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Hazards of Design: Ethnomethodology and the Ritual Order of Computing

Philip E. Agre Department of Communication University of California, San Diego La Jolla, California 92093-0503 USA

phone: +1 (619) 534-6328 fax: +1 (619) 534-7315 net: pagre@ucsd.edu home: http://communication.ucsd.edu/pagre/

Note to the reader: this is a draft paper that I wrote in July 1997 and never finished. I am hoping that circulating it in this form will provide me with the impetus that I need to wrap it up. Please do not quote from it or circulate it, but do send any comments. I apologize for the long paragraphs and esoteric vocabulary.

Italics are in asterisks, book titles in the text in underscores.

//1 Introduction

In the climactic scene of Robert Long's film adaptation of William Gibson's short story "Johnny Mnemonic" [ref], the hero of the tale, played by Keanu Reeves, jacks into the computer system of an evil corporation. There he engages in what can only be described as a special-effects version of a traditional shamanic journey. Descending through a long tunnel, he fights with and tricks various entities in order to find and bring back the cure to a dread disease. On a relatively overt level, this scene affirms a cultural recoding of the computer worker. As late as the 1970's, the figure of the systems analyst expressed an entirely uncontested alignment between computer work and institutional power, each devoted to the construction of an emerging technical order and to the ideology that Kling [ref] has called systems rationalism. By the 1990's, however, American culture, had thrown up an entirely different model, the computer hacker who encounters an already established sprawl of systems. Far from identifying with the institutional order that created the systems, the hacker regards this order as malevolent and decadent, and above all as the enemy of the utopian potential of the technology. At this level, the cultural change has nothing special to do with computers; it is continuous with the emergence of Rambo-like narratives that an entirely different Gibson (1994) has located in a virulent reaction to the debacle of Vietnam.

On another level, though, Johnny Mnemonic's journey provocatively draws on a discourse of virtual reality that has deep roots in the Western technological tradition. David Noble [ref] has identified this tradition as "masculine transcendentalism", a recurring technological preoccupation with millennialist themes of disembodiment and rational order. These themes also plainly organize the discourses of artificial intelligence and cyberspace. Johnny Mnemonic's journey, however, is distinctive in one crucial respect. Considered as theology, masculine transcendentalism has always been resolutely monotheistic. God occupies the standpoint from which an absolutely uniform rational order can be created and surveyed, and the engineer aims to occupy that very same standpoint as the progenitor and administrator of rational order on earth. Johnny Mnemonic, however, invokes an entirely different theology, the considerably more decentralized spiritual order of the shaman. The project of technological reason was founded quite specifically in opposition to traditional animism and its healing practices, and yet here the constitutive other of technological reason is found irrupting in the cultural elaborations of a paradigmatically advanced technology.

My question is, how do we evaluate such phenomena? It is surely incorrect to view "Johnny Mnemonic" and the other technocultural echoes of shamanism as wholly immanent in the directions of technological development; at a minimum, the narrative of the shamanic journey in "Johnny Mnemonic" is plainly overlaid with a series of other narratives whose sources are not obviously related. On the other hand, it is surely equally wrong to treat the phenomena of popular culture simply as arbitrary or opportunistic appropriations of technical methods that have no more affinity for any cultural themes than any others. Indeed, it is not much of an exaggeration to say that computer system designers, in their most routine practices, are attempting to construct a parallel world of disembodied information, and that these practices coevolve with a whole series of transcendentalist visions, from distance learning to digital libraries to friction-free marketplaces, that are not far distant in their metaphors and ambitions from the most extravagant fictional narratives of virtual reality.

It is clear, then, that computers in some sense inscribe forms of social imagination. The question is, in what sense? This question has been taken up by other authors in a variety of contexts. Authors such as Clement [ref], for example, have made much of the historical continuities between contemporary system design and an earlier era of industrial automation; for them, the social content of computing is to be found in the material realities of class conflict and social control. Authors like Suchman and Trigg [ref], by contrast, have sought the inscription practices of computing in the fine details of designers' work; they observe that this work consists in large measure of the successive transformation of technical problems from theoretical statement to fictional scenario to formalism to software. The contrast between these two approaches is instructive: the inscription practices of computing appear to exhibit large-scale historical regularities, and yet the work of inscription is never anything but the local, situated production of order in the sites of technical work.

