event mechanics

I modified my recent Code2K12 paper while at was at the conference to introduce a TEDx or ‘Virilio’ moment. By this I mean speculating on the future scenario of present tendencies. I wanted to isolate a tendency in the ways various functions of the magazine are not only repeated in different ways online now (my previous paper), but also in the ways they could be repeated in different ways through annotated or augmented reality technologies. My focus are those events of experience that I tie closely to the circulation of affects that we might call ‘enthusiasm’.

Everyday media technologies have been constitutive in the collective individuation of subjects for a long time. The ‘Kodak moment’ is a classic example of photography becoming part of the everyday experience of ‘family’ and the individuation of ‘parent’ and ‘child’. What I am specifically interested in are not only technologies of representation that insert relations of representational valorisation into social relations but specifically vernacular or affective epistemologies. Taking a photo of a child’s birthday party may involve the modification of setting and composition to capture the ‘perfect moment’, but this does not necessarily generate or develop new ways of knowing either explicitly or tacitly any aspect of the event captured and modulated through technologies of representation.

One of the functions of specialist magazines has been to circulate ‘know how’. ‘Know how’ is an experience-based practical knowledge. Magazines represent the conditions of experience through which (tacit, embodied) knowledge is developed rather than the (explicit) knowledge itself. There is a continuum between tacit and explicit forms of knowledge, including ‘rules of thumb’ that combine both. I’ve developed an account of the ‘How to’ article that follows this line of thinking, which should be published early next year. To help think through this relation between media representations and experience in the development of vernacular epistemologies I have called the events of experience that mobilise enthusiast bodies ‘challenges’. A ‘challenge’ isn’t something that makes enthusiasts all excited in the stereotypical delirium of the enthusiast; often they are rather daunting and can often end in utter failure. The key element of a ‘challenge’ is that like a problem they beg some kind of resolution to a contingent element or state of affairs (‘meet the challenge’), while at the same time they encourage an engagement of affirmation through which one’s capacity to act is increased through positive affects (‘rise to the challenge’). (I also delve into the virtual architecture of challenges, drawing on Deleuze’s philosophy of ‘problems’ and a Deleuzian reading of Kant’s ‘enthusiasm’.)

There has been a tendential shift from enthusiast discourse operating to shape bodies into enthusiasts suitable for a given market of certain challenges in the print era, to enthusiast discourse organised around enthusiast-produced accounts of their own challenges, to what I suggest is currently unfolding which is enthusiast discourse directly intervening into the challenge itself through the specific affordances of AR technologies. The future-oriented historical process I described in my conference presentation involved the suggestion that AR technologies will directly intervene in specific events of experience. In this situation the locus around which the subject, the technology and the media content is organised is ‘this’ singular event of experience through which ‘this’ subject is individuated. All of these involve modulations of challenges, but there is an accelerated relation of temporality now and a more granular relation between the specific conditions of experience through which vernacular knowledges are developed and the ‘How to’ steps that must be followed.

To a certain extent this is playing out already in the world of consumer-level health and fitness enthusiasms. I just spent a stupid amount of money on a set of Withings weighing scales that are equipped with a wireless internet connection so it can sync up with various ‘fitness’ applications on my iPhone. It is a good example of the next iteration of machinic metrology that combines technologies of measurement with algorithm-based modelling of my personal fitness project. The knowledge produced here is of my performance for the day or week. Have I been working hard enough? Have I been disciplined enough? My physical activity still requires me to manually input data (type, time, work, etc.) because I only use gym equipment. If I was running or cycling then one of my apps (Runkeeper) would automatically calculate how much ‘work’ (energy/time) I had performed.

Such knowledges have circulated within specialist media for a long time. I used to subscribe to Men’s Health magazine (or I had a free subscription because of one of my utility providers), and I sometimes still buy it. The relations of valorisation that drive the algorithms of my iPhone apps are discursively embodied in photographic and text-based form in Men’s Health. It was very useful for gaining an appreciation of different modes and levels of mobilisation in terms of the levels of work required for different kinds of challenges. Now my apps have the capacity to modulate the events through which I mobilise as I am mobilising based on my singular conditions of mobilisation (my specific weight, age and type of activity).

