, that is, new possibilities for them to be present, or in other words to connect’ (2005a, p. 186). If an ecology of practices aims at constructing ‘new practical identities for practices’, then this challenge is even more valid for socio-technical environments

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and in situations where many heterogeneous protagonists interact and form media ensembles. Media practices are characterised by a complex interplay of technologies, know-how, collective modes of use and individual appropriations, which is characterised equally by continuity and discontinuity. It is therefore necessary to ask which concrete media practices in digital cultures achieve presence and effectiveness in the sharing and distribution of images.5 Which situations does an ecology of media practices update and which practical identities does it create? Placing practices at the centre of such media-ecological considerations has the advantage of outlining a relational concept of media that emphasises concatenations and interdependencies within and between structures of materials, artefacts, practices and subjects—structures that produce each other and can be described as media ensembles.

2

Connective Practices

From the viewpoint of practice theory, what is to be gained from Stengers’ approach of a cosmopolitan ecology of practices? First, the insight that practices create and multiply relations between heterogeneous, human and non-human actors. Plus, no practice can be conceived without values and interests, without constraints and obligations. In other words, in the spirit of ecology, the interests and values of all those involved in a practice must be taken into account. In this respect, practices are at the same time political affairs—to use Stengers’ words: they are cosmopolitan, i.e. they compose a shared world. If these findings are now applied to the field of media practices, it becomes clear that they too are determined by competing interests and values or by constraints and obligations and are thus eminently cosmopolitan. Stengers’ concept of an ecology of practices is particularly useful where different interests and values meet and are negotiated within networked digital cultures. For example, local users of social media have different interests than the globally active providers of media services—i.e. the respective conditions of use and modes of operation must be negotiated between these actors. Moreover, digital platforms are used by ‘experts’ as well as ‘amateurs’ who both produce and receive information. Taking photographs and communication with images in particular has become a ubiquitous gesture in digital environments. Different levels of skill and knowledge coexist there and have situated and specified media practices of making, 5

For Harrasser and Solhdju (2016), the concept of effectiveness is at the centre of an ecological epistemology that ties its concept of truth to relationships between practical experiences.

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distributing, evaluating and archiving images. In social media, therefore, initially there has been a multiplication of relations, through which, in Stengers’ terms, new ‘practical identities for practices’ have emerged. In addition, van Dijck (2013, p. 4) has shown that a media infrastructure has emerged simultaneously with globally active Internet platforms and digital databases, which she calls the ‘ecosystem of connective media’. In her view, this ‘ecosystem of connective media’ has at the same time replaced the participatory culture of the now historic Web 2.0 with a ‘culture of connectivity’ (ibid., p. 5).6 It is implemented through the linking logics of digital technologies, i.e. it is based primarily on software, codes and protocols that limit and regulate users’ options for action. Digital infrastructures thus make available technologies of networked communication which impose certain restrictions and subject their users to constraints. They are also dominated by globally active providers of networks and platforms who pursue their own, usually commercial interests— with far-reaching consequences for the scope of media practices which are not only subject to economisation but also to neo-liberal techniques of government. For it is the media content produced by users of such networks and platforms that is commercially exploited, along with the personal data that are voluntarily and involuntarily disclosed and abused by intelligence services and for dubious political purposes, as the unbroken chain of scandals surrounding the unlawful disclosure of profile data by Facebook has shown once again.7 However, practices based on collaboration are not only dependent on competing interests: they also imply the possibility of failure, detours and disruptions. For Reckwitz (2003, p. 289, trans. PL), this corresponds to the ‘non-rationalistic logic’ of practices, where practical knowledge and skills meet resistant things and arbitrary materials, unexpected limitations, disruptions or breakdowns. In other words, for him, social practices are not only heterogeneous, but despite of all routines in their implementation and orientation towards a goal, they are open to different outcomes. This also means that deviations from common routines and modifications are always possible and detours are sometimes even necessary. From this point of view, practices are both innovative and persistent, spontaneous and iterative (see Conradi et al., 2012, p. 10).

6

Tim O’Reilly has described Web 2.0 accordingly as an ‘architecture of participation’ (2005). 7 The forwarding of 87 million user profiles to Cambridge Analytica in 2016 has been criminally investigated. In October 2019, Facebook agreed to pay a UK fine over £500,000. See https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-privacy-britain-idCAKBN1X913O (access 19 July 2023).

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This is particularly true of media practices because media are not unilaterally technologically determined, but are shaped by collective behaviour and heterogeneous forms of knowledge—in other words, ‘[t]echnology is therefore social before it is technical’ (Deleuze, 1988, p. 40).8 This is particularly evident in digital cultures where media practices operate in networked socio-technical environments. This also means that these practices affect the entire arsenal of media and their heterogeneous structures and traverse the dichotomies between ‘old’ and ‘new’, ‘analogue’ and ‘digital’ media. Digital photo-sharing platforms such as Flickr, for example, operate with established practices of collecting and classifying, arranging and montaging images created in analogue image media and integrate digitised image material of older provenance (cf. Gerling et al., 2018, pp. 236–241). In other words, in comparison between practices and media, the former often have greater continuity. Or, to put it yet another way, it is practices that situate and specify media and their interweaving into media ensembles. Social media distribute power of action among heterogeneous actants and operate on the basis of collective behaviour aimed at collaboration or cooperation. The term ‘collaboration’ emphasises the aspect of working together, which is initially open-ended, while ‘cooperation’ is clearly directed towards a common goal.9 Schüttpelz & Gießmann (2015, p. 8, trans. PL) thus describe media practices as ‘cooperative practices’ and ask through which ‘organisational, technical, institutional and aesthetic concatenations’ (ibid., p. 9, trans. PL) or ‘reciprocal productions of common procedures, goals and means’ (Schüttpelz & Meyer, 2017, p. 161, trans. PL) they come about and are maintained. Accordingly, media both create cooperation and emerge from cooperative practices (see Schüttpelz & Gießmann, 2015, p. 10). The media practices of sharing and distributing images on photo-sharing platforms are thus both collaborative and cooperative—collaborative when they are fulfilled primarily in the communicative act of sharing, cooperative when the activities, such as creating joint image collections, the viral disseminating of image content or negotiating conditions of use, are directed towards a common goal. From the perspective of a praxeology of media practice, it is therefore essential to relate the political, economic and social circumstances of the continuity and discontinuity of practices to those of media. Even in connected digital cultures, media practices are always dependent on collective negotiation processes that help shape media environments. In many cases, 8

Here, Deleuze refers back to studies in cultural history by Fernand Braudel and Jean-Pierre Vernant. 9 Ghanbari et al. (2018) emphasize in their introduction that collaborations question or undermine common hierarchies and focus on inclusive participation in work processes.

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it is precisely these practices that determine which software and applications will prevail and be economically successful.

3

Media Ecologies

Matthew Fuller’s book Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Technology, published in 2005, was openly presented as an attempt to understand both technical media and media practices as relations between human and non-human actors, between processes and objects, beings and things, structures and matter (cf. Fuller, 2005, p. 2). His approach to media ecology can be understood as a media praxeology of relations, which is particularly relevant to the organisation of collaborative work processes and information flows. In digital environments it is described with the term ‘information ecology’ (ibid., p. 3). For Fuller, the material form of media is nothing more than the result of an interplay of resistances and degrees of freedom, which are sounded out by practices and can in turn give rise to a completely different set of practices. He describes this interplay as the ‘capacity to distinguish, mobilize, and connect medial powers in relation to other compositional formations’ (ibid., p. 86). In the collaborations of human and non-human actors, he simultaneously combines the aesthetic with the political: ‘There is a “casuistry of relations” that is at once aesthetic and political, but […] absolutely synthetic. Objects, processes, and media address themselves to other elements and dynamics’ (ibid., p. 86). In this respect, Fuller’s media ecologies are influenced by Félix Guattari’s ecosophy, which outlines the ethical foundation of ecology in the social and mental realm and has called for a ‘reconstruction of social and individual practices’ (Guattari, 2000, p. 41). Only through the collaborative execution of a practice and the testing of various options for action can the relations between the actants involved be expanded, as Fuller emphasises as follows: ‘the use of objects is not simply determined by their arrangement but also by interpretations, layering, reuse, and other operations’ (2005, p. 87). This testing of relations leads to variable arrangements that open up options for action: ‘multiple compositions, multiple dimensions of relationality to operate through and around the arrangements of the same set of material’ (ibid., p. 88). In this context Fuller explicitly speaks of ‘compositional drives’ (ibid.) in order to highlight the different interests and needs of the participating actants. At the same time, Fuller develops a ‘theory of medial becoming’, which is based on the idea that there is unrealised potential in every formation, every structure of actants, which can be realised in other formations and structures:

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‘preexisting formations […] containing dynamics that are unrealized, that await composition with other devices, drives or patterns’ (ibid., p. 92). He understands these processes of becoming as an ‘othering of technology’ (ibid.)—as a possibility that technology may change and transform.10 As an example of such an alteration of technology, Fuller cites a neighbourhood self-organisation of nighttime street lighting, in which residents bring their different interests, needs and values to bear and negotiate with each other: while for some people night-time lighting of streets and paths promises safety and control of social space, for others it is perceived as disruptive, disciplinary or uneconomic. Here, the technology is altered in that the infrastructural concatenation of matter and energy, i.e. the structure of streets, lighting fixtures, the cable system of the power supply, light measurement by sensors and electrical signal transmission, is no longer controlled centrally but organised in a decentralised manner, so that other practices can be tested, which in turn have the potential to have a changing effect on the technological ensemble. Automated control has become a complex process of negotiation, a practice that is both social and media-based, intensifying and multiplying the relationships between the actants involved. This means that an established technology is not simply operated differently but reconfigured through negotiated practices. We are dealing here with a ‘new practical identity’ in the collective handling of a media ensemble, which Isabelle Stengers speaks of in the context of an ecology of practices. The shift from the automated control of street lighting by light-sensitive sensors to manual control by the residents not only creates new options for action and obligations, but also presents the technical ensemble in all its positions and their interrelationships as composed, which can also be composed differently. Fuller speaks in this context of a ‘[f]ine tuning of a technology’ (2005, p. 90), by which technologies are made more effective and resource-saving and are designed according to the interests and values of their users. With Stengers’ concept of ecology, it can be said that the material components of a media ensemble also have an interest in duration and subsistence, i.e. the preservation of their existence. Elizabeth Edwards also argues in this spirit when, following actor-network theory, she conceives of photographs as ‘distributed objects’, which, through their material configuration, traces of use, exhibition, exchange and archiving, provoke specific ways of dealing with them and have their own biography to endow them with agency. Edwards therefore regards photographs and archives as ‘dynamic 10

Bruno Latour has also developed the idea of an altering of technical ensembles and has described ways to ‘ecologise’ technology as an alternative to ‘modernis[ing]’ it (2013, p. 231).

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forces within networks of non-humans and humans which themselves constitute social processes’ (2011, p. 51). Media practices of archiving multiply the relations between human and non-human agents as well as between physical and digital materiality. From this point of view, digital objects and archives are agents—in Edwards’ words: ‘the digital as another moment in the on-going social biography of the material archive’ (ibid., p. 56). The digital infrastructures of archives also consume material resources and must therefore be understood as part of a material ecology (cf. Vestberg, 2016).

4

Media Praxeology of Relations

So, what conclusions can be drawn from Stengers’ ecology of practices and Fuller’s media ecologies for a media praxeology of relations? In the following, I will discuss media practices of collecting, sharing and distributing images that were first established by prosumers in the participatory Web 2.0 and are still practised today on social media platforms. I am particularly interested in the changes these practices have undergone on the photo-sharing platform Flickr and what implications of these changes can be observed. Collecting and storing things is without doubt a widespread and continuous cultural practice. Socio-culturally, collecting can be understood as a passion through which special affective ties between people and things are maintained. Because of their appreciation, collected things often achieve a longer existence than those who initially collected them. And they need special care to be preserved. Collections must therefore be conserved and curated at the same time. This makes them time- and space-consuming and therefore turns them into powerful actants. The ways and means of collecting are also subject to cultural change and are shaped by different socio-technical environments. This can be particularly observed in collection activities on social media, in which an immense variety of collected objects from both private and public collections is not only presented photographically and thus made public for the first time, but these now digital objects are also embedded in a fabric of practices of sharing and distributing, commenting and interpreting, arranging and archiving.11 The digital infrastructures of databases, online portals and search engines form a socio-technical environment in which the acquisition and dissemination

11

The following takes up my argumentation in Gerling et al. (2018, pp. 207–257). On the history and present of archival practices, see Wimmer (2012) and Melone (2018).