I believe that both sets of authors have contributed something valuable, and I will not strongly dissent from their conclusions. Nonetheless, I believe that much more remains to be said. It will be the gist of my account that the most fundamental layer of inscription practices in computing is religious in nature, not political, and that the religious content of these practices is grounded in technical practitioners' highly evolved strategies for contending with the inherent dilemmas of their craft. In analyzing these dilemmas, I will draw on certain themes from Schutz's phenomenological account of the cognitive basis of social order, and particularly from the ethnomethodological investigations of Garfinkel and his school. Although I will be drawing on my member's familiarity with the methods and recurrencies of technical work, however, this is not an ethnomethodological investigation. I am not reporting from any specific site of practice beyond the school of hard knocks, and I offer my conclusions only in a speculative mode as questions and suggestions toward more concretely located studies. In turning from the dilemmas of computer work to the methods by which these dilemmas are worked through in practice, I will be drawing on recent anthropological work on signification and ritual. Once again, I can only offer suggestions. The big picture, to which I will return in concluding, pertains to the emerging critique of systems rationalism, and to the specifically theological meaning of ethnomethodology's respecification of the various topics of rational order in local and finite terms.

//2 Reflexivity and displaced artifacts

In computer work it is customary to distinguish between designers and users. It is a constructed distinction, to be sure, an the object of a great deal of symbolic work [Woolgar]. But I want to accept it here on a heuristic basis, schematically, to evoke some of the interpretive problems that arise in daily work around computers.

The crux of the relationship between computer designers and computer users is an artifact, the computer and its software. Marx spoke of the factory worker as confronting production machinery as something alien, and so it frequently is with computers as well. Even on those occasions when designers and users are acquainted with one another, the computer itself has typically undergone some kind of displacement in time and space from the site of its creation. This kind of displacement has been a significant theme in science studies, for example, where it has often stood for the mysterious practical work by which knowledge-claims are rendered universal through the gathering of representations and the gradual unhooking of practical accomplishments from their local conditions.

From an ethnomethodological perspective, what is most significant about the relationship between designer and user is the production of cognitive order in the distinct sites of their work. It is useful to compare the case of a paper note passed between intimates. Far from locating the meanings of that note in semantic conventions that might be applied to the marks on the page, ethnomethodology would draw attention to the relationship between the sender and receiver. The note will be written with a reflexive orientation to the practical circumstances and consequences of its being read, and it will be read with a similar orientation to its writing. In particular, the recipient's work of making out the practical force of the note will depend on its ascription to an author, and to the assumption that its author designed it to be read. An analysis of the reciprocal understanding of the writer and reader is thus central to any appreciation of the note itself.

Garfinkel developed these themes in his studies of coroners and clinic personnel [ref]. The records that were carefully maintained in these sites had proven useless as standardized, mimetic documents of deaths and clinical patients, and this seeming deficiency was a mystery. The orderliness of the record, it turned out, was to be sought in their authors' anticipation of later circumstances. A case might always be reopened, or questions might be raised about it, and the records were adequate if they stood up in those future situations. What was crucial was the authors' understanding of those possible future situations. Those future situations necessarily remained hypothetical in any particular occasion of preparing a record, and so it was necessary to anticipate, by various methods, a broad class of potential scenarios. The general point does not relate to the antagonistic structure of the situation but to the authors' reflexive orientation to projected potentials for their work to come back round to them in the circuits of a well-familiar institutional order.

//3 Inscribing discourse

Computer designers find themselves in a similar situation to the author of an institutional document, and I want to convey something of the methods by which they contend with it. Computers, it is commonly said, are language machines. They embody language, and they transact linguistic exchanges with their users later on. Computer designers orient themselves pervasively to the intelligibility of their artifacts; in order to be useful, a computer must provide its user with guidance in the construction of some ongoing account of what it is doing. That account is rendered in language, and designers are massively concerned with language as such. Every detail of a computer's functioning is produced through a transformation of language. The first steps of system design are akin to the procedures of certain kinds of discourse analysis: beginning with a corpus of explanations of particular work practices, the systems analyst recovers a grammar, listing the nouns and verbs that will become successively transformed into technical objects -- hardware and software. The conventional account of this work, the taken-for- granted "official" story of computer design, is that this language is used to define what the computer is supposed to do. It is a machine, say, for forecasting the weather of computing tax payments. Yet this work can be further specified as providing for the accountability of the machine's operation. The designer proceeds by constructing a grammar of accounts. The designer is operating under two profound constraints. First, it is impossible to know the specific practical circumstances in which the machine will be used. Second, the results of the designer's analysis must be embodied in working machinery. System designers employ a specific strategy in negotiating these constraints. As a community, they maintain a repertoire of technical schemata, each consisting of a fragment of narrative form -- serial action, for example -- and a formal device for embodying that aspect of narrative in a machine. Other schemata provide technical renderings of narrative categories such as objects and their attributes, actions and their outcomes, questions and their answers, and so on. To become a computer person is to learn these schemata, and to acquire a skill that Jameson [ref] called transcoding: paraphrasing others' language in terms of the technical schemata. Transcoding is a powerful and pervasive cognitive orientation. It explains, for example, why computer people have such extraordinary difficulty comprehending most any proposition from the social sciences, and especially the interventions of ethnomethodology: when they attempt to transcode these sociological propositions, they obtain either nonsense or the most radical individualism and mentalism. The problem is not that they hold to these theoretical commitments on a substantive level, but that their schemata are directed at translating all grammatical forms into technical "things" that can be built.

