wallpaper dinding

Andrew Feenberg makes an important claim in his book "Between Reason and Experience: essays in Technology and Modernity" that ours is not the only technological society that is possible. To believe that it is can be construed as a technological deterministic position - Feenberg charges Heidegger (particularly) with this (and since he was a student of Marcuse, who in turn was a student of Heidegger, he at least has some pedigree for saying this).

Technology was a dominant concern in Heidegger's career, from the early "Being and Time" through to the late essays "The question concerning technology" and "Building Dwelling Thinking". The late works argue that the essence of technology is 'enframing' and that man is bound by a technological world as the "setting upon that sets upon man", and that the only escape is a mystical retreat to poetry and art.

To what extent is Feenberg right? To what extent is there merit in Heidegger's position?

Feenberg's book is essentially about the relationship between abstraction and experience, and the role of technology in that relationship. It is really a book about where politics sits in the unfolding of this relationship. These are themes very close to my own preoccupations (see http://dailyimprovisation.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/technology-abstraction-and-experience.html). Feenberg advocates a critical approach to technology as a way of engaging political discourse in the technological realm. I find that this theme has echoes in Ulrich Beck's work too.

What may be wrong in Heidegger, and (interestingly may also be wrong in the technological work which is Heidegger-inspired, such as Winograd and Flores) is that the view of technology is fundamentally irrealist. Heidegger, after all, was a phenomenologist. To him, individual experience was to be privileged. It should also be said that much 2nd-order cybernetic work is also phenomenological in this way - it's all about the individual-biological perception. As I have argued in the past, this kind of methodological individualism has social and political implications. Adorno, whose project of Negative Dialectics was essentially a competing project to Heideggers, dismissed Heidegger's work as being fascist- no doubt sticking the knife in with some relish following Heidegger's inexcusable war record! But individualism can lead to fascism - it can lead to the denial of the reality of the social. And with the denial of the reality of the social goes the denial of the possibility of building a better world.

This is where I find common ground with Feenberg. I believe that work with learning technology is precisely about exploring what a better world might be like. It is a process that Ronald Barnett wrote about a couple of weeks ago in the Times Higher: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=422221: Universities are about creating the conditions for the experimentation with 'feasible utopias'.

However, whilst Feenberg concerns himself with technology, I would argue that just as important is teaching and learning. Technology is experiential, it allows us to escape from abstraction, but so is teaching. Indeed, it is precisely in the combination of technology and pedagogy that the "feasible utopia exploration project" can be undertaken - not one in favour of the other.

There is a deep social need for this to take place. Just at a time when the institutions we originally established for the purpose of free exploration of ideas begin to marketise, professionalise and determine narrow purpose for themselves (much narrower than in their original form), so something new needs to happen which  opens things up again. Neither technology nor pedagogy are restricted to the University. But finding new ways of exploring feasible utopias - either within or outside universities - needs to become a major political priority.

The alternative is slavery to the fate that Heidegger described. Yet we will only become slaves if we believe that we are in the best of all possible worlds.

At his talk to the American Society for Cybernetics in 2012 in Asilomar, Terry Deacon asserted that 'Cybernetics isn't enough', as he attempted to argue the case for absence to be taken seriously in information theory. This didn't go down terribly well, with one very eminent member of the ASC heard to mutter "what you just heard was a sham!" - despite much of what Deacon was arguing for being prefigured in the work of Bateson and a few others.

To me, Deacon was uttering a statement that was a reaction to a peculiar kind of stasis that has struck the cybernetic discourse in recent years - really in the years following the deaths of the most significant thinkers in the discipline: Heinz von Foerster (died 2002), Gordon Pask (died 1996), Stafford Beer (died 2002), Niklas Luhmann (died 1998), Bateson (died 1980) and Ernst von Glasersfeld (died 2010). It's unfortunate that stasis has set in alongside the biggest global economic crisis since the 2nd world war... in fact, since the very original crisis which was the source of the remarkable synergistic, trans-disciplinary creativity of the Macy conferences. But exactly what "isn't enough?".