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of knowledge are as much of an incentive as communicative exchange and selfexpression. In this context, the linking logics of digital technologies regulate the relationships between digital objects and their prosumers. As Uricchio (2009) has shown, high connectivity within dynamic digital networks leads not only to a new logic of distribution but also to new regulated modes of interaction. José van Dijck highlights the consequences of this programmed connectivity and emphasises that actions in social media are directed and manipulated: ‘Sociality coded by technology […] renders people’s activities formal, manageable, and manipulable, enabling platforms to engineer the sociality in people’s everyday routines’ (2013, p. 12). However, if one assumes with Andreas Reckwitz that every practice shapes social relationships, then this applies also and even more so to connective media practices. In this sense, technologies are always embedded in more or less heterogeneous social milieus, which use these technologies for their own purposes and in Fuller’s words change them. Thus, the question is rather which actants with which interests prevail in certain socio-technical environments at a certain point in time. For the formation of media infrastructures is, along the lines of Stengers and Fuller, an ongoing political negotiation process in which the interests of all participating entities intervene and in the course of which technologies change. In network societies, which Castells (2009, p. 126) has characterised as a ‘culture of sharing’, not only information is shared and commented on, but also personal memories, which are therefore no longer private property, but become publicly accessible information with all the attendant consequences. Based on the infrastructural networking of prosumers, the circulation of mediatised memories in the digital networks of social media has thus become a collaborative media practice (cf. Hoskins, 2009). In this context, Hoskins and Tulloch (2016) speak of ‘hyperconnectivity’ or a ‘new media ecology’ (Hoskins, 2017). As an individual as well as a collective experience, remembering is embedded in digital infrastructures, which simultaneously determine what and how something is remembered or forgotten. Thus, communication through images has become as firmly established as the creation and arrangement of image collections. On social media platforms, the most important factor is to communicate events instantaneously through images and to share them with others, i.e. to distribute them virally via corresponding web services and to present them on corresponding portals (cf. van House & Churchill, 2008). This is why image-based technologies are particularly popular. Nevertheless, communicating through images is only one aspect of digital image circulation. The creation of image collections that need to be constantly curated is also a practice that is common in digital cultures. On digital portals and

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platforms, private collections and collection activities compete for public attention alongside public institutions of cultural memory such as museums or archives. Amateur collectors not only increasingly manage their collections digitally, but also post entire picture galleries of their carefully arranged and photographed collection items on the Internet, where they exchange ideas with like-minded people. Susan Murray therefore speaks of a collective experience when she considers the options for action that such platforms enable (2008, p. 149). Practices of collecting, sharing and distributing images in digital environments thus influence not only our ways of remembering but also our lifestyles and identity formation, everyday life and the canon of cultural values. In digital networks such as Flickr or Instagram, photographs, films and collections gain visibility primarily as image galleries that adopt established ways of representing images and their spatial arrangement in formations of rows. These older collection practices are thus continued on photo-sharing platforms, insofar as they are taken up in the visual design of database structures. As digital objects, marginal collections in particular receive greater attention and can be placed in relation to other digital objects. This can be seen with the example of the photosharing platform Flickr, which has existed since 2004 and on which numerous groups have formed that share, comment on and curate their photographed collections and collected photographs on the basis of common interests. Users of such online services first arrange and photograph their collections, then upload them as image files and transfer them into thematically organised image galleries, or curate collections of genuinely digital and linked image files on media events or more or less ephemeral themes. The published metadata on camera type, time and place of recording, as well as the photographer and the indexing of the images, the so-called tagging, play a special role, as they can be linked to other digital objects and thus be better distributed and find their way into different collections. Indexing is now also carried out automatically by appropriate algorithms, so that the power of this practice increasingly shifts to non-human actants and to attributions made by administrators such as ‘new’ and ‘interesting’. The members of the Flickr group the Collection Collective, for example, also primarily regards their photographs and picture galleries as vehicles for communicating in networked digital networks. For this reason, the photographers index and link their photographs with other collections or created digital photo albums that can be browsed, compared and commented on. This is thus an eminently collaborative media practice—a practice that first and foremost focuses on showing and reviewing photographs of mostly ephemeral things from everyday culture. In other words: the practise of collecting itself is presented and made

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accessible to the public. Only on the photo-sharing platform does it become a collaborative practice of communicating via photographic images. As Edgar Goméz Cruz and Elisenda Ardèvol have shown in their ethnographic study on a Flickr group of amateur photographers in Barcelona, this use of photography represents a ‘connectivity practice’ (2013, p. 41). The fact that this bundle of offline and online practices of collecting, photographing and arranging images, which can be shared, distributed and commented on via the platform, is understood as a collective activity, which is underscored by the group’s name, ‘the Collection Collective’.12 Such groups are formed by common interests (in this case: the collection mainly of artefacts of popular culture) and are held together by collective media practices of communicating via images, for which purpose specially established discussion forums are used. These forums are primarily set up to provide supporting comments and exchange tips on collecting, which promote the group’s cohesion. These group activities are at the same time dependent on personal preferences, opinions and trends and serve the purpose of community-building, as the self-description of the Collection Collective makes clear.13 At the same time, it is noticeable that these groups, in contrast to their linked image collections, hardly exceed a certain size, so that collaborations have internal limitations. Moreover, their activities are relatively stable and routine; however, they have to continually reconstitute themselves when the architecture, functions or terms of use of the website change or the platform is sold. In 2005, Flickr was taken over by Yahoo and, to the chagrin of many users, converted into a mainly commercial service. Changes to the terms of service made unilaterally by online services and attempts to commercialise the content generated by their users or their personal data repeatedly meet with collective resistance and can lead to migration to other web services (cf. Gerling et al., 2018, pp. 44–48). This development could also be observed at Flickr. The recurrent disputes about rights of use or community guidelines (cf. ibid., pp. 71–77) in particular 12

The group has been in existence since 2006 and currently has 251 members, many of whom, however, are currently not active; see https://www.flickr.com/groups/491438 20@N00. The group the Coffee Collective has existed since 2007 and currently has 373 members; see https://www.flickr.com/photos/coffeecollective. The Ost Collective, which joined in 2009, describes itself decidedly as ‘Ateliers partizipatifs’; see https://www.flickr. com/people/ostcollective (access 29 March 2018). 13 There we can read the following: ‘this is a tribute to collectors. an investigation into what we collect. our collections reveal a great deal about who we are. so join our assembly of assemblies, collection of collections… and post pictures of whatever you collect’; cf. https:// www.flickr.com/groups/49143820@N00 (access 30 March 2018).

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are an example of the fact that different interests are at stake in digital image circulation—especially when users clearly prioritise communicative and social exchange via the platform as well as self-presentation. When Flickr groups limit or stop their activities, then this is also a collective action (and attitude), which shows that collaborative practices can fail in certain situations or media environments, or that the actors seek or create other situations and environments. Here, the mobility of digital images and the networking of collectors are particularly entangled with older practices of collecting and the (more or less existing) immobility of collections of material objects. The failure of collaborative practices is therefore also part of a connective media culture. Not least because of this possibility, in 2008 Flickr and the Library of Congress initiated a collaborative project entitled ‘the Commons’ with the aim not only of increasing the visibility of public image collections, but also encouraging users of the online service to index and disseminate the images made available in the public domain. Here it becomes particularly clear through which heterogeneous relations digital objects become effective in socio-technical environments. For commons only come into being through the linking of materials and knowledge in digital environments, through which relationships between data and modes of use are established. This creates situations in which technologies that are adapted to the interests of users and practices are updated according to the affordances of digital objects, which often have long-standing object biographies in analogue collections and archives. As Felix Stalder has pointed out, as an object of collaborative media practices, ‘[c]ommons are long-term social and material processes. They cannot be created overnight and in order to become meaningful, they must exist over an extensive period of time’ (2013, p. 33). In terms of a media praxeology of relations, it is therefore important to investigate which alternative socio-technical environments can be created by collaborations of users and affordances of digital objects in order to take their mutually legitimate interests into account. With regard to an ecology of media practices, the main aim here is to multiply the relations and thus the options for action between them. This also raises the question of how stable or sustainable the changes these practices undergo are when they assume ‘new practical identities’, as Isabelle Stengers puts it. My final example is therefore a long-term collaborative project launched by Canadian artist Perry Bard in 2007: Man with a Movie Camera: The Global Remake. This shows how different interests, restrictions and values are negotiated within regulated database-supported platforms in the spirit of an ecology of media practices.

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Bard gave Dziga Vertov’s 1929 film of the same name a digital platform on which amateurs worldwide could post re-created sequences.14 The ‘classic’ of avant-garde film has become a digital object with its own affordances. Over a period of ten years, this collaborative activity of amateur filmmakers has resulted in an extensive audiovisual archive that was permanently reconfigured and regenerated until its web archiving in 2017.15 On the project’s homepage, Vertov’s digitised original recordings were combined with alternating uploads, so that new pictorial arrangements between Vertov’s original film and current film recordings of amateur filmmakers were continually being created and, in principle, could continue to be created should the website go online again. The digital files were indexed, sorted by scenes and archived in an interactive database for the long term. Bard’s collaborative project, which was also shown as a film installation at various festivals, has therefore been called an ‘experiment in database cinema’ (Guertin, 2012, p. 11). In this way, cinematic practices of documenting everyday situations, selfaffirmation and experimentation with cinematic techniques and materials, as well as digital practices of sharing and linking images, have entered into a relationship and the relations between them have multiplied (cf. Bard, 2011, p. 323).16 The platform offered the opportunity not only to situate and update these filmic practices in a digital environment, but also to make Vertov’s film itself the subject of a practical digital analysis (cf. ibid.).17 The structure of the database has taken up the montage technique of film, creating an environment in which media practices of filming, ordering and montage of visual material have been updated and reconfigured. It is striking how often the self-reflexive gesture of filming from Vertov’s film has been taken up by amateur filmmakers and updated with various types of camera, including smartphones (Fig. 1). This shows not least the continuity of this media practice, which is not only much more widespread today, but has 14

This digital platform was created in cooperation with the Video Pool Media Arts Centre in Winnipeg, Manitoba, which is dedicated to insdependent artistic multimedia projects. It was also supported by the Arts Council of England and the Canada Arts Council. 15 See http://www.perrybard.net/man-with-a-movie-camera (access 29 March 2018). Web archiving is carried out by the archive collective Rhizome: http://webenact.rhizome.org/ man-with-a-movie-camera-the-global-remake/20160217142125/http://dziga.perrsybard.net. A current version of the remake (from 16 January 2017) is available at https://vimeo.com/ 224732919. 16 In the run-up to the digital remake, Bard worked with various groups who wanted to film portraits of their cities in Vertov’s tradition. 17 Bard says she was inspired by Manovich (2001), who compares Vertov’s film montage with the construction of databases.

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Fig. 1 Perry Bard: Man with a Movie Camera: The Global Remake, ‘Shots tagged with Camera’ (http://dziga.perrybard.net/tags/show/camera; screenshot, 7 November 2018)

also taken on a ‘new practical identity’ in Stengers’ sense in its interaction with digital technologies and infrastructures. The effectiveness of cultural semantics in indexing is particularly evident in the assignment of uploads, when, for example, images of a ballet performance from Vertov’s film meet images of a choir (from Canada), a private dance event (from Spain) and a mask dance (from Brazil) (Fig. 2). The changing combinations of original sequences and current uploads of film amateurs from numerous countries, which have been created in this way, also provide an indication of the geopolitical conditions of the spread of media practices. It is noticeable that with one exception there are no uploads from countries on the African continent. Bard’s long-term project therefore makes it possible to understand the political conditions of digital infrastructures as well as the changes that the participation-oriented Web 2.0 underwent until its eventual replacement. In her essay ‘When Film and Database Collide’, published in 2011, Bard also critically examined the programming and functioning of the software developed

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Fig. 2 Perry Bard: Man with a Movie Camera: The Global Remake, ‘Shots tagged with Dance’ (http://dziga.perrybard.net/tags/show/dance; screenshot, 7 November 2018)

by John Weir and addressed problems of collective authorship. She reports that she had changed the rules for uploads several times since 2007 and also adapted her expectations to the products submitted by users. This illustrates how the programming of database architectures regulates their use, thus subjecting participation and collective authorship to restrictions that can be lifted by adapting the rules and programming. In terms of a relational aesthetic, Bard (cf. 2011, p. 327) is particularly interested in the distance between the image windows, which changes with each upload, as well as the image constellations themselves, which from her point of view must be constantly subjected to reflection. Thus, the image windows of the digital platform for which there are no uploads to sequences of Vertov’s film have remained empty. The experience Bard has gained with her long-term digital project over ten years shows that hyper-connective collaborations in digital media must be continually renegotiated—and that means that media practices update situations and create ‘new practical identities’ in which different aesthetic interests, political values and economic constraints collide. This is why at this point I would like to return to Stengers’ cosmopolitan point of view.