These algorithmic technics of coaching embodied in such fitness apps are only a very simple example. I imagine scenarios where knowledges that circulate are far more complex and closer to the mechanical, scientific and design knowledges of different kinds of enthusiasms (modified-car enthusiasts, fishing or gardening enthusiasts, and so on). The ‘googlefication’ of knowledge so it can be parsed and indexed for the purposes of ease of machine-assisted searching renders knowledge incredibly granular, as many people have noted. Some critics have lamented this as a dire turn of events for the state of knowledge. The granulated forms of knowledge will now be able to be delivered to specific subjects through emerging AR technologies within specific events of experience as the event is unfolding at the rate and level of expertise suitable for the subject.

The event of experience is still pre-personal and able to be co-individuated and transduced into other contexts, but the relation between media representations and experience will be far more complicated in the specific sense complicating something involving many more folds (‘pli’) in the relation. I am describing how media content will be delivered tailored on ‘this’ experience (fitness project) for ‘this’ subject (Glen) rather than working to produce enthusiast cohorts for the purposes of individuating markets (print-era model of specialist media). My technology consumption is infrastructural of a given lifestyle, it enables me to act or perform in certain ways, but these are different to the identity-building ways we used to speak about media and consumer technologies.

I’m about two thirds of the way through restructuring and rewriting an article on ‘know-how’. This is the first proper publication to come out of my PhD dissertation that I finished in 2007. My goal is to lay the theoretical groundwork to eventually carry out a ‘media archaeology’ of ‘know-how’. It is largely based on Deleuze’s reworking of Kantian metaphysics, but I am using such philosophical concepts in a very applied way.

I define ‘know-how’ as experience-based practical knowledge. ‘Know-how’ is developed in the body through some kind of practice. ’Developed’ has two meanings here. Firstly, like a polaroid photograph, ‘know-how’ develops as a consequence of exposure to the conditions of experience. Secondly, the differential repetition of experience develops ‘know-how’. Experience does not accummulate, so for example, it would be incorrect to describe someone as ‘more experienced’. Rather, experience is differentiated as the synthesis of memory is founded on the synthesis of habit. Someone only ever has a experience that through its differential repetition becomes ‘keener’ (or ‘duller’). 

The episodic character of differentially repeated experience through which ‘know-how’ is developed I am calling a ‘challenge’. I define three characteristics of ‘challenges’. First, its problematic contiguity, which I won’t go into in this post. Secondly, there is a material ‘kicking-a-rock’ dimension of challenges and, thirdly, there is also an incorporeal or virtual dimension to them. ‘Challenges’ are similar to problems (in the non-Deleuzian sense) because they beg some kind of resolution or solution. But unlike problems, a ‘challenge’ also demands some kind of mobilisation to ‘rise to the challenge’. Hence, the affective disposition of the subject of ‘know-how’ is of crucial importance.

In terms of affect, there are three ways to respond to a ‘challenge’, depending on its character. To be ‘beat’ by the challenge means to be over-awed (or under-awed) and assume a diminutive relation of the ‘passive affections’ of the ‘challenge’. One’s capacity to act is diminished. On the other hand, to ‘rise to the challenge’ and mobilise to engage with an increased capacity to act determined by the active affections of the challenge. In between is a complex relation of active affections in all dimensions of the mobilisation bar one, and that is the capacity to delineate or intuit the ‘challenge’ itself. By inheriting the ‘challenges’ of others, one’s co-assembly of active affects — what I am calling ‘enthusiasm’ — becomes harnessed by whatever agency is positing and valorising these inherited ‘challenges’ as worthy of mobilisation. For example, this is how ‘enthusiasm’ belonging to subcultures becomes harnessed as a resource by the creative industries.

In this article I am primarily concerned with the way ‘know-how’ can be transmitted. The core problem is that experience itself cannot be communicated. My solution to this problem is to engage with the ways the condition of experience (i.e. ‘challenges’) can be transmitted. When a subject of ‘know-how’ begins to develop ‘know-how’ he or she is exposed to what I am calling the ‘visibilities’ (following Deleuze’s reading of Foucault) and ‘tactilities’. ‘Tactilities’ captures a sense of the qualitative capacity to and practice of getting one’s ‘hands dirty’. This is a non-cognitive tactile appreciation of the material qualities of the ‘challenge’, where habits of practise are synthesised in the body as ‘tacit knowledge’.