The purpose of transcoding is to convert discourse into formalism. Natural language, however, is not left behind. Rather, a connection is established between the grammar of natural language and the logic of formalism. Because natural language and formalism are entirely different sorts of things, whole generations of research on formal semantics notwithstanding, this connection is the locus of significant tensions. These tensions are inherent in the project: designers must be confident that their designs will work, and so they narrate various scenarios, talking through their code hypothetically. Lacking access to the situational detail of any particular context of use, they must seek the coherence of these scenarios in other ways. On one level, the designer is a kind of storyteller, appealing to what Aristotle called probabilities and to the typifications of culturally organized experience. On another level, the designer must also look to the formal closure of the system by ensuring that some intuitive gloss has been given for every logical possibility that the formalism generates. These two levels of order in computer work, narrative and logical, exist in dialectical interaction, and a design feels done once that interaction has seemed to exhaust itself.

//4 Accountable machinery

Let us turn from the situation of the designer to the situation of the user. Computers, evidently, are machines that we build so that we can talk about them in a certain way, and ethnomethodology recommends that contexts of computer use are self-organizing with regard to the production of every aspect of rational order. Although computers abundantly produce the linguistic resources that users might employ in accounting for the machines' behavior, in other words, we must still look to each occasion of computer use for the unique way in which it interprets these resources and makes them relevant to ongoing practical concerns. Woolgar [ref] has described something of this process. He has rightly emphasized that users and machines are both produced in a reflexive fashion: what the people do provides a reflexive ground for making out what the machine has done, and vice versa, and all of this is accomplished only for all practical purposes, being endlessly revisable in light of subsequent evidence.

Woolgar points particularly to the ascription of intentional predicates to machines: interpreting a machine as knowing or remembering, asking or telling, trying or failing, and so on. If the user's task is to construct ongoing accounts of the machine's behavior in these terms, then it matters whether and when, and on what grounds, such ascriptions can be made. One approach, to which I shall return, is to attempt to define the terms, to articulate general criteria for the application of intentional vocabulary to anything at all, and to artifacts in particular. Woolgar will have none of this, and instead directs our attention to what he calls the moral order of representation in a given setting: the ascriptional practices of that particular local group. These practices constitute a moral order in the sense that they hang together, and in the sense that they interconnect with a range of morally consequential matters such as the assignment of responsibility for error. These practices also change: they change over the long term with the introduction of new technologies and new ideas, but they can also change from moment to moment with changing definitions of the situation.

This account is valuable in directing our attention to the local accounting practices of a group, but it does not offer much guidance in reconstructing how these practices operate, or how they interact with the practices of design. To this end, Woolgar offers the further heuristic suggestion that the computer itself be regarded as a kind of text. Texts, of course, are open to a range of interpretations, and the practices of reading and writing are open to investigation in the ways that the literary metaphor suggests. They are also open to the forms of sociological investigation that I mentioned earlier in my sketch of the reflexivity of written notes. Within this framework, it becomes possible, in Woolgar's terms, to investigate designers' work of configuring the user, that is, predisposing the user to certain kinds of interpretation of the computer-text -- starting with the user's own self-interpretation as a user, as a person located outside of the designer's organization and outside of the computer itself.

To extend this analysis, it is useful to focus attention on the specific form of accounts of computers-in-use. If these accounts take the form of ongoing narratives of the reflexively interrelated actions of both user and machine, then we can investigate the nature of these narratives. In order to be narratives of actions, and not simply of events or states or data, both user and machine must be actively accountable as the sorts of agents hat can really act, and it turns out historically that designers have been intensely occupied with providing the conditions for this kind of narration. But Schutz [ref] and Mead [ref] both argue that action involves a kind of self- objectification. An action is not simply a movement, like a reflex jerk of one's knee. An action, to the contrary, is always accompanied by a conscious sense of what it would be like for the action to be complete. Action thus requires, among other things, an orientation to the future. And indeed, for several hundred years at least, technologists have sought to ascribe a future orientation to their artifacts. This has not simply been a philosophical sidelight; to the contrary, it has been central to the cultural construction and elaboration of a long series of technologies. McReynolds [ref] has recounted the case of clocks, which stood as symbols of a mechanical model of humanity not simply for their readily visible principles of operation, but specifically because the mainspring of a clock provided a metaphor, a narrative anchor, for the language of animate motivation and vital force. Cybernetics, likewise, excited a generation of technologists and technologically-inclined psychologists not because of its strictly instrumental successes, which were debatable at least at first, but because, as Wiener observed [Galison], the operation of servomechanisms likewise provided a mechanistic way of talking about orientation to the future. In each case, a vast technical rhetoric ```

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