My view is that what "isn't enough" for Deacon is what might be called "positive cybernetics". That is the study of theoretically-proposed actual feedback mechanisms which are seen to be responsible for the phenomena of the world. In 2nd order cybernetics, the existence of these mechanisms calls into question the ontological status of matter. Biologically-inspired totalisations characterise material experience and psychological phenomena  with individual mechanisms of coordination of coordinations (so my coordinations coordinate your coordinations - and vice-versa - and the dynamics of these coordinations produce the experience of a shared reality). However, despite these mechanistic operations calling into question the nature of reality, the ontological status of the mechanisms themselves remains untouched. They merely assert themselves by their capacity to reduce highly complex phenomena to highly logical recursive formulae.

There is much of value in these ideas. They are ingenious, rich and fascinating. But at root, there is an assumption that reasoned abstraction of all the complexity of life is conceivable by an individual but operates at a deeper ontological level than individual perception. This is a heavy-duty metaphysical assertion, and Deacon finds this hard to swallow - and so do I. As Wiener put it over 60 years ago,

"the whole mechanist-vitalist controversy has been relegated to the limbo of badly posed questions"

The problem lies, I believe, in concentrating on the 'actual' operation of mechanisms. There is simply more to life than what is 'actually' there. Our whole yearning to know more, to be curious, to explore is driven by a sense of incompleteness - of something missing. Whatever we can actually see - be it traffic jams, or economic forecasts, or disease symptoms or exam grades - we sense questions within ourselves "what more? what's missing?" Importantly, our interpretation of the actual always takes into account "the missing": we read more into the learner's absences than anything else; the messages that aren't there are causal.

My reaction to the mechanistic totalisations of cybernetics has always been "what more?" For me, this sense of incompleteness has come from a lifetime being fascinated by and thinking about music. Music is the epitome of incompleteness - waves of rich questions which interlock with one another eventually reaching some sort of reconciliation - but always a reconciliation that raises many more new questions.

But we don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater: actual mechanisms are important! We have made remarkable machines through our understanding of them; some policy interventions actually work! But is there a way of situating the actual mechanisms of cybernetics against the context of missingness that surrounds them?

This is where I've started to think about the possibility of a 'Negative Cybernetics'. I'm consciously thinking of Adorno's 'Negative Dialectics' as I suggest this and it is first worth saying a bit about that. Adorno was reacting to two poles in German philosophy: On the one hand, he saw Kant's "negative" critical endeavour and Hegel's negative aspects of dialectic, on the other the overall totalizing and positive tendency in Hegel's dialectical method. Alain Badiou argues (in "Five Lessons on Wagner") that Adorno was interested in purging the positivising, identity-producing forces in this, by removing the positive aspects of Hegelian dialectic and refocusing those aspects of Kantian critique which determine the limits of thought. Badiou makes the point that what became known as 'critical theory'

"was given the name "negative dialectics" by Adorno as a yoking together of critical theory and negative dialectics, of Kant and Hegel now transcended." 

Cybernetics is essentially also a child of German idealism. A negative cybernetics demands transcending the positive identification of a mechanism. Critical cybernetics demands consideration of the limits of conceiving a mechanism, of the impact both of the context on the action of a mechanism and on its abstraction and conceptualisation. There emerge a range of questions, which for starters, might include:

1. How might absence be constitutive of an abstract description of a mechanism? (for example in a theory)
2. What are the social implications of a mechanistric metaphysics?
3. What are the causal relations between absence and presence as a constitutive force on being?
4. How can the causal relationships between absence and presence be known?
5. Do these problems force us to consider the relationship between reason and experience?
6. At an experiential level, what is the place of technology and how should we approach it?
7. At an experiential level, what is the place of teaching and learning and how should it be approached?

I think a "negative cybernetics" may be a good starting point for the serious study of educational technology. This is because both technology and education are concerned with experience - they are both places where abstractions are 'played out' in society. In educational technological practice, whilst idealised abstractions epitomise positive identities, the essence of experience with technologies in education is nonidentitical - it emphasizes absence. Educational Technology cannot be content with abstraction alone. Asserting the ontological privilege of abstract mechanism (such as those suggested in 'positive cybernetics') quickly reveals itself to be a mistake.