The best example of the the transmission of ‘know-how’ is the much neglected ‘how to’ article. The ‘how to’ article walks a subject of ‘know-how’ through a ‘challenge’. The subject develops new ways of ‘seeing’ the elements of the ‘challenge’, new ways of manipulating and engaging with the material elements (‘tactilities’), and mobilises through a co-assembly of active affects (i.e. implicit ‘encouragement’). Because of my unique work background I have countless informal examples of how ‘know-how’ is developed, but rather than extensive (and probably boring) examples of how ‘know-how’ is developed (in my dissertation most of a 12k word chapter was spent going through the example of how I fixed a broken fan belt on my car!) I use the actor-network theory concept of ‘black-boxing’ as a way to think through the way subjects of ‘know-how’ engage with socio-technical systems.

During my trip last weekend back to Perth for an old school friend’s wedding, I woke up at about 3am in the midst of a jet lag and impending lecture writing anxiety, and couldn’t get back to sleep. I thought this was an appropriate time to read the ‘Carpentry’ chapter of Ian Bogost’s recent book Alien Phenomenology. The forthcoming ‘Nonhuman Turn’ conference is streaming its plenaries, and Bogost is delivering a talk about “The Aesthetics of Philosophical Carpentry”, so I am looking forward to seeing how Bogost develops his thinking about ‘carpentry’ into the aesthetic realm.

Bogost had tweeted that he’d received a 1-star negative review on Amazon.com so I had a look and noticed another reviewer (5-stars) suggested that the book was worth reading just for the Carpentry chapter. The OOOer’s world is full of (post)grad student fanbois who dis/like certain OOOing so I’d take any user-generated review, be it positive or negative, with a healthy dose of skepticism. Unless, of course, it is backed up with a thorough analysis that at least demonstrates that the reviewer has read the book. I was intrigued that this reviewer singled out a chapter as worth the ‘price of admission’ so I decided to return to Bogost’s book.

Yes, ‘return’. I read the first chapter and filed the Kindle ebook away under ‘when I have more time’. The first chapter largely rehearses the OOO ‘origin story’ without any substantial development (something Goldsmiths, something Meillassoux, etc.). I like the rhetorical move of announcing that ‘speculative realism’ is an event and discussing it as such; it is an example of the sort of thing I would do (what I would call ‘event mechanics’, OOO-as-event presents a very straight-forward analysis). Bogost does a bit of discourse analysis, historical analysis, media archaeology and so on.

For example, ‘correlationism’ could happily be defined is a Foucaultian style ‘statement’ configuring the field of OOO discourse. Yeah? Organising compositions of power relations and so on. How? Enter Bogost: “to proceed as a philosopher today demands the rejection of correlationism”. The scholarly field becomes happily organised for OOOers into those who reject ‘correlationism’ and therefore can be regarded as ‘doing philosophy’, versus those who do not, for whatever reason, perhaps because they think the ‘problem’ of correlationism isn’t one. Bogost references Alain Badiou’s ‘decisionist’ conception of the event. (‘Decisionist’ moniker comes from Badiou’s reading of Spinoza, see that Pli essay on it.) I’d argue it is far closer to what Foucault called a ‘discourse event’, a kind of ‘order of objects’. Philosophy itself is transformed through the articulation/enunciation (or denunciation) of ‘correlationism’. What does this incorporeal transformation of philosophy herald? Bogost is clear, “it names a moment when the epistemological tide ebbed, revealing the iridescent shells of realism they had so long occluded.”

That first egg was named “Thought”. Tathagata Buddha, the Father Buddha, said, “With our thoughts, we make the World”. Elemental forces caused the egg to hatch. From it then came a stone monkey. The nature of Monkey was irrepressible!