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Cosmopolitics of Media Practices

‘If the1980s gave birth to media theory, and the 1990s were the decade of networks, we are now living under the spell of the platform.’ (Lovink, 2016, p. 2). Taking up Manuel Castells’ concept of the network society, Geert Lovink critically speaks of a ‘Platform Society’ (ibid., p. 4), in which globally active operators of digital platforms have taken over the monopoly over social media and their networks and profitably evaluate and commercialise the data provided voluntarily or involuntarily by their users. In addition, these platforms are networked and exchange data. This turns them into powerful actants. Against this monopoly position and the exploitation of personal data, Lovink once again relies on decentralised platforms and the self-organisation of their users to break the hegemony of global players like Google or Facebook. His plea for a network politics that not only analyses the economic interactions of digital capitalism, but opposes it with alternative economies, is decidedly characterised by the desire to ‘design new forms of sociality […] that emphasize long-term collaborations over spontaneous one-off gatherings’ (ibid., p. 10). His proposal for a political economy of the digital aims to shape practices of solidarity, ‘in order to create direct and lasting connections with others who are still unknown’ (ibid., pp. 26, 11). It is cosmopolitan in the best sense, since it is also about an ecology of practices as proposed by Stengers in the sense of a multiplication of relations that includes the interests of non-human actors. Collections that have been digitally prepared, digital archives that are curated in the same way as analogue ones and must be constantly regenerated, are in this sense actors with their own interests and impact. At the same time, they are structures of materials that repeatedly prove to be resistant in processes of presentation and representation. ‘A renaissance of the cooperative Internet’ (ibid., p. 27) is therefore only possible if the interests and values of all participants are taken into account and ‘new practical identities for practices’ can be created. Creating non-commercial platforms, sustainable networks and intelligent infrastructures is one way to achieve this (ibid., p. 186).18 In other words, media practices must continue to be negotiated on a micro-political level and their socio-technical environments must be reshaped in accordance with the interests and values of all actors in order to test other economies and options for action.

18

Lovink refers to the 2013 Accelerate Manifesto by Alex Williams and Nick Smicek; see http://criticallegalthinking.com/2013/05/14/accelerate-manifesto-for-an-accelerationistpolitics (access 12 June 2018).

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References Bard, P. (2011). When film and database collide. In G. Lovink & R. Somers Miles (Eds.), Video vortex reader II: Moving images beyond YouTube (pp. 322–329). Institute of Network Cultures. Castells, M. (2009). Communication power. Oxford University Press. Conradi, T., Ecker, G., Eke, N. O., & Muhle, F. (Eds.). (2012). Schemata und Praktiken. Fink. Couldry, N. (2004). Theorizing media as practice. Social Semiotics, 14(2), 115–132. Cruz, E. G., & Ardèvol, E. (2013). Some ethnographic notes on a Flickr group. Photographies, 6(1), 35–44. Deleuze, G. (1988). Foucault (S. Hand, Trans.). University of Minnesota Press. van Dijck, J. (2013). The culture of connectivity: A critical history of social media. Oxford University Press. Edwards, E. (2011). Photographs: Material form and the dynamic archive. In C. Caraffa (Ed.), Photo archives and the photographic memory of art history (pp. 47–56). Deutscher Kunstverlag. Fuller, M. (2005). Media ecologies: Materialist energies in art and technology. MIT Press. Gerling, W., Holschbach, S., & Löffler, P. (Eds.). (2018). Bilder verteilen. Fotografische Praktiken in der digitalen Kultur. transcript. Ghanbari, N., Otto, I., Schramm, S., & Thielmann, T. (Eds.). (2018). Kollaboration. Beiträge zur Medientheorie und Kulturgeschichte der Zusammenarbeit. Fink. Guattari, F. (2000). The three ecologies (I. Pindar & P. Sutter, Trans.). The Athlone Press. Guertin, C. (2012). Digital prohibition: Piracy and authorship in digital art. Continuum. Haraway, D. (1988). Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575–599. Harrasser, K., & Solhdju, K. (2016). Wirksamkeit verpflichtet: Herausforderungen einer Ökologie der Praktiken. Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft, 14, 72–86. Hoskins, A. (2009). The mediatisation of memory. In J. Garde-Hansen, A. Hoskin, & A. Reading (Eds.), Save as... digital memories (pp. 27–43). Palgrave Macmillan. Hoskins, A. (2017). Digital memory studies. Media pasts in transition. Routledge. Hoskins, A., & Tulloch, J. (2016). Risk and hyperconnectivity: Media and memories of neoliberalism. Oxford University Press. van House, N. A., & Churchill, E. (2008). Technologies of memory: Key issues and critical perspectives. Memory Studies, 1(3), 295–310. Latour, B. (2013). An inquiry into modes of existence: An anthropology of the moderns. (C. Porter, Trans.). Harvard University Press. Löffler, P., & Sprenger, F. (2016). Medienökologien. Einleitung in den Schwerpunkt. Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft, 14, 10–18. Lovink, G. (2016). Social media abyss: Critical internet cultures and the force of negation. Polity Press. Manovich, L. (2001). The language of new media. MIT Press. Melone, M. (2018). Zwischen Bilderlast und Bilderschatz: Pressefotografie und Bildarchive im Zeitalter der Digitalisierung. Fink. Murray, S. (2008). Digital images, photo sharing, and our shifting notations of everyday aesthetics. Journal of Visual Culture, 7(147), 147–163.

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O’Reilly, T. (2005). ‘What Is Web 2.0?’ Design patterns and business models for the next generation of software. https://www.oreilly.com/pub/a/web2/archive/what-is-web20.html. Accessed 12 June 2018. Reckwitz, A. (2002). Toward a theory of social practices: A development in cultural theorizing. European Journal of Social Theory, 5(2), 243–263. Reckwitz, A. (2003). Grundelemente einer Theorie sozialer Praktiken. Eine sozialtheoretische Perspektive. Zeitschrift für Soziologie, 32(4), 282–301. Schüttpelz, E., & Gießmann, S. (2015). Medien der Kooperation. Überlegungen zum Forschungsstand. Navigationen. Zeitschrift für Medien- und Kulturwissenschaft, 15(1), 7–55. Schüttpelz, E., & Meyer, C. (2017). Ein Glossar zur Praxistheorie. Siegener Version (Frühjahr 2017). Navigationen. Zeitschrift für Medien- und Kulturwissenschaft, 17(1), 155–164. Stalder, F. (2013). Digital solidarity. Mute books/PML books. Stengers, I. (2005a). Introductory notes on an ecology of practices. Cultural Studies Review, 11(1), 183–196. Stengers, I. (2005b). The cosmopolitical proposal. In B. Latour & P. Weibel (Eds.), Making things public: Atmospheres of democracy (pp. 994–1003). MIT Press. Stengers, I. (2008). Der kosmopolitische Vorschlag. In Spekulativer Konstruktivismus (G. Ricke, H. Schmidgen & R. Voullié, Trans.) (pp. 153–185). Merve Verlag. Stengers, I. (2010). Cosmopolitics I. University of Minnesota Press. Uricchio, W. (2009). Moving beyond the artifact: Lessons from participatory culture. In M. van den Boomen, S. Lammers, A.-S. Lehmann, J. Raessens, & M. T. Schäfer (Eds.), Digital material: Tracing new media in everyday life and technology (pp. 136–146). Amsterdam University Press. Vestberg, N. L. (2016). The Ecology of the Photographic Image: Archives, Power, and Materiality. In V. von Fleming, D. Berndt, & Y. Bialek (Eds.), (Post)Fotografisches Archivieren. Wandel, Macht, Geschichte (pp. 83–95). Jonas Verlag. Williams, A., & Smicek, N. (2013). ‘Accelerate Manifesto’. Critical Legal Thinking. Law and the Political. https://criticallegalthinking.com/2013/05/14/accelerate-manifesto-foran-accelerationist-politics. Accessed 12 June 2018. Wimmer, M. (2012). Archivkörper. Eine Geschichte historischer Einbildungskraft. Konstanz University Press.

Part V Post-Scripta

Socio-Material Practices in Irritating Situations Jörg Potthast

About twenty-five years ago, Amann and Hirschauer (1997) called for ethnographic enquiries to estrange their own culture. Their aim was that ethnography should work systematically to make our modern and highly differentiated knowledge societies seem exotic. As Hirschauer (2008) later reaffirmed, this project was directed against a twofold pattern of a mistaken division of labour within their home discipline (sociology). On the one hand, it was important to shake up the self-evident fact that sociologists pursue either theoretical projects or empirical work (ibid., pp. 166–168). This horizontal division of labour results in mutual ignorance. On the other hand, it is equally problematic that the discipline’s understanding of methodology is linked to a vertical division of labour through the narrowing of ‘empirical social research’ to ‘standardised surveys’. The larger the survey, the more the relationship between principal investigators and subordinate employees is characterised by problems of disciplining. For this reason, ‘methods’ have a strong normative connotation and are used and reflected almost exclusively in terms of delegation and control (ibid., p. 178 f.). In both respects, this unquestioned division of labour is inappropriate; if it remained so, sociology would be robbed of the ability to use methods for the purpose of discovery and thus to irritate theoretical assumptions (Amann & Hirschauer, 1997, p. 38). Due to these problematic patterns in the division of labour, sociology would drift, losing its competence to culturally estrange its subjects in a systematic way (ibid.). Years later, Hirschauer (2017) reviewed a monumental methodological handbook that claims to initiate the reunification of quantitative and qualitative research methods. The reviewer, however, does not see this promise fulfilled in the handbook J. Potthast (B) University of Siegen, Siegen, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 S. Gießmann et al. (eds.), Materiality of Cooperation, Medien der Kooperation— Media of Cooperation, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-39468-4_13

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and still considers the irritating competence of his discipline to be in danger. Far from making it a reference point for further disciplinary development, the volume would cultivate an understanding of methods still narrowed down (to surveys) (ibid., p. 320) and must be accused of being attached to a theoretical monism in a way that suggests that there have been no new developments in the last three decades. On the basis of individualistic theories of rational choice, the promise of unity could only be flimsy, even if it was meant to be ‘ingenuous’ (ibid., p. 327). Instead of a proposal for reunification, the review essay sees precisely these problematic disciplinary forces of perseverance at work, which, starting with the programmatic publication (Amann & Hirschauer, 1997), should be challenged in the form of ‘theoretical empiricism’ (Kalthoff et al., 2008). In this respect, the point of departure to which ethnography owes the invitation to return to the West and the North, in the opposite direction from the classical orientation towards non-European destinations (Amann & Hirschauer, 1997), in order to assert its potential for irritation, remains unchanged. Their mission, they argued, was to take on a ‘translation and mediation task’ that was crucial for the discipline, from a position doubly marginal to the discipline and its theoretical foundations as well as to the fields researched (ibid., p. 28). The practice of this type of ethnography can be described as a pendulum movement, back and forth between the research field and the academic workplace at the university (ibid.). Neither at home here nor there, but somewhere in between, ethnographic research imposes a great deal on the two populations: it violates the unwritten laws of the disciplinary division of labour—and it comes unusually close to its research subjects (“co-locality”; ibid., p. 22), only to then remain there for a long time as well (ibid., pp. 16, 21).1 Sometimes it is possible to infect people in the field with the researchers’ ‘curiosity’; in this process, informal research alliances can be formed on an ad hoc basis (ibid., p. 26). Ethnographic research comes with serious risks. Anyone who takes on both sociological theory-building and standardised research approaches can be crushed in the process. Those who rely on field research also need access to the field; however, while this was a matter of course in colonial times, it can by no means be taken for granted anymore and is sometimes denied (Amann & Hirschauer, 1997, p. 12). A student at the University of Siegen recently inserted a slightly desperate undertone to her comment, when she remarked in a discussion of Amann and Hirschauer’s text Die Befremdung der eigenen Kultur: ‘Nobody wants to do that.’ 1

In a reflection on my first experiment with ethnographic research at home, I also used the category of ‘imposition’ (Zumutung) (Potthast, 2017d, pp. 85–95).

