What do you see as an important substantive logic for PECE?

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Mike Fortun's picture
March 23, 2021
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Sparked in part by Ali Kenner having to respond to editors (3/23/2021) as to why "The PECE Design Team" should be included as an author, I was reminded of these letters from Bateson to Norbert Wiener from 1954 and 1959.  Wiener (like Bateson, another "polymath," as these kinds of people were called at the time) was one of the key figures in "The  Cybernetics Group" that met in interdisciplinary Macy Conferences.  In the 1959 letter Bateson thanks Wiener for putting him on the list to receive Wiener's novel The Tempter, which is apparently about patents and who does or doesn't deserve them. This prompts Bateson to write:

I ran across in our old files the other day a curious case of intellectual indebtedness—a letter which I wrote to you in 1954. In that letter I outlined to you the first version of the “double bind” hypothesis on which we have been working ever since. My indebtedness consists in this—it was because I was writing to you that I could think those thoughts on that day. Life is not so simple that we can say that this man contributes this idea and that man that idea. There is also the mass of thoughts that are generated by interaction.

So Bateson could "think those thoughts on that day," thoughts that would get developed through other interactions with the Palo Alto group into double bind theory over the next 5+ years, and feel indebted to Wiener simply because he (Bateson) was writing a letter to him. Indebted not to Wiener as a source of ideas or inspiration or provocation, but just for being there in a position (of friendship) to receive Bateson's yet-to-be-developed thoughts.  We could say (and it  looks like I will say) that the 1959 Bateson realizes that in the future anterior of 1954 he will have been indebted to Wiener for a double bind theory to come.

And I could only think this because Ali started an email about recognizinng collaborative authorship, and Kim started a "PECE in Theory" essay to collect concepts like the "infinite indebtedness" one I just made up, and...and...and...and...  Hyperbole, obviously, thinking both of Blanchot's The Infinite Conversation and Levinas' "infinite responsibility," to whom I am indebted in ways I continually forget and later re-recognize. I thought maybe "disseminated indebtedness" or "indirect indebtedness" to avoid the totalizing transcendentalist implications of infinite, and maybe those are better. But I opted for hyperbole because I like it so much as a rhetorical trope.

But (he added later) it's more than rhetoric: the journal only recognizes named recognition, debts that can be accounted for and entered into a ledger. Those debts can still be disseminated and distributed, and still be named and recognized. Infinite indebtedness acknowledges that some debts can't be named, or can only be recognized in a future that may or may not transpire, or that will have been produced or altered by the debt itself.

Kim Fortun's picture
March 22, 2021
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See: NOTES: Commercial Over Determinations of Meaning

From KFortun 3.14.2020 Cultural Analysis In/Of the Anthropocene with Hamburg edits

"...we know the  wolf is at the door, so to speak. If we don’t build our own digital research infrastructure, commercial providers will.   Increasing commercial hold on scholarly infrastructure has advanced at an alarming rate in recent years, despite the buzz around open access publishing and open science.  Indeed, major initiatives to extend open access scholarly publishing -- as in Plan S, in particular -- have been effectively captured. While more scholarships will be “openly accessible,” what counts as open is often delimited to those inside elite enclaves (German, or the University of California, for example).  Elite access to publication venues has also been further consolidated (Knöchelmann 2020; Okune 2020; Okune 2019). 

Somewhat counterintuitively, digitization (since the mid-1990s) has been in step with increasing consolidation of the  scholarly publishing industry, with five companies (Reed-Elsevier, Wiley-Blackwell, Springer, and Taylor & Francis  and Sage)  accounting for more than 50% of published output by  2006 (up  from 20% in  1970).  Profit margins have been high, sometimes near 40% (RELX 2019), partly because the companies don’t pay for key inputs (the research itself and peer review). A study published in 2015 (based on a data set ending in 2013), showed that  the  social sciences had the highest  level of concentration, with 70% of papers published by the top five publishers (Larivière et al. 2015; University  of Montreal 2015).  Increasingly, these large commercial publishers companies are pursuing vertical integration as a “rent-seeking” business strategy, “generating exclusionary effects upon researchers/institutions in the global south”  (Posada and Chen 2018; 2017)

Even more sobering, in my view, is the capturing of the backend of scholarly communication, where research data is preserved, curated, accessed and used.  Consider, for example, Elsevier’s 2013 acquisition of Mendeley, a digital platform where researchers can share references, papers, and commentary. Established in 2007 by and for researchers, Mendely had become an open access icon. Response to  the Elsivier aquisition from some corners of the research community was harsh (Shaw 2013; London 2013; Dobson 2013). But Mendely has continued to extend its services.  In 2016, for example, Mendeley Data was launched to allow researchers to share citabale data sets (Mendeley 2016), becoming, for example, one of a cluster of repositories promoted by the US  National Institute of Health for sharing COVID-19  data (Goldman 2020).  In 2016,  Elsevier also acquired SSRN (Social Science Research Network), a repository for pre-prints (Elsevier 2016).  In 2017, Elsievier acquired BePress, which  includes DIgital Commons, a cloud-based institiontal repositty now used by hundreds of  universities, research centers and public libraries (BePress nd).  Esevier said that acquisition  of BePress was “was part of a deliberate effort to shift the company from journal publishing into research and technology data management” (MacKenzie 2017). Librarian’s were particularly vocal in criticizing the BePress acquisition, noting that over the years (since BePress was established by academics as  a non-profit in  2011), they had invested a  great deal of  time and money in helping develop it. One commentary explained that “[t]he move into institutional repositories means that Elsevier now offers services at almost every stage of the scholarly workflow -- from initial research to citation management, publication and deposit into a repository,” highlighting that academic researchers now have “An Elsevier-Enabled Workflow -- From Start to Finish” (McKenzie 2017). 

These projects may not be overdetermined by commercial interests, but they are encoded with them.  And that is a problem we need to acknowledge and assume responsibility for."  

Kim Fortun's picture
March 22, 2021
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Our experiments with  digitality follow historians of science in their findings about ways changing instrumentation in the sciences changes both what counts as science and scientific selves (Daston and Galison, for example). 

From Experimental Ethnography Online: The Asthma Files

We pursue The Asthma Files aware of long-standing effort, often experimental in tenor, to integrate new technologies and media into the work and expression of cultural analysis. Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead’s stunning work with photography – as both a research tool and means of conveying their analysis – comes immediately to mind (Bateson and Mead 1942, Jacknis 1988). The history of filmmaking in the conduct and expression of cultural analysis has also laid important ground, generating impressive methodological debates and innovation, and a body of work that literally provides different angles on matters of interest and concern to cultural analysts.


Bateson, G. & Mead, M. (1942) Balinese Character: A Photographic Analysis, New York, New York Academy of Sciences. Clifford, J. (1981) ‘On ethnographic surrealism’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 23, no. 4, pp. 539–564.

Jacknis, I. (1988) ‘Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson on Bali: their use of photography and film’, Cultural Anthropology, vol. 3, no. 2, pp. 160–177.

Mike Fortun's picture
March 7, 2021
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