Anyway, it is a pity that no one (at least that I am aware of, even from the regular OOO blogs) has carried out an OOO analysis of the OOO ‘origin story’. I would find this fascinating. Mainly because it would force the OOOer fanbois to forego the cult of personality surrounding key OOO figures… unless these figures are ‘objects’ but that would be a waste of an analysis surely, why detour through ‘objects’ at all? Or maybe we’d end up with a kind of analysis of OOO following Alliez’s Signature of the World (following Deleuze and Guattari) where the concept of the ‘object’ has its own autonomy? Or maybe Bogost wasn’t doing philosophy yet, so early into the book. This would be a curious response, in the sense that an OOO analysis of OOO should be possible, considering that OOO is meant to celebrate “stuffs [as enjoying] equal being no matter their size, scale, or order” (Bogost). Maybe OOO needs a non-OOO introduction so as to be sensible to first timers? (A bit like the birth of Monkey born from an egg on a mountain top.) Hmmm. I don’t think my ‘off hand’ point regarding the non-OOO presentation of OOO is inconsequential, however. (As opposed to the ‘ready-to-hand’ critique of ‘correlationism’ bandied about by those who don’t seem to follow or even have read Meillassoux’s argument.) Does irony exist for objects? (Less ‘molar’, Deleuzian: What is machinic irony?) Regardless, this is clearly a case of ‘theory’ irony.

Oh, and the Carpentry chapter. Bogost launches into a critique of writing, in particular scholarly writing, and then develops what he names “carpentry” as the “practice of constructing artifacts as a philosophical practice” which “entails making things that explain how things make their world”. I am currently researching ‘know-how’ as an experience-based form of practical knowledge and in particular the ‘how to’ article as a key text in discourses of ‘know-how’, so Bogost’s invocation of carpentry was at least interesting.

Of course, my PhD was on enthusiasm, the creative industries and modified-car culure, plus having come out of an ‘aspirational’ working class context I actually built a few cars in my late teens and early twenties. That and I worked on a mine site to pay for the cars. I’ve always approached philosophy as a kind of ‘mechanics’, not in the classical physics sense, but an in-the-garage-under-the-hood sort of way. Hence, the title of this blog. I spend a week in my first year foundation unit discussing what these ‘tacit knowledges’ are required for the practice of research. I’ve discussed this a number of times on this blog drawing primarily on Michael Polanyi and then go from there. To be clear, I don’t think Bogost is advocating this kind of ‘tacit knowledge’ approach, even though this is the approach of Matthew B. Crawford in his book Shop Class as Soulcraft, who Bogost cites. Well, I didn’t think Bogost was advocating this kind of approach until I got to the concluding section of this chapter (see below). On the other hand, Crawford is clearly arguing this, i.e. “real knowledge arises through confrontation with real things”. For more on Crawford’s book, see my review from a number of years ago. My position is very similar except I’m interested in a more sophisticated appreciation of experience, and a better understanding of how ‘know-how’ is circulated through media, etc.

It is unclear exactly what Bogost is arguing. Bogost: “The carpenter [...] must contend with the material resistance of his or her chosen form, making the object itself become the philosophy.” Ok, kind of Polanyi-Crawford-ish here. And then when he introduces his first two examples of “philosophical software carpentry” he describes them as “ontographical tools meant to characterize the diversity of being”. When discussing the unintended (‘sexist’) consequences of one of these tools, he suggests changing it would lead to it losing its “ontographical power”. What is its philosophical accomplishment? Bogost:

[It's] philosphical accomplishment comes from the question it poses about the challenge flat ontology and feminism pose to one another. On the one hand, being is unconcerned with issues of gender, performance, and its associated human politics; indeed, tiny ontology invites all beings to partake of the same ontological status, precisely the same fundamental position as many theorists would take ob matters of identity politics. But on the other hand, the baggage of wordly stuff still exerts a political challenge on human experience that cannot be satisfactorily dismissed with the simple mantra of tiny ontology. The [accidently sexist ontographic tool] hardly attempts to answer these questions, but it does pose them in a unique way thanks to carpentry.

Hmmm. The univocity of being is indeed irrelevant for most real world situations. I can’t help but feel Bogost is ignoring the bits of Crawford that don’t fit within the anti-correlationist party line. Take Crawford’s axiomatic statement that “real knowledge arises through confrontation with real things”. Ok, what are the ‘real things’ in the accidently sexist ontagraphic tool example? An image of a Playboy bunny randomly selected from Flickr? The OOO event website with sexist image as viewed by two female scholars? The code of the website? All of them? What is the ‘real knowledge’ produced then? Does a flat ontology privilege the reality of some things over others? No, of course not! That would be entirely against the point of the concept. Yet, there is a clear contradiction here. Crawford’s “real things” are only ‘real’ because of their relationality and implication in the production of “real knowledge” as part of the experience of being a mechanic/carpenter/whatever. This is precisely the kind of position disavowed by OOO as ‘correlationist’.