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If the unity of the discipline depends to a large extent on finding people who develop irritation as a core competence, include it in their job description and make it their profession, then this reaction is cause for concern: What exactly is this competence about? The starting point for this reflection is an ‘analytical case study’ in which Stefan Hirschauer describes transformations of the interaction order during a lift ride, which he explored in a ‘self-experiment’ (Hirschauer, 1999, p. 222). His contribution, which has since been acknowledged as a classic (Krämer & Schäfer, 2014) and translated into English (Hirschauer, 2005), documents irritating situations using the example of a lift ride; this attention must seem like an ‘anachronism of the industrial age’ to a society which considers the Internet as the most contemporary technology (Hirschauer, 1999, p. 221). Disregarding more recent technology, Hirschauer’s contribution highlights how people who use lifts are busy doing nothing. This, in turn, must seem strange to conventional social sciences that think of the social in terms of ‘action’. Counterintuitively, thus, he posits that the social can be recognised in situations in which we ‘do nothing to each other’ and somehow manage ‘to have nothing to do with each other’ (ibid., trans. JP). By implication, socio-material practices are to be determined at non-places (Augé, 1995 [1992]) or ‘Unorte’ (Hirschauer, 1999, p. 222) from the midst of doing nothing: Where does this inversion lead? Has it proven its worth? In order to appreciate its potential for irritation, I first reconstruct this inversion in slow motion: How do situational switches come about? This question will also be addressed in the subsequent sections. There I shift the focus to paradigmatic places of ‘doing nothing’ at the non-place par excellence: queues in major airports. The slow-motion approach would be misguided if the only thing that could be gained here was the confirmation of some vaguely pragmatist mnenomics: when situations are irritating and break apart, reflexivity is released. Or: reflexive actors are effects of irritating situations. Rather, slow motion is indispensable if you want to take a step forward. In order to provide a situated account of how alterations in situations occur, I will limit myself in the following in other ways: I enter into an imaginary dialogue with Hirschauer, who, during the period under consideration and in the German-speaking world, has worked particularly persistently, consistently and reflectively on bringing ethnography back home and who has emphatically defended the position he developed on the subject: situations must irritate. The fact that he also asserts this position against a ‘self-sufficient situationalism’ can—in all the contributions mentioned—not be ignored. Certainly, research on technology and media has made considerable progress by abandoning a fixation on new characteristics and turning ostentatiously (not to the Internet,

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but) to everyday situations of using older technologies (such as the lift) (see Edgerton, 2007). But (also) this can only be a first step. It is only the question of how such situational switches occur, and where these switches lead, that prompts us to return in detail to the lift ride. If it turns out that Stefan Hirschauer overlooks or even underestimates certain varieties of self-sufficient situationalism, then this question deserves the attention of a partly exclusive dialogue.2

1

Have We Become Thoroughly Modern? Socio-Material Practices Bring About a Revolution of Waiting

Why should we bother with lifts and airports when both only serve the purpose of getting from A to B? What is the point of functional buildings if not their function? Introducing his contribution, Hirschauer raises two topical points on the social history of lifts. Firstly, it is worth mentioning that lift users have become their own chauffeurs. Secondly, this does not imply merely the technical competence needed to turn on an automatic vehicle at the push of a button, but also a more comprehensive cultural process in which ‘technical conditioning’ corresponds to ‘disciplined handling’. From this he draws the far-reaching conclusion that only a skilled practice of use produces the technical artefact (Hirschauer, 2005, p. 46).3 The history of airports can also be summarised with a few key points. Initially, airports were developed along military routes and for postal services in order to supply aircraft with fuel. In addition, they were only equipped with the bare essentials to provide shelter for the staff, if necessary. Larger aircraft necessitated paved runways, and as aircraft ranges increased, many airports became redundant (Denicke, 2012). The situation was quite different for those located near urban agglomerations. They took part in the booming development of civil aviation. Within a few decades, tents on the edge of levelled landing 2

To use a proper name pars pro toto for a wider research network remains a questionable strategy, even if an exception seems justified to me for the reasons given above. It should therefore be stressed that it is far from Hirschauer’s intention to isolate himself in this way. A recent publication, for example, shows that his plea for ‘intersituativity’ (with borrowings from Bruno Latour and Karin Knorr Cetina, among others) is a tradition-conscious argument (Hirschauer, 2014). In the case of another recent publication outlining ‘quality criteria for qualitative social research’ (Strübing et al., 2018), he has served as a co-author. 3 On lifts, see Bernard (2014 [2006]) and Paumgarten (2008); on queues, which, according to the authorities, were ‘uncivilised’ and therefore botched the launch of the new public transport system of Santiago (Chile), see Ureta (2013).

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strips gave way to huge terminals (Anderson, 2014). Places that had previously been associated with the edges of the known world came together with ideas about modern cities. This change, too, can only be understood if we gain insight into how airports are used: How was the operation of large airports culturally implemented? How were users disciplined? What types of technical conditioning must work together to keep such a facility running? Pointing to their social and cultural history may shake up the idea that technical artefacts can be reduced to statements of their very purpose. This is undoubtedly an important repertoire for irritations at the disposal of the social sciences. However, Hirschauer does not place his contribution in this particular line of research. The history of the lift may estrange theories of rational choice, which reduce technical artefacts to mere means to an end. For this, he also puts together a number of arguments (Hirschauer, 2005, p. 47 f.). But this happens more en passant. To what extent does he change registers—and subsequently operate in another mode of estrangement? As mentioned at the beginning, his analysis is about how people do nothing to each other. Those who expect lift rides to be limited to carrying out cool and confident choices will be irritated by this. If Hirschauer succeeds in boiling down this idea to a cliché, it is because his portrayal is not about self-contained calculating devices, but about bodies that repeatedly show themselves to be vulnerable, requiring a constant effort to protect themselves. Seen in this light, lift users are more likely to be victims than perpetrators; more precisely, they are actors only in so far as they are busy not becoming victims. They are only protected by more or less well-rehearsed practices of ‘civil inattention’ (Goffman, 1963, p. 83 ff.): Bodies are not simply positioned to save space but are literally brought to safety. It is not only a matter of avoiding contact in view of the unfamiliar proximity. Obviously, it is also about not having to talk to each other under any circumstances (Hirschauer, 2005, p. 54 ff.). There is silence in the cabin; the processes of getting off and on are also carried out silently. The atmosphere is tense; those involved are faced with a threatening situation that relegates them to mere physicality—and at the same time encourages them to minimise it, whether this involves movement or noise. Gazes and their ‘visual order’ (ibid, p. 52 f.) also provides information about this tension. All take care that their eyes do not meet; to avoid eye contact, they instead focus on the point that indicates the location (the number of floors). Even the mere signal about the floor being reached is fatefully charged in this special situation. Even if journeys become complicated, for example by many people getting in and out, they usually do not last long; given the short duration, it must seem strange that people in the lift experience

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themselves as a ‘community of fate’ (ibid., p. 58). People look at the floor indicator as if they were convicts looking through bars (ibid., p. 53). Even if they are locked up for only a short time, they do everything to avoid any doubt that they have nothing to do with this situation and have nothing to do with their fellow prisoners (ibid.). In this respect, lift users are thoroughly modern. They demonstrate being forced into wasting time. By implication, time is not external to them. Rather, they have a subjective sense of time and also defend it, even if they know that, objectively measured, they have not lost that much time. As hard as people try to document their forced inactivity; as consistently as they continue to narrow down their perception of it, it becomes clear that their common ground is exhausted by focusing on the only sparse reference to the floor they are currently on in the lift. Thus, achieving common ground results from an enormous narrowing of the field of vision (ibid.) and alludes to a point beyond that situation. Drawing on this observation, presented without being too much impressed, Hirschauer infers: In a joint attempt, the participants show that by way of a scrupulous [monitoring] of the floor indicator they must prepare their ‘timely’ exit. The concerted glances communicate a serious priority, which the egocentric use of elevators should have over the social dimension of being together. The individualism of rational actors is enacted interactively. (ibid., p. 54, italics in the original)

So, people in this situation (only) pretend to be benefit-maximising individuals. But then what is the significance of the situation of the ‘lift ride’? Are people still working on this flattering self-image when their situation actually speaks against it? Are they affirming an everyday theory of the social, which is based on autonomous cognitive performance, when, locked up and reduced to their bodies as they are, they do everything they can to avoid becoming victims? Hirschauer’s depiction is mainly concerned with highlighting the sequentiality of the event. Even the view of the floor display passes through ‘several stages’ (ibid., p. 53). And yet, in the context of the order of the gaze, he succumbs to a modernist reductionism, too: in the strenuous attempt to avoid eye contact, everyone’s gaze meets at the display. Irony of fate, triumph of sociology; the evasive manoeuvres collapse; the individualism of situated performance supports a collective structure that is as relentless as that norm of industrial modernity which unmistakably demands that one never remain inactive. In that case, however, ethnographic research would have no irritating potential at all. Contemplating an unusually condensed situation, we learn what sociological theories that set a scene of industrial

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modernity have long known. The lift ride then actually only needs to be discussed in such detail because it could wrongly be considered an exception from the modern order. But, lo and behold, even in a situation where people behave quite strangely, the all-encompassing productionist norm of modernity is at work forbidding the passengers to waste time. Following Augé (1995 [1992]), it could be argued that placeless places are in a state of expansion. Hirschauer refers to Augé, who also advised ethnography to return home, in order to justify his sampling strategy. He only included one type of lift that could be described as a ‘non-place’—thus leaving out lifts that have been furnished with distinctive works of art and operate where people predominantly know each other. If it is true that non-places are expanding, what follows from that? If the situational logic of these places simply fits into a ‘supermodern’ norm of modernity, then what is remarkable about sociologists (no matter how prominent) reporting to have discovered non-places at airports? Even if we were to find non-places practically everywhere, so what? Bearing witness to the ‘emptiness of transition’ (Castells, 1996, p. 421) and other thoroughly modern experiences (Sennett, 1998; Gottdiener, 2001; cf. Potthast, 2017a, 2018), some authors fall behind Hirschauer in that they usually strive for an individualising script. Does modernity result in making us even more isolated and lonely (Augé, 1995 [1992]) than we have ever imagined? No! These works are not concerned with making a rise of non-places empirically comprehensible. Rather, they content themselves with repeating a venerable narrative of the aesthetic origins of modernism: we are homeless and vulnerable to the point of feeling naked. This condition is constitutive of modernity as a universally valid aesthetic project. Do we talk about lift rides and airport layovers because, by means of this contemplation, we reach the origins of modernity? Do we observe how people take great pains to pretend that they are strangers to each other in order to impute a common experience to them? Even though the return of ethnography has celebrated some of its greatest journalistic successes with Marc Augé’s non-places, this cannot be the end of the research programme on estranging oneself from one’s own culture. This is why I stay with airports and in situations. I try, however, not to present them as places without qualities, but as places construed through socio-material practices, and that evoke alterations—that is—situational shifts alongside which people no longer recognise themselves and each other. In part, I follow further points raised by Stefan Hirschauer. However, I move away from the interpretation that the medium of the ‘floor display’ creates unity through a communicative act.

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Have We Never Been Modern After All? Socio-Material Practices of Waiting Are Subject to Everyday Alterations

Waiting times in the course of using lifts or airports intensify our relationship to ourselves. This remains hidden from objective research approaches from the outset. It doesn’t mean anything to them when people in the lift are confronted with their bodies or when they remain silent. These approaches either neglect the phenomena of silent sociality (Hirschauer, 2001) altogether or use them as opportunities to call for methods that advance into previously inaudible frequencies. Ethnography is then considered a good choice for this range of phenomena. Kate Fox justifies the strength of ethnographic description (among other things in search of the hidden rules of queueing (Fox, 2004, pp. 153–161)), with precisely this argument: queueing often takes place in silence. This invites for a division of labour: loquacious aspects of the social fall to survey research; silent parts fall to ethnography; the latter, if necessary, shakes up what is taken for granted. As explained in detail above, Hirschauer, even if not fully embracing a cultural history point of view in this respect, ultimately draws on this tradition. His contribution is devoted to a situation—highly particular and therefore initially odd—in order to infer from these circumstances how (thoroughly) modern we have become. Lifts are not only a means to an end, but are also a cause for liminal experiences by their users. Taking rationalist theories of action as a benchmark, users are condemned to idle waiting. This applies particularly to travellers at airports who are waiting for a connecting flight. When they are stranded, they do not regard airports as a material infrastructure that temporarily secures their survival. Airports do indeed give shelter to people who are temporarily or chronically homeless in the material sense (Holst, 2018; cf. Hopper, 2003, p. 124 ff.; Spielberg, 2003); those who wait, however, are transcendentally homeless (Kracauer, 1995 [1922]). They experience a modern world that was literally designed from scratch. Even the most inhospitable places (military bases along intercontinental routes) have developed into ‘aerocities’; a socio-aesthetic process is at work here which consistently denies its origins—and therefore inevitably draws the attention of cultural historical analyses (Corbin, 1994 [1990]).4 4

According to one of the key players, a view from nowhere, which has revolutionised urban planning, has become available with airplanes (Corbusier, 1995 [1924], pp. 81–100; cf. Roseau, 2012). Only a view from above can refrain from local décor and bring a universal appeal to architectural design. Airports, designed with an acclaimed emphasis on nakedness, have been termed ‘the most revolutionary’ of these structures (Gordon, 2004). This is reflected in accounts by those working on the return of ethnography at airports—and who, no

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Who is still irritated by the insight that universalist modernity hides its particular origins? Situational evidence meant to exemplify this, however, is precarious in that it can be subsumed under a grand narrative of modernity. It thus seems fatal to me to base ethnographic research only on such analyses. Where do they contribute to understanding alterations as characteristics of situations—rather than being subsumed under some overarching pattern of order? With regard to waiting in line or in the lift, could it also be that we have never been modern in the first place? According to Fox (2004, p. 154), the less the English queue up among themselves, the more likely they are to make a troubling experience: although the law of the queue counts more than anywhere else, those who queue-jump often get away with it there more easily than elsewhere. To explain this, she first considers how violations of the order of the queue are usually and very successfully punished: with barely audible grumbling and signals of body language. Because newcomers simply ignore this, she argues, this minimalism falls back on the locals. They no longer understand the world since they cannot see that the queue lacks protection because there are two competing normative principles at work. One of them, that of not raising a voice in public, keeps the other principle, according to which a violation of the queueing order must always be prevented, in check (ibid., p. 153 ff.). According to Molotch (2012), who also talks about queues, much depends on not eradicating such ambiguities, but rather on enduring them. What is more, ambiguities—also and especially in the name of security—must be cultivated by means of suitable design ideas. All chapters of his book, which comprises several individual studies, conclude with his own suggestions for design. In practice, however, planning airport terminals is supposed to be a different thing. Here everything is said to be derived from the calculated space that has to be provided for queues.5 This formula is based on the minimum comfort zone per passenger. Even though this measure varies over time, according to origin of passengers and their status, it has a decisive influence on terminal design: these spaces are made up of cells provided for waiting passengers. The principle of individualising separation (cf. Höhne, 2016) then continues in the way that passengers and their luggage are processed through airports. They are separated again and again: travellers from fellow travellers; travellers from their suitcases, from their hand luggage, from their shoes, belts and mobile longer embedded in local traditions, describe themselves as lonely, vulnerable, if not naked and homeless. 5 Interview with a senior member of the planning department of ADP (Aéroports de Paris), 7 April 1998.