There is a balance between abstraction and experience. Technology and education are at the pivot point. But in order to see this as a living process, we have to make ourselves vulnerable enough to see that our ideas and abstractions are no more than "comfort blankets" veiling nothingness. Indeed, they may do harm.

It is interesting to reflect that the driving force behind Adorno's theorising was the 'break in history'. I'm wondering whether in our daily experimentation with educational technology, there aren't continuous small 'breaks with history', except that we've chosen to overlook the discontinuity in favour of an identity-bound, rational narrative. Bourdieu would call such pedagogic moments acts of 'symbolic violence'. We should take these seriously. Certainly letting a runaway identity principle loose in education is unlikely to do anyone any favours. 

Imagine a situation where a teacher is supporting a single learner. In my experience, this is most common with things like music lessons, although any kind of supervision could be considered. What are the characteristics of this situation? How can we explain the learning process? How is this distinct from the characteristics of group learning, or distance learning?

I've made some strong criticism of Conversation theory recently, and I think that the one-to-one situation highlights some of the explanatory deficiencies in the theory. I could be accused of overstating my case (!) but I want to defend this position because at the root of my criticism is a complaint about the way we tend to think about thinking and learning. I am not anti-technology!

The centrepiece of Pasks' theory is the concept of teach-back. In essence this is a mechanism whereby the teacher examines the utterances of the learner in response to their teaching and questioning, and determines the extent to which the learner has understood what they are being taught: Pask thought of it like a 'comparator'. Fine in principle; but what happens in reality??

Think what it actually feels like to be in that situation. We say something. The learner may say something, or shuffle around a bit, or look away, or blush, or go "errr....". What do we make of all that? What do we 'read' and what do we filter out? Is the shuffling insignificant? etc. The astonishing thing is really that with such complex information coming their way, teachers have the ability to decide what to do next at all!

Related to this, I had a conversation this morning (at least I've provoked people to argue with me!) where my complaint that text-based communication was deficient was challenged by considering 'the telephone' (in terms of reading richer signals) or "a super-high-definition-3d-with-smell-and-touch-a-phone" - what about that, eh?!  Surely these technologies mediate rich coordinations almost as good as face-to-face? I replied "can you enumerate all the particular sensory qualities that go to making a realistic impression?". I think the enumeration process never ends - we never quite get to reality. The super-high-definition-3d-with-smell-and-touch-a-phone is an attempt at such an enumeration. This is not to say that improvements and increasing detail in enumerating the sensory deficits cannot lead to improvements - but it's all a bit like Achilles and the Tortoise.

This is all about what's missing. It's also all about the fact that considering what's missing leads us to what is perhaps an important conclusion: educational experience is stratified into levels which are irreducible to one another. In information science, there is a lot of work going on around the irreducibility of social structures: Critical Realism strongly emphasises this; but more recently we find it in Terry Deacon's work; and Floridi also suggests the irreducibility of his 'levels of abstraction'. There is a tendency for communication theories like Pask's theory (Maturana suffers the same fate) to collapse levels into one another. It's like dissolving biology and chemistry into physics (why don't we go the whole hog and dissolve sociology?!! - Pask comes close to that!). What we end up with is a flat totalization.

How does what's missing (absence) lead to irreducible stratification of learning experience? Absences are all around us from the moment we are born. If they are causal on our development (which I think they are) then the shared absences between mother and child create the original spaces where thought develops. This is the grounding for language and action. Language and action create absences on a social level - between siblings, between friends, etc. Shocking events, rites of passage, etc all are powerful in their formative influence. But what emerges are distinct spaces where people grow and become attached to one another (which may mean they coordinate around the things that they lack). The social level of the family and friends is distinct from the level of the baby: one cannot be explained in terms of the other - it has it's own rules, it's own dynamic. And so we move up the social systems, each of them distinct, emerging from the other, but irreducible to it.

This makes me think of Luhmann. But Luhmann's dynamic - rather like Pasks - is based on a coordination of coordinations of communication: in the end, the perturbation is king at all levels. So Luhmann can create his distinct social structures, and show how they persist, but he always relies on the obscure processing of the 'psychic system' in order to make it work. If instead we consider that whatever we are looking at, there is something we are not looking at which shapes what we see and how we think about it, then there is a chance to move away from the global totalisations towards something that can be brought into focus a bit more clearly: the irreducible stratified levels of the internal and the external world.