The experiences of things can be characterized only by tracing the exhaust of their effects on the surrounding world and speculating about the coupling between that black noise and the experiences internal to an object. [...]
The phenomenologist who performs carpentry creates a machine that tries to replicate the unit operation of another’s experience. Like a space probe sent out to record, process, and report information, the alien phenomenologist’s carpentry seeks to capture and characterize an experience it can never fully understand, offering a rendering satisfactory enough to allow the artifact’s operator to gain some insight into an alien thing’s experience.

How did the accidently sexist ontagraphic tool gain any insight of an alien thing’s experience? Or is ‘woman’ not sufficiently ‘alien’ for ‘man’? Or is it a case of the ‘alien’ experience of those specific women and the haecceitty of an unfortunately sexist OOO event website? Has OOO somehow managed to overcome relations of alterity? These aren’t fair questions, perhaps, as it would be ridiculous to suggest an OOO version of the differend, as this would make Bogost’s entire project untenable. But what does this ‘carpentry’ do?

Bogost’s I am TIA project sounds pretty cool. Through a metaphorical lens it characterizes (Bogost prefers ‘characterizes’, it seems, as compared to ‘represents’) the experience of a ‘television interface adaptor’ of an Atari VCS. Cool! Now what?

The Tableau Machine example illustrates how a ‘machinic’ perspective of a home “helps deliver the home’s residents out of anthropocentricism” (Bogost, citing Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter 120). Good! So what? Can we infer that Bogost (or maybe Benett) is implying that the residents are transformed akin to Felix Guattari’s introduction of ‘transversal’ practices into the psychiatric institution of La Borde and his hopes for the reconstitution of subjectivity etc?

The concluding section of Bogost’s chapter is titled “A New Radicalism”. He says that “real radicals [...] make things” and challenges OOO to “become craftsmanship, challenging us to learn a trade”. Maybe Bogost is not aware of the whole “philosophy as toolbox, concepts as tools” notion from an interview between Foucault and Deleuze, or the development of Serres’s work on the invention of physics into what Deleuze and Guattari called a ‘minor science’ in A Thousand Plateaus. The purpose of mentioning Polanyi above was that he goes to great lengths to indicate how all abstract (‘explicit’) knowledges are premised on ‘tacit knowledges’. Or even Harman has noted that Heidegger discussed the extraction of ‘theory’ as part of a scholastic disposition from experience (in one of Heidegger’s very early lectures).

Bogost then returns to Crawford (his colleague Hugh or Soulcraft’s Matthew B.? I think it is meant to be Matthew B.) in the concluding passage to this chapter:

When people or toothbrushes or siroccos make sense of encountered objects, they do so through metaphor. As Whitehead and Latour suggest, this process requires creative effort, challenging OOO to become craftsmanship, challenging us to learn a trade. We tend to think of creativity as construction, the assembly of something new out of known parts. A novel is made of words and ink and paper, a painting of pigments and canvas and medium, a philosophy of maxims and arguments and evidence, a house of studs and sheetrock and pipes. Perhaps in the future, following Crawford’s example, radical philosophers will raise not their fists but their hammers.

Now I am really confused. Bogost seems to be collapsing two kinds of experience. One that is developed in humans, following Crawford’s axiom “real knowledge arises through confrontation with real things”, and the experience that objects have of whatever (the other objects that constitute their ‘environment’ in the ecological/systems sense?). That is not the confusing thing however. Confusing is, firstly, the suggestion that any objects whatsoever “make sense of encountered objects” as Bogost has not discussed ‘sense’ at all, at least not in any way that correlates with philosophies of sense that I am familiar with (vaguely Frege or Deleuze), and secondly that this sense making is carried out through “metaphor”. Hmmm… Bogost has described how human philosophers have created artifacts that offer a metaphorical representation of machinic experience, not how those actual objects have used metaphor (or some kind of machinic equivalent…?) to “make sense”. I can understand a multiplicity of experiences (this experience is as singular as that experience), but the simple projection of anthropomorphic concepts like ‘sense’ or ‘metaphor’ from the OOO philosophical domain and using them to ‘characterise’ the existence of objects is contradictory (and that is putting it mildly) of what would seem to be the basic tenets of OOOism. What is all this gruff talk about ‘taking objects seriously’ if objects are reduced to being mere vehicles of philosophical metaphor?