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phones. In this respect, queues at airports differ from other queues. Airports are strictly zoned. Travellers first pass through a public zone (where departing and arriving passengers mix) and ‘clean’ zones (where the populations mentioned are strictly separated) (Potthast, 2010). Since zoning has become even stricter for security reasons, queues at airports have become longer.6 Despite being closely and constantly related to terrorist threats, they continue to be an ordinary phenomenon. Nobody would associate queueing at the airport with the extraordinary state of ‘airmindedness’ that, according to accounts of cultural history, accompanied and fuelled the development of air traffic in its early phase (Corn, 1983; cf. Potthast, 2017b). We would never expect passengers, even if they move through terminal buildings that are considered architectural masterpieces, to transcend that soberly planned calculation of individual cells. Perhaps queueing is the omnipresent, thoroughly everyday social formation that least suggests the experience of transcendence. There are numerous queues in airport terminals. Observing passengers, one is inclined to think that these queues foster utilitarian behaviour. By contrast, very few, if any display a solemn attitude. Virtually no one seems to float through the terminal in anticipation of the flight. Those who push their way through the terminal stand out as more frequent. In doing so, they seem self-centred in a way that borders on ‘tunnel vision’. Similar to what Ross (2001) described in his report of the same title on the London Underground, they are constantly lurking in anticipation of the next opportunity to shorten their waiting times. Even small and often only temporary improvements in their position receive close attention; if such advantages can only be realised at the cost of pushing ahead, they do not shy away from doing so. They show little consideration for people in wheelchairs, families with small children, and others who are at a disadvantage in the competition for even the tiniest of gains. However, as much as they are keen on improving their position—and, if necessary, will implement this in conjunction with local knowledge—at the security gate, the lurking, utilitarian attitude that has been perfected up to this point collapses. The ‘tunnel vision’, until then unconditionally used to one’s own advantage, proves to be a physical limitation. The process of continued separation now no longer appears routine but raises 6

Two of the last three incidents at German airports that attracted greater media attention were due to ‘security breaches’. If even one person reaches airside areas in an uncontrolled manner, all those who are there must return, be separated again and checked. Under such circumstances, tightly scheduled flight plans cannot be maintained. At Munich Airport, 330 flights had to be cancelled on 28 July 2018; at Frankfurt Airport, eighty flights had to be cancelled on 7 August 2018. At Hamburg airport, all flights were cancelled on 3 June 2018 due to a ‘power outage’.

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uncertainty. Isolated and separated from our belongings, we feel out of place and unable to reflect on this situation in terms of technical operations. Even if our luggage is only temporarily processed on a different path (Potthast, 2007), we fear its loss, and feel lost ourselves. A shift in the situation can be clearly seen from the fact that we are no longer behaving like self-confidently calculating actors (Reitman, 2009) but are engaging in mimicry. We copy behavioural patterns that we observe in the queue of the people in front of us. They take off their shoes? So do we. If we also take off some of our clothes, we feel even more vulnerable. Moreover, tunnel vision fundamentally affects our ability to navigate. Even in airports that we have already used several times, we depend on signage. In the meantime, our tunnel vision even turns into blindness. Facing the security staff, we avoid eye contact (Pütz, 2012) or even close our eyes for this liminal stage of a heavily framed passage (van Gennep, 1961 [1909]). If there was hardly any talking in the queue, people usually pass through the security gate in silence. Even without going through nude scanners (Genner, 2017), they reveal a lot about their bodies and then leave everything else to the forces of ritualised procedure down to the smallest detail. By the time the plane takes off, those who shortly before had sought and used every advantage no longer recognise themselves. What had begun with queueing now comes close to the experience of a pilgrimage. When the passengers open their eyes again, they are like newborn babies who are given motherly care by flight attendants (opening and closing the curtains; offering sweets; serving drinks). Neither the modality of highly active and individual orientation towards a specific purpose (tunnel vision), nor that of the quasi-religious experience of a collective ritual (pilgrimage) is favourable to enabling vigilance. On the contrary: they both contribute to the production of civil inattention (Hirschauer, 2005)—and are therefore problematic from a security perspective (Molotch, 2012, pp. 85– 127). According to Molotch, it is unacceptable that security measures continue to be tightened in a way that exacerbates the conditions described above. He argues that, for example, stricter controls will also lead to longer queues, which— in a somewhat muffled mode of civil inattention—could become the targets of attacks. Those who attempt an adjustment in the name of security must therefore take account of the ambiguity of the situation (ibid.). Inasmuch as Hirschauer’s analysis of lift rides knows only one modality of civil inattention, it is of little help for this task. As the above example shows, there are also very practical reasons for zooming in on alterity as a characteristic of action sequences.

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Have We Become Reflexively Modern? Queues as the Subject of Everyday Media Practices

Air travel has been growing for many years. Around public holidays or around the holiday season things occasionally get crowded. So, while waiting times and the capacity to handle them are subject to sophisticated calculation and design, there are always disruptions, especially during busy periods. At those times, airport terminals are crowded. Confronting this mass of people heroically or with metropolitan nonchalance is often not an option. In these situations, we do not keep our distance, but see ourselves threatened by the crowd. We see even small deviations from what is assumed to be normal behaviour as an attack on the social order itself—and we are prepared to intervene to maintain it, even by force. If we are committed to defending social order, we are far from adopting an instrumental attitude towards queues. Instead of looking for a small advantage, we show concern for the order of the queue, constantly threatened by violations and seeming close to collapse. Once again, we are likely to be caught up in a state that seems almost irreversible. We become fixated on the crowd and lose the ability to turn to other things or to become active in other ways. If we perceive the terminal in this way—as a faceless crowd of people—this also manifests itself in our physical condition: it is as if anonymous forces draw us into the depths of passivity. To be more precise: as with psychiatric patients, there is only one form of activity left that makes our situation even worse (Goffman, 1961). Apart from its temporal extension, this is similar to the situation in the lift. Here as there, illegitimate behaviour patterns attract a great deal of attention (see Hirschauer, 2005 p. 56). Here as there, people not only have little space, but are unable to do anything other than adjust their positioning in such a way that their presence shrinks and monitor the positions of fellow travellers for deviance. This type of situation shares a characteristic with lift rides as described above: the small display showing the current floor imposes itself as a central focus of attention. As noted above, it is precisely through the alignment of their gazes that, according to Hirschauer, the passengers involuntarily have a shared sense of belonging. As a temporary community, if brought about by a simple device of infrastructural self-reporting, this collective readily deploys an unusual sense of gravity, which occasionally, when someone succeeds in making a joke, erupts into laughter. If people no longer look predominantly at a centralised display but prefer the more or less asynchronous displays of mobile devices, then this ‘loose connection’ (Stäheli, 2012) prompting collectivisation no longer holds. It may be the same embarrassment, aptly captured by Hirschauer, that causes people to look at

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smartphones. Here, too, what Hirschauer interprets from a passenger’s ‘concentrated’ reading of the headlines of a folded newspaper (Hirschauer, 1999, p. 237) is probably true: the news value—or, more generally, the instrumental function of an artefact carried along—is certainly not what matters. But the ritual and collectivising experience does not occur when people no longer look at the floor display or the central display board in the airport. What will change if the way we kill time and the related way of accomplishing civil inattention are subject to change (cf. Krämer and Schäfer, 2014, p. 290)? What are the consequences? The community of fate, whose constitution Hirschauer traces in the lift, is a product of modernity. People bow to the norm of industrial modernity—a norm that unmistakably requires them to never be inactive—and experience themselves as comrades in fate. They may struggle with their subjective perceptions of time (as with a ‘watch that has gone crazy’; see Heiner Müller, The Man in the Elevator), but through jointly staring at a display, any discrepancy of perception becomes reflexively accessible to the participants. This reflexivity can be increased by using smartphones. They offer the participants the possibility to go beyond a uniform demonstration of absence in a way reminiscent of the tactics of street art. Similar to this performative art form, the use of smartphones fits perfectly into the tense situation described above. Similar to how Street Art engages with empty urban spaces and the arbitrarily jumbled elements available there, Smartphone Art deals with a given situation in a lift or terminal. The recompositions of digital artists are as virtuoso as well-rehearsed performances by street musicians taking up the rhythm of public transport in order to collect their money in time. Like their analogue predecessors in the case of the rhythms and textures of urban life, situated digital artists must have carefully observed, not to say ethnographically examined, infrastructural processes beforehand. This also means that they have examined in depth the limits of what is allowed, what is tacitly tolerated and what is good taste—and that they will feed into discussions of this with their input. Street musicians might conclude that they will not be tolerated at airports in the foreseeable future. A two-minute mobile phone video about a labyrinthine queue at Chicago Midway airport, however, has made it onto the scene. ‘TSA, are you f…ing kidding me?’, uploaded in May 2016, has almost 2.5 million hits on YouTube (Sean, 2016). The images show neither pushy people looking for the slightest advantage nor travellers who, in the face of a faceless crowd, commit themselves to maintain order. The video does not qualify as an ethnographic contribution by its documentary character, but rather by the fact that the scope for its toleration has been so well anticipated that it is not prevented from circulating on the Net.

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In the twenty-second footnote to his article, Stefan Hirschauer mentions the no less common example of an analogue graffito. Its author may not have been a colleague (with ethnographic training), but a rather welcome accomplice: In one elevator of my sample this problem was highlighted by a little shameless graffito just aside the floor indicator: it threw back the inmates’ looks, which had fled to the indicator in the hope of avoiding contacts, with two words: ‘fuck yourselves!’ (Hirschauer, 2005, p. 64)

The other example of artwork in an elevator mentioned (only) in his original text leads to Bombay (Hirschauer, 1999, p. 233). There is no mention, however, of the fact that since the 1990s, housing associations have agreed to have lifts decorated with pictures by an artist. According to a ‘random sample inquiry’, residents welcomed ‘something different’, whether they recognised it as commissioned or rather as street art (Rath, 2001). But, apparently, artistic reworking leads to a higher degree of tolerance even among those users who otherwise tend to attract attention through vandalism. In 1997, for example, she [the same artist] painted the lifts of a housing estate in Ludwigsburg, Swabia. Three years later, the Otis lift company attested: ‘To this day, none of these three lifts have been damaged in any way.’ As a rule, Otis continued, ‘in residential complexes of this size, damage must be expected shortly after the installation of lifts’. The lift cabins previously in use were also affected by vandalism (ibid., trans. JP).

In the above case, not only did the client and the artist cooperate in an unusual way, but their project also resulted in a jointly developed social-scientific expertise. In the case of a team of artists and a sociologist who had planned ethnographic research and an exhibition at Leipzig Airport, however, the cooperation broke down. The exhibition about the airport inside the airport had to be cancelled (Tollmann, 2008). While, at Leipzig, disclosing secret military uses became the stumbling block, airport equipment suppliers were unashamedly advertising digital security fantasies elsewhere that would take the breath away from many users of these infrastructures (Potthast, 2017a). Finally, from the well-established areas of the digital world and its sometimes virtuoso media practices comes the example of a text message. Its author is stuck in a muddled situation at an airport, but does not sink into passive waiting, instead demonstrating distance from it with a concise and confident description of his situation, which has now been disseminated through the publication of an ethnographer.

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Oh, my gosh: still sitting on the plane in Cologne. The captain has just explained that, with air traffic control in Paderborn understaffed, we are going to depart much later. This is why we’re getting close to the maximum working hours of the crew – that’s if everything goes to plan. [...] Keep in touch. Fingers crossed. Don’t feel like staying in Cologne. (Schindler, 2016, p. 265, trans. JP)

4

Irritation as a Profession

Everyday life in queues and also in lifts is characterised by alterations which ethnography, since it was brought back to Europe, can help analyse. It produces sophisticated descriptions of situational shifts and inevitably entails developing an analytical toolkit that does justice to these alterations. In this respect, the attempts initiated and then further shaped by Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot to conceptualise shifts between orders of justification (Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006 [1991]) and between regimes of action (Thévenot, 2006) are ground-breaking. If I mention this research programme here unexpectedly and only at the end of my chapter, it is not because the programme has already been worked out in full.7 A line of tradition which is incorporated in it and which far precedes its denomination as a ‘sociology of critique’ can be traced back to Erving Goffman’s preoccupation with irritating situations (Boltanski, 1973). In contrast to authors who, by referring to a pragmatist figure of argumentation, generously value irritating situations (because they generate reflexivity) and then stop to pay attention to these situations, the point here is to show how moments of suspicion take part in shifting and linking situations. In this respect, the ‘sociology of critique’ is oriented towards theories that give socio-material practices a primacy over reflexive actors, but also over technologies, media or scientific knowledge. For it is interested in those everyday conditions that irritate, arouse suspicion and thus make critical operations possible. ‘Critique’ then refers to a mode of alteration (among others) which, driven by practical hermeneutics of suspicion, contributes to linking situations across alterations. In order to justify the relevance of situational shifts in the tradition now outlined, it is necessary to specify different variants of alteration. If this effort is not made, then we will end up with a self-sufficient situationalism. The above analysis follows this concern without claiming to be exhaustive. As explained along the lines of lifts and queues in airports, irritating situations leave us altered in ways that cannot be reduced to a common denominator. If even Hirschauer makes us 7

On the contrary, its development can, still, be followed (Guggenheim & Potthast, 2012; Pettenkofer, 2016, p. 420 ff.; Potthast, 2017c).