So the question of what happens in face-to-face learning isn't a simple one. Who is it who's talking? Mother and child? Teacher and student? Brother and Sister? It matters because the absences are different in each case. Regarding mediated communication through technology, we can never escape the absences of the technology itself (it tries hard enough to remind us them, after all!) We both might share those absences and choose to ignore them (or discuss them - how much online communication is about the communication of technology, or where the technology is part of the drama of the conversation? - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_voix_humaine for a beautiful example of this!). But I'm never going to get my mum to Skype!!

And our learners are in so many different spaces, coordinating with their absences is almost impossible in formal education. Some learners who are awkward in social company may find an outlet online - but maybe they have really found a way of talking to themselves (I know a few people on online networks like this!). For those learners that really don't know their way, online learning is unlikely to reap any lasting reward: only the determined re-parenting of digging into someone's absences and making ourselves vulnerable enough that they can see ours. Those are the best music lessons and supervisions I remember.

There is a problem with my thinking. Like all academics, I like to think in abstractions. I look at the world, think about my experiences, and look for neat explanations of things. It's a kind of therapy and of course, I enjoy doing this (some people are rude about this kind of thing and call it 'intellectual masturbation' - it's unkind, but not entirely untrue!)

But abstraction is always problematic for a number of reasons.

1. Real experience is lived in time; abstraction compartmentalises time (if it acknowledges it at all) as a kind of divine mechanical clock, where successionism rules (b follows a..)
2. Abstractions are an individual's ideas which form from the individual's experiences, habits and history; they are not merely rational creations, nor is their form purely the result of their internal logic.
3. Abstractions must be taught if they are to have any effect in the world (there is no point in having a new theory if you can't teach it!); the teaching of abstractions is typically a situation where learners are indoctrinated with the categories of the abstraction: it can tend to exhibit sage-on-the-stageness...
4. To be taught an abstraction is a lived experience for the learner. This experience is fundamentally different from the experiences which led to the formation of the abstraction in the first place. 
5. Were one to formulate an abstraction of the learning experience of an abstraction, it would be a very different kind of abstraction!
6. Then there are socialisation problems associated with abstractions, and the institutional, corporate, political and legal frameworks which form the context within which abstractions are generated and within which they are taught.
7. The fundamental changes underway in HE (the process of marketisation) has a powerful bearing on these processes of abstraction, teaching, learning and the necessity for critique for the advancement of knowledge.

I think that from the Enlightenment to the decline of manufacturing industry in the 1980s, it was possible to overlook these problems with abstraction. Now, I think not.

The deep problem with abstraction is "time" and successionism. It's as if we have convinced ourselves of the ontological status of clocks. Computers haven't helped - they epitomise causal successionism in their internal operations. But they epitomise the fallacy of causal successionism in their social effects.

My deep concern for this is that I feel the need for something more than abstraction. There are I think two things which we should consider much more seriously if we are to escape our enlightenment chains. They are:

1. Technology
2. Play

Technology, of course, is the product of abstraction. But technology also provides experience in time. Technologies used to teach with can provide rich experiences of simulated problems from which abstractions emerge. The best example of this is Lovelock's DaisyWorld simulation. There Lovelock used technology as a way of allowing people to explore the problem situation he was considering and play with the parameters.

This process of play avoided the need for sage-on-the-stage. Instead, the abstraction of Gaia was presented in a way that invited participation. This leads me to the conclusion that Technology is a "solvent": the problem of the abstraction of time dissolves in effective use of technology through play.

This overcomes some of the other problems with abstraction. Considering that an abstraction is an individual's ideas,  what is it that a learner of the abstraction learns? I think they learn about the originator of the abstraction: how do they think? how did they reach that conclusion? Learners also learn about each other as they all learn about the teacher of the abstraction. Technology gives us not only play, but convivial play. Playing together around complex ideas affords powerful opportunities for the social impact of learning.

Most importantly, perhaps, playing together with powerful ideas can help us to come together, to unite, to organise ourselves. If we are to really address the challenges that face us in this current crisis, then new ways of finding togetherness and purpose must be created. For that we will need to use our "solvent" wisely!