In Peter Kügler‘s recent essay titled “Sense, Category, Questions” he compares Gilbert Ryle’s concept of ‘category’ to Gilles Deleuze’s concept of ‘sense’ in an analogical way. I am interested in Kügler’s essay because I am just about to finish an article on ‘know-how’ coming from a very different perspective, but which touches on Ryle’s book Concept of Mind and draws heavily on Deleuze’s empiricism. Using a Deleuzian terminology, Kügler compares the virtual dimensions of Ryle’s ‘category’ and its relation to language and Deleuze’s concept of ‘sense’ and its relation to language, although Kügler does not frame it as such. The closest Kügler comes to this is in his explanation of the relation between sense and the singular (virtual) problematic actualised through/as expression (sense):

the idea is a problem, and the problem is a set of questions. Strictly speaking, ‘The problem is a set of questions’ is a kind of slogan that we may use for the sake of convenience. It would be more precise to say that the problem is an entity in its own right whose various parts or aspects can be grasped by asking appropriate questions.

Kügler continues the explanation in related footnotes:

The term ‘event’ belongs to this list, too, as sense is said to be ‘an incorporeal, complex, and irreducible entity, at the surface of things, a pure event which inheres or subsists in the proposition’ (Deleuze 2004b: 22). Another ‘surface entity’ is the concept, which ‘speaks the event’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 21). ‘All concepts are connected to problems without which they would have no meaning [sens]’ (16). Except that concepts are supposed to be solutions of problems, they have much in common with the latter. In particular, they are ‘not propositional’ (22). To keep the discussion simpler, however, I refrain from considering these notions of event and concept. I will reserve the word ‘concept’ for Ryle who uses it for a linguistic entity.

As indicated in the previous note, sense inheres or subsists, but does not exist. Furthermore, it is a dual entity on the border between world and language: ‘It is rather the coexistence of two sides without thickness, such that we pass from one to the other by following their length. Sense is both the expressible or the expressed of the proposition, and the attribute of the state of affairs. It turns one side toward things and one side toward propositions’ (Deleuze 2004b: 25). Thus, sense is something very peculiar, to say the least.

It is fascinating to read Kügler’s analysis as he is clearly far more familiar with Ryle’s work and the tradition of linguistics to which it now (in part) belongs. I’ve also been reading some contemporary engagements from logical epistemologists re-engaging with Ryle’s arguments.

My interest is that I am trying to think through a given situation where ‘know how’ is developed through experience; it is a form of knowledge that actualises a problematic (and in a sense provides a ‘solution’) without becoming explicit as such. In other words, it is knowledge that cannot be expressed in language as a proposition in any normative sense. ‘Know how’ inheres or subsists through bodies-in-action (or as Massumi might argue bodies-in-motion), and can be ‘read’ by others who can appreciate the ‘know how’ in terms of an embodied/material/machinic regime of signification (or what Deleuze and Guattari, and in particular Guattari, call a-signifying semiotics). Theorists of organisational studies have grappled with this problem in terms of ‘tacit knowledge’ (following Michael Polanyi).

What is interesting in terms of Ryle’s account, and what most contemporary readers of Ryle’s argue is incorrect, is that every form of ‘knowing that’ requires ‘knowing how’ too. From my Deleuzian perspective, this is uncontroversial. It basically means that there is a situationally specific emergent dimension to all knowledge. Kügler explains he does not want to engage with the ontological dimensions of Deleuze’s argument, which means this ontogenetic part of Deleuze’s concept of sense (or as I am extrapolating it into knowledge) is not engaged with. I argue that ‘knowing that’ requires the production of ‘know how’ (however miniscule) as an apprehension of any given situation and this is developed in experience. From apprehension to application and the ‘possibilization’ (cf Massumi) of a field of virtual singularities. From application to the expression of what most people would recognise as ‘know how’ and the reconfiguring of the habitus belonging to the subject of ‘know-how’. ‘Know-how’ inheres or subsists in bodies(-in-action) in the same way ‘sense’ inheres or subsists in propositions.