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believe at first glance that we are undergoing situational shifts only to discover ourselves as thoroughly modern, other metamorphoses must be contrasted with this variant: a situational shift occurs—and we are left with the understanding that we are not modern or, perhaps, reflexively modern, too. The section headings of this text are provisional. Deliberately opposing grand pre-fabricated templates, I seek to undermine a unified concept of a cultural modernity, which is still firmly established in the social sciences. It has become clear, at least with the references to street art, that no monopoly can be claimed over the aspiration to pursue ethnography as an irritation. The irritations that we expose and initiate are not particularly sustainable from the outset; they are only as sustainable as the relations, alliances and cooperations on which they are based. If we abandon conceptual efforts in this regard and only follow an aesthetic imperative of rendering things unfamiliar, this enterprise will have an extremely short half-life that cannot survive for long in a ruinous rush for permanent irritations. Conversely, this requirement, as indicated at the beginning, seems very demanding. Who would like to ally themselves with everyday life and its socio-material practices against the strongest constraints of theoretical reflection in their own field? The answer seems to be clear: ‘Nobody wants to do that!’ As mentioned, this statement was made in a seminar discussion based on the text by Amann and Hirschauer (1997). It is contradictory in that it was made in the last session of this seminar, itself conceived as an introduction to ethnography. The high commitment of the students does not directly refute the fear that the logic of outbidding ethnographic research of one’s own culture would drive people straight into forced individualism. But it should be pointed out that the lift study (Hirschauer, 1999, 2005) goes back to student observations.8 Ethnographic estrangement may be a little bulky in terms of organization—for example by the standards of the established division of labour in quantitative projects (Amann & Hirschauer, 1997, 2008). But it does work, doubly marginalised in relation to both the fields being researched and (not only) (sociological) theory-building, within the institutions of the university. Working out the paradoxes of everyday life in order to make them analytically comprehensible with due effort inevitably results in a political intervention. 8

The same applies to ethnographic research on ‘Pissed off [drivers] in L.A.’ (Katz, 1999), on Doormen (Bearman, 2005) and on the Anatomy of Zurich-Kloten [Airport] (Güttler et al., 2018), among others, as this list cannot be exhaustive. The Siegen Seminar mentioned above resulted in a reader on queueing, with contributions from Lars Plato, Jan Wahlbrink, Mona Luisa Jüngst, Jennifer Uher, Laura Maria Albrecht, Svenja Höfler, Esther Freia Heike Roth, Tobias Brecht, Tamara Bernhardt, and Fabian Spahr.

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Hochschild (2016), in her ethnography of those who have become strangers to themselves because they have withstood an ecological catastrophe (i.e. have remained in the most affected areas), allows us to participate in this involvement on several occasions. Research that joins the project of self-estrangement produces public spheres; it participates in the production of media practices and in this respect engages in political ethnography. This sounds strange to all those who think of applied research when they hear the phrase ‘airport security’ and consider alliances with street art as a matter that is far removed from science. For those who would like to settle into situationalism, the irritating power of ethnographic research still needs to be tapped. It is not only sensitive to one (and certainly not to the first), but to a plurality of alterations worked out here. As I have tried to defend and illustrate, the question of how and where situational shifts occur does not lead to losing, but to appreciating situations anew.

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The Irreducibility of Technical Skills: Before and After Science Erhard Schüttpelz

1 In classical media theory, the synaesthetic and acoustic space of the human body constituted the invariant condition for the independent variable of media theory, namely, the history of technical media inventions. The combination of invariant and independent variable impacted upon two dependent variables: the perceptual skills affected by media and the social relations that media made possible. This combination of the invariant body with a single independent variable was the dominant formula of media theory authorized by McLuhan and Carpenter, Virilio and Baudrillard, Flusser and Kittler. Elsewhere, doubts remained: Is the invariant in the end as variable as the independent variable? And is the independent variable established by McLuhan shaped by other invariants and variables? Is it possible that the dependent variables influence the independent variable and thus turn the relationship on its head? Yes, yes, and yes. The world of classical media theory was seductively simple, and it did not tackle the task to further explore the invariant. If you take a closer look at the invariant in Carpenter and McLuhan (1960), you find that it already consists of techniques that are taken for granted in its constitution, and that these techniques have their own variable history: techniques of the body (Mauss, 1973), language techniques and rituals. The following comments examine this variability. How do these techniques differ from chemical, physical or biological techniques, i.e. the material techniques of material processing? Lévi-Strauss (1976, E. Schüttpelz (B) University of Siegen, Siegen, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 S. Gießmann et al. (eds.), Materiality of Cooperation, Medien der Kooperation— Media of Cooperation, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-39468-4_14

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pp. 28–30) has called societies dominated by accumulating techniques ‘hot societies’, and societies without a progressive accumulation of technical inventions ‘cold societies’. Even at the time of its introduction, he limited the term ‘hot societies’ by conceding that between ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ there are two principles that do not apply to entire societies, but rather to the dominance of the accumulation of inventions in some societies and their ongoing rejection in others. Archaeology and ethnography have not confirmed this typology. There are no ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ societies, because there are no societies or cultures that are exclusively or not at all based on an accumulation of technical skills, that exclusively or not at all try to accumulate practical knowledge about their environment. All societies continuously work and try to change their environment to their own technical advantage, and to possibly increase their social advantage in doing so. The pursuit of the advantage of a technical improvement—or ‘progress’—is a perfectly normal part of technical action in all societies. There is no point in assuming the existence of primitive peoples or homeostatic societies that have been in perfect balance with their environment for centuries or even for a few generations. These ideas have not been confirmed for China (Elvin, 2006, pp. 7–46) or for Polynesia, neither for the Amazon region (Heckenberger, 2013) nor for Africa (Iliffe, 2003). It is in the nature of the social use of ‘hot’ technologies to continually shift the boundaries of environmental relations and, through the resourcefulness of human management, to create a continuously modified ecology, for better or worse, for smaller or larger contexts. Human ecology has to be improvised as well as planned, and acting according to plans too. Innovations were not restricted by a lack of human inventiveness, but by having to live with their consequences. As Braudel (1977) and others have conclusively demonstrated, the fate of an invention over a few millennia was decided not by the different levels of ingenuity of the world’s populations, but by the social and economic relations and costs that its introduction would entail for its infrastructural reproduction. Older agricultural societies without fossil fuels would not have been able to pay for or organise a constant revolution of their elementary subsistence techniques, and through them would simply have put the survival of their inhabitants at risk (Horden & Purcell, 2000). There was no lack of ‘hot’ inventions, but rather a lack of advantages of implementation. Where these advantages are immediately obvious, for example in the replacement of stone axes with steel axes, these inventions gain acceptance even without their own production facilities and at the same time create a new power differential that, by experience, was avoided elsewhere. Thus, there are no ‘hot’ or ‘cold’ societies in the strict sense. It makes more sense to speak of ‘hot’ and ‘cold techniques’. ‘Hot’ techniques accumulate and

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are combined in chains of operations that experiment with the incremental incorporation of techniques into other techniques. The prototypical material techniques are ‘hot’ in such way because all material techniques have come from millennia of incorporating techniques into each other. Each of the technical artefacts in our rooms is based on an accumulation of technical skills and processes that combines knowledge from the distant past with recent developments. We may think of our synchronised computers as the heirs of early modern mechanical clocks and the modern standardisation of time zones, but we should not forget that for a long time, mechanical clocks were urban prestige artefacts and more often than not turned out to be out of sync and even beyond repair, while urban timereckoning achieved more reliable results by using sun-dials and hour-glasses. The history of accumulation is built into our artefacts, but not in a straightforward manner we could unearth by hands-on reverse engineering. This integration is facilitated by modularisation: through combinable wholes or parts, through functional replacements and open insertion points, through parts and operations that remain separable and can be inserted as required, and through the interlinking of processing steps that can extend in space and time. Furthermore, as in all technologies, the products of one technology were and are used or misused as resources for other technical objectives. Has technology fundamentally changed? Yes, but we should not underestimate how modern mankind has been from the start. Long chains between absentees and different groups were already common in the Stone Age and, as Widlok (2015) has proven, even then they created a possible inscrutability of technical production and use, which distinguished sophisticated ‘hot’ products and artefacts from others. ‘Hot’ techniques are condensed into opaque objects, and they distinguish technical virtuosos, or skilled craftspeople, from less skilled workers and users. The double strangeness of material techniques—their technical impenetrability, and the gap between skillful and clumsy uses—is therefore not a new experience but is inherent in their incremental production from the very beginning. As obvious as it is to assume that the members of small societies would have more unlimited access to all available techniques, this picture may be unrealistic at the shop-floor level: on the one hand through the division of labour according to gender (including a possible third gender, which in Amerindian societies, for example, meant that a man could and had to practise women’s techniques with as much virtuosity as possible), and on the other hand through the concatenation of a technical production process that combines exotic materials and pre-processing with domestic processing steps.

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2 In this respect, what do techniques of the body, language techniques and ritual or ritualised interaction processes have in common? Even ‘cold’ techniques tend to modularise, i.e. to treat operations and partial operations as set pieces that can be separated and combined with others. The constant effort to modularise and combine separable units and procedures therefore runs through both ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ techniques. This is also because ‘hot’ material techniques are worked on with ‘cold’ skills, and ‘cold’ techniques use ‘hot’ tools. A prime example of this modularisation from antiquity is the art of rhetoric, which aimed to create a stockpile of fixed modules with which one could and can contest every form of speech and its literature; a modern example is pop music, which for its practitioners consists solely and exclusively of set pieces that are freely available, with the constant danger that any of the set pieces might once again have been copyrighted. The possibility of modularisation is therefore common to all techniques, and in everyday life they are all subject to a cooperative learning process that reassembles and enriches them during the joint improvisation. All techniques are incrementally improved in everyday life and remain accumulative techniques, also and especially including the ‘cold’ techniques: linguistic, physical and ritual. What then is the difference? ‘Hot’ techniques can either be combined or not. But physical, chemical and biological techniques, if you delve into the modules of their combination or the history of these modules, consist of incorporating techniques into other techniques. In Eurasia, oxen were first domesticated, then harnessed to carts and trained to pull ploughs—this is a typical combination and mutual upswinging of ‘hot techniques’ that is missing in the New World. When horses were introduced in North America, completely new hunting and military techniques emerged in the Great Plains, combining new mobility with traditional forms of knowledge. But the military prowess that emerged reminded many observers of tactics and virtues well-known from ancient warfare in Central Asia. There is neither an end nor a logical limit to the incorporation of techniques into other techniques in the fields of chemistry, biology and physics. If, on the other hand, one tries to accumulate several ‘cold’ techniques in a new technique, the result will no longer be an accumulation, but rather a hybridisation or a new technique as the length of the chains or intensity of the processing increases. Technical reality remains of equal complexity or even decreases—and the criteria for complexity or its decrease, for technical superiority or inferiority or ‘efficiency’ become arbitrary. Body techniques cannot be accumulated at will without unlearning or not being able to deepen what could be learned or driven to virtuosity in a single body

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technique. Various hybridisations have been invented between European and East Asian body techniques to create a new consistency, for example by combining muscle- and chest-oriented European gymnastics with elements of Indian yoga. This is how Pilates was developed, which became popular in many professional contexts in the West, for example in Hollywood, but failed to make an impression in East Asia. When a vernacular language is subjected to rigid grammatical rules and the standards of a literary language, or when a foreign language is taught by means of dictionaries and explicit grammar rules, this does not result in technically superior knowledge or skills that relate to the everyday use of the vernacular language. A new language variant or even a new language emerges that, due to its hypercorrectness, becomes indispensable for certain purposes, for example as the language of theatre or public media. Literary languages were mostly created in this way and had to prove themselves within a greater linguistic diversity as elitist ‘diglossia’ over the course of thousands of years (Versteegh, 1986). In the long history of the Lord’s Supper in the Occident, the central ritual of Western Christianity, priests repeatedly reorganised the ritual to exclude the laity from the centre of ritual acts. The laity in turn tried in all possible ways to compensate for their exclusion from what was happening at the altar by participating in supplementary actions. Although, from the priests’ point of view, these were only assisting and sometimes suspect activities that contributed to the rhythm of the ecclesiastical year, these additional actions proved to the laity their own indispensability in distributing the blessings of their sacramental community, the source of life, health and well-being. The church year was integrated into the agricultural rhythms and was thus co-determined by these rhythms. In particular, the history of the sacramentals from the late Middle Ages to the present day has been structured around this millennia-long class struggle between lay people and priests. This class struggle undoubtedly contributed to the ritual differentiation of Catholic religious practice, but the accumulating exclusivity of priests and the inclusivity of the sacramentals did not per se make the practices of piety on both sides easier or more complex (Angenendt, 2014). Therefore, if you build ‘cold’ techniques into other ‘cold’ techniques, or, as in the last example, ‘build around’ them, this does not mean a necessary increase in complexity, but possibly rather a constant shift of profit and loss. This leads me to a second statement: For ‘cold’ techniques we cannot say with certainty when we are dealing with a reduction of existing techniques and when we should speak of a new and equally complex technique. As far as linguistic skills are concerned, the case of pidgin languages, or ‘lingua franca’ languages with a small vocabulary and reduced grammar that turn