To a certain extent, all this seems a little bit obvious. Except when it comes to the question of signification, as the transmission of ‘know-how’ is a special problem if it necessarily belongs to ‘tacit knowledge’ and cannot be codified in conventional ways. Then the rather laborious path through a complex appreciation of experience described above becoms very useful. My article directly tackles this problem as the first step in a genealogy of ‘know-how’.

The very ‘drafty’ abstract starts after the paragraph below. First paragraph locates this draft abstract in a much larger research project. Comments, critique, feedback, etc welcome.

The research paper I am currently working on is titled ‘Towards an archaeology of know how’. Derived in part from my PhD research, I am shifting the focus from enthusiasm to the forms of tacit experience-based knowledge produced by enthusiasts and how this ‘know how’ circulates. The ‘Towards…’ paper is for publication in a special issue of the Cultural Studies Review due out next year. It will serve as a draft version of the first chapter in a book on ‘An Archaeology of Know How’. I am currently carrying out research in three or four other ‘chapter oriented’ areas of research interest. One is researching the early colonial era of Australian history to produce an account of colonial economies of knowledge. This is an experiment in rethinking questions of national identity organised around the creative capacity to produce knowledge and has so far proved very interesting. At least two or three other chapters shall explore know how, popular culture and enthusiast media from the early 20th century until the advent of ‘social media’. One will focus on the massification in the circulation of ‘know how’ in the early 20th century, another the emergence of popular cultures of enthusiast-based economies of ‘know how’ in the mid-20th, and lastly the transition from print-based media forms — largely magazines — to web-based mechanisms for the distribution of ‘know how’. I am thinking this last area would serve as a good topic for the upcoming CODE conference at Swinburne. Below is the beginning of a draft abstract:

I lived through this transition in the car scene of Australia from magazines to email lists to discussion forums to blogs/websites/entire specialist social media platforms. A genealogy of ‘know how’ requires a process of teasing out the multiple layers of socio-technical systems that have complex and overlapping durations. This is a baroque architecture of experiences that are contracted into habit and system design. The creation of ‘know how’ means that design becomes a condition of actual — rather than possible — experience. ‘Know how’ is concerned with the ad hoc performative knowledges that are born of experience and which gain teleological currency as part of a material aesthetics and semiotics of functionality.

De Certeau famously suggested that ‘know how’ was a form of knowledge that could not be represented in discourse. To the extent the knowledge itself cannot be represented, De Certeau is correct. ‘Know how’ can be distributed through media, however, by implicating potential subjects of ‘know how’ in the events of experience through which they will develop the embodied dimensions of the knowledge. The media representation is of the conditions of actual experience (most commonly systems that belong to mass-produced commodities) that can serve as the necessarily elements to catalyse such experiences that result in the development of ‘know how’. ‘Development’ in the sense a photo print is developed.

The classic example of this is the ‘How to’ article that leads potential subjects of ‘know how’ through the processual steps of engaging with a socio-technical system. The ‘How to’ article has a weird temporality as it is captures future experiences by providing the conditions of past experience(s) that are nevertheless repeated in different ways. What is represented is ‘this’ practice of engaging with ‘that’ technical system, but what circulates is the ‘how’ of the knowledge developed through the experience of doing ‘this’ to ‘that’.

The print-based magazine has been the dominant mode of distributing know for that last 70 years. Examples. The online web-based mechanisms for the distribution of ‘know how’ have largely replaced the print-based enthusiast magazine. Examples. How to think about this transition? Print-based magazine as abstract machine with different functions. The abstract machine of the enthusiast magazine has been separated and distributed across multiple platforms in different ways. Examples, something.

There has been an explosion in the ways media-based designers think about their task as producing ‘experiences’ rather than negotiating through different design-based modes of representation and correlative concepts such as ideology, identity, and so on. A semiotics of functionality is required to grasp the conditions of experience. Examples, something. The question of agency is paramount here as it seems most popular acounts of experience-based design (‘UX’) are actually oriented around obfuscating the teleology of experience, so the ‘know how’ is of a functionality that the subject does not necessarily want, but what the designer has been paid to produce. Something.