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into creole languages with all the possibilities of other natural languages, is well known. It may well be that all of today’s languages were created in this way. But from the point of view of media theory, it can be said with even more certainty that some written languages were created in this way—the basic process of the development of writing from makeshift languages to possible creolisation may be nothing other than that (Justeson, 1976). And the idea of language reduction must be viewed with scepticism anyway, as long as other languages exist to embed and comment on them. Every reduced language variant can contribute to the enrichment of linguistic diversity, especially in its combination and translatability; while complex ritual languages, accessible only to the initiated, may move away from any everyday comprehensibility and thus be limited to a small corpus of purposes and recitations. But even through such recitations a great subtlety can emerge, which is perceived as complexity, as is proven by the fate of classical music in modern times. The reduction of a previously constantly renewed compositional and improvisational music to a self-contained corpus of texts, and the obligation of instrumental training to play scores true to the score was and remains without doubt perhaps the most sensitive self-limitation in European and global music history. Due to its socio-historical revaluation, however, it was perceived by only a few as the radical loss of tradition and creativity that became apparent to others by way of cultural comparison, and was even understood by many as a gain in tradition ‘for all’, a loss and gain in tradition that is now being repeated by the equally skilful replay of former popular music (Janz, 2014). Modern body techniques also originated to a large extent from reductions, and modern sport in particular bears great similarities to military drill: the endless repetition of modularised combinations of movements that are standardised down to the last detail. However, if one considers the entire training of a successful athlete or a league team, the professionalisation of body technique includes so many aspects of interpersonal fine-tuning, medialisation, economy, psychology and the generation of optimism, in other words, of what Malinowski (1966 [1935]) recognised as the ‘core of magic’, that one can only speak of a ‘fait social total’. No doubt ritual practices can be broken down into sequences, and these sequences can be reduced to their elements, at least when there are strictly prescribed procedures and spontaneity is minimised, but each isolated ritual sequence can in turn take on the weight and significance of a sophisticated ritual, for example when a coronation ceremony is parodied or rededicated as a ‘baby shower’ or birthday celebration. Lévi-Strauss (1959), following Hocart, pointed out that many of our rites of passage were probably derived from royal ceremonies. And

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indeed, the fascination with coronations, royal weddings and funerals is unbroken (ibid.). After all, our personal transition celebrations are less sophisticated, but just as important and efficient as royal rites of passage. When one can speak of a reduction of existing rituals, languages or body techniques, or of a new ritual, language or body technique, therefore remains more than arbitrary. In the field of ‘cold’ techniques, ‘accumulation’ and ‘reduction’ remain arbitrary attributions, and often enough elude even the technical experts. Why is that? 3 The reason can be formulated as follows: if ‘cold’ techniques are accumulated or combined beyond a certain threshold, they will break down the accumulation or damage the material carrier of the accumulation—what you could call their medium. The life of a professional athlete begins with their talents, then leads into the routines and one-sidedness of training with an increasing biography of sports injuries, only to end up possibly in disability status, with impairments or damages that can only be overcome by further training or not. Physical techniques can therefore be enhanced or ‘improved’ in various ways and can take the form of an accumulating exercise unit through nested sequences, but constant work on the stress limit inevitably triggers setbacks and long-term consequences. They amount to an exchange: a specialised accumulation in the perfection of the body technique for a long-term loss of the body technique. This observation can be transferred to other virtuosos and their forms of accumulation. Ritual knowledge can also be accumulated by specialists, and ritual specialists, e.g. shamans, can use their careers to perfect and vary small and large ritual practices. But they too can meet an ‘athletic’ fate, for example by competing with other shamans who have fortune on their side and act efficiently either by simpler means or even through ignorance. In these cases, the accumulation of knowledge and additional technical skills can also be ambivalently assessed and counteracted by gossip and slander, as in our own oral societies and professionalisations. Ritual efficiency can be demonstrated through sophistication, but also through emotional abreactions or spontaneous enthusiasm and break-downs; forms of efficiency can specialise and unite without there being a form of ritual expertise that is competent for all public, intimate and officially forbidden purposes. As far as the linguistic side of the issue is concerned, I am taking up the metaphor of ‘programming languages’, without claiming that programming is a linguistic matter. A well-known theorem on computer programming reads as

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follows: ‘Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you’re as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?’ (Kernighan & Plauger, 1978, p. 10). This theorem applies, in my view, to any form of linguistic, cognitive or philosophical creativity. Cognitive and linguistic creativity (if it is possible to distinguish between them at all) provokes acts of reduction, and is often particularly effective in its reduced versions, i.e. in its degradation or ‘debugging’. The peak of linguistic virtuosity in modern literary language was reached (or, as some believe, exceeded) with Finnegans Wake (Joyce, 1939). For beginners and advanced students alike, Finnegans Wake remains a kaleidoscope of neologisms in various forms of creolisation or mere pidgin. Yet the generative principle of Finnegans Wake’s writing technique is as old as the emergence of written languages, using the analogous process of ‘bootstrapping’. It is the rebus principle of writing homonymous syllables and morphemes in the same way (DeFrancis, 1989). These signs, which mediated between homophony and semantic difference, made it possible to develop written languages in China, Egypt, Mesopotamia and Central America that could, in principle, transcribe any phonetic expression. It was only through this potential that notations could be made capable of transcribing every utterance of a language and converting the notation into a written language. This suggests that the extreme complexity of written language virtuosity is again broken down into the most elementary operation, in the limbo of eternal becoming and verbal mutilation. There is some evidence that Joyce sought this state of verbal and written suspense, also in order to test or counteract his own virtuosity; it is still an open question whether the ‘debugging’ of Finnegans Wake can succeed or has even begun: ‘In the buginning is the woid, in the muddle is the sounddance, and thereinofter you are in the unbewised again’ (FW 378.29–30).1 Language, body and socialisation seem, as far as their téchnisation is concerned, to be tied to threshold values above which an accumulation or a 1

An interpretation of this passage can only be a beginning, a ‘buginning’, in the insect-ridden hostel with its buzzing opportunities (‘bug’, ‘inn’, ‘innings’). One word must therefore suffice: the ‘woid’ is a misspelled ‘void’. But this beginning takes up both the beginning of Genesis (‘In the beginning the earth was desolate and empty’, ‘innings’ are also ‘washed-up new territory’) and the beginning of the Gospel of John (‘In the beginning was the word’); as hybrids of both and thus as neither: ‘woid’ instead of ‘void’ or ‘word’. This beginning in the eternal present (…is…is…are) is also a condensation of Freud’s dictum: ‘Where id was, there ego shall be’. But with an unclear outcome: where id begins, there is a muddle of dancing sound particles in the middle (with the Indian ‘sundance’ around the initiators’ stake), and after that one is just as clever and in the unproven and the unconscious as before (‘in the unbewised again’).

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combination no longer succeeds or results in inverse effects, and this even or even more so in their manifestations as athletic, literary or ritualistic virtuosity. This perspective seems to correspond to the common dichotomies that early media theory also applied to the history of technology and media: ‘cold’ technologies were said to be resistant to innovation because they originated from a limited space of freedom that they could not leave; and ‘hot’ technologies formed the dynamic realm of innovation or even of the world that overcame the limitations of the past. Despite all the evidence, I consider these consequences of the connection I have established between ‘cold’ and ‘hot’ techniques to be an illusion. This is for two reasons: 1. All our technologies continue to be driven by the techniques mentioned above, i.e. language techniques, body techniques and ritual techniques. One could declare the group of these three to be the ‘invariant’, but with the restriction that not only the effect of these three is extremely fluctuating, but also their appearance, so that the talk of an invariant consists only in the undecidability outlined above and not in a ‘hard core’. It is the self-restraint of these techniques that made them appear as non-modern in modernity, and at the same time ensured their stability over millennia. The motto of the ‘cold’ techniques could be ‘Plus c’est la même chose, plus ça change!’—even within a single situation. Precisely because they are not suitable for incorporating each other or for organising technical sequences in hierarchies of standardised classifications, they are always on the verge of improvised modification. 2. A large part of dealing with ‘cold’ techniques is therefore essentially a matter of continually negating this characteristic. This is true in all societies, but it is also very important in dealing with ‘hot’ techniques, which in turn require material standardisation in modernity, and for their practice also incorporate ‘cold’ techniques into their material standardisation. In modernity, material standardisations are combined with standardisations of body techniques of production and use, but also with language standardisations. After industrialisation, these three standardisations became an economic necessity, because an industrial society is not viable without language standardisation, if only because its jurisprudence would otherwise collapse. But the reverse is also true: the cost of standardising language and body techniques would not have been affordable in earlier societies. Thus the introduction of military drill in the service of the best-funded section of the European population took place in the Dutch–Spanish war of liberation (and of all possible places: in Siegen, see Parker, 1988, pp. 20–23). But subsequently, despite proven efficiency, military

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drill remained unfeasible for the overwhelming majority of armies for more than a hundred years due to the necessary investment in training and exercise time. It only became an affordable and militarily efficient standardisation of body techniques again after the economic upswing in the eighteenth century (Bröckling, 1997; Parker, 1988). In short: The reduction of ‘cold’ techniques to standardised sequences, e.g. to standard dances, to standardised pronunciations or the literal repetition of rituals, means a considerable infrastructural effort, which becomes visible when considering the question of training and practice, and the issue of payment for these two parameters. A continuous education and lifelong training must be institutionalised for the non-variation of standardisation, as already was the case with the correct Sanskrit recitation of the Brahmins, and since the nineteenth century: in the case of modern dance schools, modern spelling and modern stage pronunciation. As soon as this effort wears off, variations or improvisations occur which cast doubt on the standardisation itself. And even in standardisation, endless variations occur which are perceived as aesthetically pleasing and satisfying because they open up non-identical possibilities of expression, for example in the case of the recitation of classical music true to the script (Janz, 2014). In this way, the standardisation of ‘cold’ techniques creates a costly reduction and repetition of reductions that non-industrial societies (such as the old Indian society) could only afford for a very few selected techniques; and the triumph of this reduction nevertheless lies in idiosyncratic variation. This makes these reductions into meeting places for a common and internally differentiated aesthetic ‘language’, be it in ritual, dance or music. However, the ritual, linguistic and bodily creativity inherent in all human beings is severely limited by such standardisations in the course of adult life, as these adults can observe in their children, who, when learning the adult repertoire, overshoot all boundaries, displaying sounds, movements and behavioural patterns that adults can no longer imitate. Adults protect themselves by judging children’s behaviour as an imperfect imitation of their own. But here too they are beset by illusions: ‘imitation’ creates its own consistency, which is called on to inherit the adult world. If it were given free rein, new language variants would very quickly emerge (Sacks, 1995). Contrary to what might seem to be a free choice of complex possibilities, modern standard languages therefore consist above all of a rigorous impossibility of what in oral societies used to be a perfectly normal linguistic virtuosity between dozens of language variants. Modern language standardisation is a hindrance to traditional language virtuosity, and therefore creates constant friction.

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If a gigantic computer crash had caused all digital storage to disappear overnight after paper was abolished, at least that is what can be extrapolated from linguistic literature, three people could run into the woods together and come up with a new language in the process. At least our children who have not yet started school could do so, and would soon have a new, but equally viable language as ours. Once the administrative necessities of standardising a ‘cold’ technique disappear, not much of its standardised ‘invariant’ remains. 4 This is why classical media theory has given us the wrong picture of ‘cold’ and ‘hot’ techniques, and evolutionism in particular has made us expect too many similarities where they cannot occur. In the version of Classical Media Theory, ‘orality’ or the ‘synaesthetic ritual world’ or the physically experienced and danceable ‘acoustic space’ was the invariant of human history; the series of accumulating media inventions were the independent variable; and social practices and aesthetic sensibilities were the dependent variables that could be illuminated by combining the invariant with the series of its independent variable (Carpenter & McLuhan, 1960). This functional arrangement seemed to work as long as it was limited to the one theoretical notion that New Media were also New Messages and entailed new practices and perceptual exercises. But the assumption of a typologically determinable invariant was wrong. There is no invariance of oral techniques and synaesthetic rituals, and there is no possible catalogue of corresponding common denominators that could be used as a basis for the aesthetics or utility of these techniques. There have been passing dance fashions since dances came into existence. But there is no repository of what makes all dances an invariant, continuous, archaic and unspecialised body technique. The technical, linguistic and liminal body is timelessly new every day, but this does not make the latest dances, puns or sports archaic. Previously unknown to us, their beauty, accuracy and attractiveness must be improvised anew every day, and there is no guarantee that they will last until the next day. This also applies to the dependence of the respective institutions, which often had no counterpart in other cultures, on fashion. Before the nineteenth century, a single category of ‘sport’ was unknown but nevertheless later went on to become a major modern institution. Despite ongoing conservative standardisation, our colloquial language would be unrecognisable if we were to go back fifty years in time-travel and talk like our children. And the rapid spread of tattooing only happened after decades during which experts had reckoned with its extinction. No doubt tattooing is as old as the oldest preserved skin and often enough wants to appear ‘archaic’, particularly nowadays, but what is archaic about the ‘archaisation’ of

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using Marquesas pattern documented by the one and only ethnographer of Marquesan art, Karl von den Steinen? Nothing, because the archaisation itself can only be understood through the modern history of tattooing (Gell, 1996). The invariant of classical media theory is therefore not particularly invariant— it is constantly in a state of invention, volatility and improvisation. One might object that the scope of invariants in the field of ‘cold’ techniques is exhausted once and for all. But if you describe invariants in the field of ‘cold’ techniques, you will soon discover that there is no typological or morphological form in which this invariance could be represented. In the field of ‘hot’ techniques, on the other hand, there are always properties that could be augmented over thousands of years and can therefore be regarded much more as being invariant (for example striving for the highest energy level in metallurgy). ‘Cold’ techniques may appear ‘archaic’ because they are new every day; ‘hot’ techniques may appear current until we notice their archaic heritage. While this does not correspond to the image of constantly inventing surprising new objects, it does correspond to the basically unlimited possibility of being able to incorporate more and more ambitious modules into other modules, and for this purpose to incorporate existing standardisations into other already existing standardisations. Historically speaking, ‘hot’ techniques follow an archaic heritage, if not an archaic path dependency. Our ‘hot’ technical accumulation is based on the incorporation of new techniques into older and even older techniques, on an accumulating refinement of materials and processing methods, but under the aegis of old technical criteria and parameters, especially criteria of speed and standardisation, reversibility and modularity, and augmented material properties. What seems new about the latest techniques and media technologies is the result of a long process in which the same parameters have been escalated again and again. There is nothing more modern in the world than the First Emperor of China and his Terracotta Army, the modular production of his soldiers and the modular simulation of their individuality, but also his political standardisation of coins, weights and measures, and the grid of his streets and canals (Ledderose, 2000). The same applies to the Uruk and Sumer standardisations (Algaze, 1993). The design of the ‘immutable mobile units’, the ‘immutable mobiles’ (as Bruno Latour called them in 1986), seems to be most consistent, most violently enforced at the beginning of a new dynasty and a new empire, only to collapse slowly but inexorably due to day-to-day compromises. In Mesopotamia, as Wengrow (2010) has shown, there was already a system of branded articles to guarantee the quality of long food chains and to certify the origin of the food by means of stamps. After that, thousands of years were needed, and it was not until the nineteenth century that a comparable regime

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emerged anew. Even the stamps with which the modular parts of the Terracotta Army refer to the date of their production and the responsible work crew are re-created in the modern division of labour—the bureaucratic certification of a production that is both anonymous and individualised. As far as the exercise of physical force is concerned, the technical criteria are always the same anyway, and they follow the iron law of attack and defence, destructive power and resistance to destruction, location and camouflage, confusion of the opponent and propagandistic emphasis on one’s own success. The technical increases of military force bear all the signs of an escalation that begins with the oldest urban civilisations and has not developed any new parameters since then. Popular histories of technology are undoubtedly not a yardstick for proper historiography, after all they are conceived as asymmetric success stories: through the unstoppable success of rational invention and the defeat of cognitive and social barriers. The fact that successful inventions can emerge from errors and misconceptions, from obsolete social relationships and cognitive biases will put a popular history of invention in an awkward position. And yet, one may wonder if these popularisations are not right on this one point: that there are easily understandable and invariant parameters of the history of invention of material techniques. An accumulating history is path-dependent, and the strongest path dependency lies in the fact that innovations are played out in only a few parameters, resulting in an ‘alignment of accumulation’ of progress, which converges on us and our technical interests. It is no coincidence that the parameters of technical development in the popular history of technology are reduced to the always same criteria of tapping energy sources, speed and invariance, action at a distance and escalation of scales and material design, power and destructive force. 5 The path dependencies mentioned above are real, but they are not all we can or should know about ‘hot’ techniques. The reason is that the separation of ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ techniques has never occurred in the way it was perhaps imagined. ‘Hot’ technical skills must continue to be learned and taught in a linguistic, physical and socialised way. In other words, these are ‘cold’ technical skills in these respects. While the comparison of ‘cold’ and ‘hot’ techniques makes good sense as long as we are talking about ‘cold’ techniques, in the realm of ‘hot’ techniques, on closer inspection, we find ourselves caught in aporias. Here a longer digression is required with regard to the word ‘technique’, which cannot be abbreviated in any way because there are currently no theoretical or philosophical deductions that are valid. The techniques which for two millennia dominated the basic training of the elites in Europe, including the theorisation of

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‘technique’ and ‘artificiality’, all crafts and aesthetic arts, industrial production techniques and systematic design, were—from the Greeks to the eighteenth century—the linguistic arts: grammar, rhetoric and the art of disputation (or dialectics and logic) (Marrou, 1957). Only when this privilege disappeared did the modern classifications of craft vs. art, handicraft vs. technology, craft vs. industry develop. Therefore, if one really wants to fall back on a general knowledge of the arts, which was formerly generally available, one cannot avoid the long dominance of linguistic arts. This dominance concerns not only the linguistic arts as techniques of basic education, but all arts conceived on the model of language techniques. In a series of publications, Reviel Netz has shown that the linguistic constitution of Greek mathematics radically distinguished its European descendants, but also the older mathematical theory, from modern mathematics (2003). It would easily be possible to name an analogous threshold for the technical treatment of chemical, physical and mechanical forces, such as alchemy in comparison with later chemistry, or for the long history of physical imponderables such as magnetism, electricity, gravity, light and ether. Not to mention the millennia-long conjunction of astronomy and astrology, or, more generally, science and divination. If one were to summarise or anticipate the outcome of such a review, one possible terminological answer (from today’s perspective) would be: the ancient cosmologies and their techniques had plenty of room for a non-human or ‘inhuman’ agency, but no room for a separation of society and technology. Obviously this separation does not apply to language techniques, nor to the mathematics described by Netz (or practised by Descartes); nor to the arts and crafts based on the structure of language techniques; nor to the concept of imitatio naturae and its aemulatio; nor to the God-given order of nature as the ‘Second Book’ of Revelation (Blumenberg, 1981). Until the seventeenth century, all the arts and techniques concerned were conceived of as social processes, which included linguistic clarification and also expected from nature a possibly ‘non-human’, but socialising and socialised, bond and expressiveness, a logos, a verbum, a script or ‘communication’. From this long history it remains astonishing and fascinating how quickly this expectation collapses within a century to produce the equation between the ‘non-human’ and the ‘non-social’, which on its opposite side produced a limitation to the realm of a purely human ‘society’. Since the late eighteenth century there have been all those classifications, and collections and museums adequate to them, which separated ‘art’ and ‘ handicraft’, ‘craft’ and ‘art’, ‘craft’ and ‘industry’ and rendered obsolete the old concept of ‘techné’. The project of a ‘science of techniques’ is designed in the seventeenth century, after a long boom of all kinds of technical

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manuals since the invention of the printing press. It reaches its enlightenment climax with the ‘Encyclopédie’, but, without any possible theoretical synthesis, restricts itself to material techniques in the early nineteenth century and is abandoned with the expansion of the laboratory sciences—because science is able to shape its own technical development, but cannot explore it or even scientifically document it (Carnino, 2015). In the sixteenth century, technical ingenuity in Europe manifested itself through the endeavour to generalise all kinds of skills, whether linguistic, physical or material, as a teachable and learnable ‘art’, i.e. to verbalise (and illustrate) them. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, the technical ingenuity of the sciences had become an untheorisable and rarely explored field of phenomena. It was only Science and Technology Studies that recognised this blind spot of the modern technical and scientific order, and in this way restituted the old question of ‘téchnical’ knowledge in the form of ‘skills’, either modernised or ‘demodernised’, depending on the point of view. No wonder, then, that the dichotomy of ‘cold’ and ‘hot’ techniques is threatened with the same fate at the end of the day as the dichotomy of ‘cold’ and ‘hot’ societies. ‘Cold’ techniques are modified with the help of ‘hot’ techniques, e.g. in sports medicine, in language laboratories or through webcams; and ‘hot’ techniques are learned and taught with the help of ‘skills’, i.e. with ‘cold’ physical, linguistic and ritual means. The statements made in the present text with the help of the dichotomy remain valid, but the dichotomy itself is recognised as a stopgap that can help to give legitimacy to the recognition of linguistic, physical and cooperative skills. The difference between ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ techniques only describes aspects of the technical process. The capacity for technical dexterity, the technical ability—the nucleus of the specifically human materiality of cooperation—has apparently not changed since the late Palaeolithic. And this is true despite the fact that human techniques have changed incessantly and sometimes with extremely adventurous leaps: between very different ecological niches, between radically opposed artificial environments, and through escalations of technical accumulation and technical oblivion (Gamble, 2007). But the technical environments since the Neolithic period have only been variants of ‘cultural niche construction’, whose most radical diversity was created during the settlement of the earth, and which has not been surpassed since. This is another reason to doubt the dichotomy of ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ societies, but also of corresponding technologies, and, after thorough examination, to drop it. This statement can be further deepened in terms of archaeology and interaction theory, here it was primarily a didactic exposition of what François Sigaut theorised as the ‘irreducibility of skills’ (2002, p. 446).

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What about digital media in this respect? The digital world seems to be doing away with ‘cold’ physical dexterity through ever expanding automation. But the opposite is the case. Digital algorithms, machines and media are perhaps not the most radical, but the clearest examples of the dependence of material techniques on the existence and continuity of incorporated, linguistic and cooperatively shared skills. Programming does not take place in a vacuum, but between communities of programmers who, through programming and its linguistic commentary, must agree on goals and implementation, distribute tasks among themselves and remain attached to the incorporated memory and to continuous learning and its intersubjectivity in the process. As long as software is still being updated, it remains dependent on these ‘communities of practice’ (Lave & Wenger, 1991). When software becomes obsolete, it is no longer reconstructed, but only emulated if necessary, i.e. not captured in its programming, but reprogrammed for its surface effects in order to ‘save the appearances’. Once a community of programmers has disbanded, there is no point in studying the obsolete code and revealing its incremental constitution at the time. It is both easier and more economical to emulate the processes and simulate them on the new interface. Old code inevitably appears ugly, and its reconstruction, if it does not have to take place for legal or historical reasons, seems a waste of money and time. Only the continuously incorporated and memorised skills make the continuity of a software and its automation practicable (Knuth, 1974; Naur, 2001). The work of the digital world is not only ‘Computer-Supported Cooperative Work’, but essentially ‘Computer-Supporting Cooperative Work’, from manual work, which maintains a nice semblance of automated algorithms, to the correction of constant malfunctions and a constant reprogramming of automated processes. The digital world proves to be an extreme case of dependence on socially incorporated and linguistically mediated skills that can easily be lost and only rarely reconstructed in detail, and in this case: if at all in any detail. But the digital world is no exception in this respect, and programming is not the only example in the digitalised world. It is, however, a prime example of the dual materiality of technical cooperation and its fragile stability, and its incorporated, irreversible, historically contingent and human constitution. This constitution will also apply to the artificial intelligence of the future. This may seem surprising, because isn’t AI about automation, and why shouldn’t the programming of AI be automated one day? Automation only appears as an abolition of human skills and subjectivities as long as one looks into the frame and not how and by whom the frame is created and kept intact. We still live in a world of an ‘irreducibility of skills’ and the question is how an AI wants to abolish this irreducibility. As long as

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there are maintenance and repair tasks for AI techniques, as long as there are software updates and their obsolescence, not only system administrators and their repair skills, but also programmers will be required to relate their respective skills to the respective equipment, owners and users. The overall stability of our infrastructures, and indeed of all our (forcibly digitised) infrastructures, depends on the fragile continuity of the communities of programmers and many brigades of maintenance people, who are subject to the inability to step into the same river twice. If programmers no longer understand what their common tasks and mutual division of labour are, these common tasks do not exist; nor can these common tasks be read by reconstructing the code, or by the code itself in the absence of linguistic explanations, or by studying its physical references, or by reconstructing the physical experience of interacting with machines. Though, of course, you may try. The materiality of technical cooperation has therefore taken an ironic turn today, with periodically renewed fantasies of the final outsourcing and automation of physical and intellectual abilities, to confront a reality of physical, linguistic and social skills, and an incessant localisation and identification of real people and singular machines, all of them interacting in a manner that earlier media theories thought had become obsolete with the invention of modern mass media. One should assume that this turbulent state of our media, marked by numerous unrealistic assumptions, will confirm in many surprising ways what François Sigaut called the ‘law of the irreducibility of skills’.

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