ArgumentThis paper is the first part of a two-part examination of computer modeling practice and philosophy. It discusses electrical engineer Jay Forrester's work on Industrial Dynamics, later called System Dynamics. Forrester developed Industrial Dynamics after being recruited to the newly-established School of Industrial Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which had been seeking a novel pedagogical program for management for five years before Forrester's arrival. We argue that Industrial Dynamics should be regarded in light of this institutional context. (...) Unlike economics, as well as operations research and management science (twin fields which were also gaining traction at that time), Industrial Dynamics was not meant to be applied by mathematicians and technical specialists in consultation with managers, but by managers themselves. This concern shifted the emphasis in modeling from the specialist act of analysis of a crucial problem to the managerial act of choosing which problems were crucial and developing effective policies around them. (shrink)

A number of writers have picked out the way knowledge in the human sciences reflexively alters the human subject as what separates these sciences from the natural sciences. Furthermore, they take this reflexivity to be a condition of moral existence. The article sympathetically examines this emphasis on reflexive processes, but it rejects the particular conclusion that the reflexive phenomenon enables us to demarcate the human sciences. The first sections analyse the different meanings that references to reflexivity have in the psychological (...) and social sciences, in philosophy and in material life, and they link these meanings to the post-positivist philosophy of the social sciences. The discussion considers the problems raised (most influentially in the human sciences by Foucault) by being reflexive about reflexivity itself. They put a large question mark against hopes for a revived philosophical anthropology. Whatever the philosophical arguments, however, there is clearly a reflexive practice in the humanities and human sciences which there is not in the natural sciences. This leads to the argument that there are different forms of knowledge for different purposes and that it may therefore be divergence of purpose, not reflexivity itself, that creates differences among the sciences. It is the fact and purpose of human self-reflection that marks out the human sciences. If this is so, then it explains why an apparently circumscribed question about the classification of knowledge turns out to be inseparable from ontological and moral questions about human identity. (shrink)

The paper consists of a reflexive exercise in which Herbert Simon's views concerning science are applied to his own research. It argues that what connected his ventures into so many different disciplinary domains was a search for complex, hierarchical systems. In the process, the paper establishes a close connection between Simon's insights and his focus on simulation. Instead of simulating Simon on a computer, though, it simulates Simon on paper. This exercise is then contrasted with Simon's own attempts to simulate (...) science. This comparison leads to a reflexive evaluation of Simon's simulations. (shrink)

: This paper discusses how Herbert Simon's initial interest in decision making became transformed into a focus on understanding human problem solving in response to the concrete conditions of the Cold War and the practical goals of the military. In particular, it suggests a connection between the seachange in Simon's interest and his shift in patronage. As a result, Simon is portrayed as a component of the scientific-military World War II cyborg that further evolved during the Cold War. Moving from (...) decision making to problem solving, Simon's cyborg science not only required large sums of money, but also managed to acquire these. (shrink)

This paper suggests that the imbrication of user-friendly software and the posthuman has increasingly been revealed as an intrinsically arborescent relationship, one premised upon the striation of personal information through different forms of software media and allowing for unprecedented avenues of control and subjective manipulation. My analysis begins with a conceptualisation of user-friendliness, tracing its development as the majoritarian style of software design. In assessing the effects of this process of subjective imbrication with arborescent software technology, it is suggested that (...) one effect of the pathological asignification of instrumentality in the representation of software is the genesis of a topological space which allows for a capacity for control over the subjective becoming of others through control over digitally mediated perception. To illustrate this point, the revelations concerning Cambridge Analytica's use of targeted advertisements on Facebook to affect voting preferences during the 2016 American presidential election are examined as an example of the quotidian domination which is characteristic of the subjective condition of arbormosis. This analysis can be applied to issues of gender, technology, and modes of subjective control. (shrink)

It was originally suggested that the Anthropocene began in 1784, the date of James Watt’s patent for the rotative steam engine. Patent dates are interesting artefacts. They owe their existence to the chronopoietic technique of patent jurisprudence, which generates temporal sequences out of synchronous states of knowledge. This may not be geological time, but it informs the experience of time that is proper to the culture whose deposits of Pu-239 now mark the onset of the Anthropocene. Patent jurisprudence makes a (...) crucial contribution to what might be called the ethos of the Anthropocene: the sense of society as having an inexhaustible capacity for innovation, for endless self-renewal. And, as it turns out, the steam engine yields some interesting insights into this mode of enchantment. (shrink)

(1997). Sociology of knowledge and the sociology of scientific knowledge. Social Epistemology: Vol. 11, New Directions in the Sociology of Knowledge, pp. 187-192.

This Common Knowledge guest column concerns performance, understood in its simple ur-sense of “doing things” in the world. It continues the author's analysis, in his book The Mangle of Practice, of cultural evolution as a “dance of agency”: a performative, decentered, and emergent back-and-forth between a multiplicity of actors, variously human and nonhuman. The author's concern in this new essay is with apparently stable and dependable technologies, such as cars, computers, and power stations, which he conceptualizes here as “islands of (...) stability” in the flux of becoming. On islands of stability, Cartesian dualism is simply true: humanity achieves command over entities that reliably serve our will. Still, while our worlds are built on them, their stability is not complete. To remain on islands of stability requires continual constructive work, and sometimes we fall off them anyway, with disastrous results, for stability is necessarily accompanied by performative excess. The performative analysis of islands of stability cuts humanity down to size and puts us in our place. (shrink)

: This essay addresses the difficulties that sociology as a discipline continues to experience in grasping the relations between technology, science and the social. I argue that these difficulties stem from a resolute centering of sociology on the social, which follows a generically Durkheimian blueprint. I elaborate a response to these difficulties which derives from recent lines of work in science and technology studies, and which entails a decentering of the social relative to the material and the conceptual, in terms (...) of both objects of analysis and explanatory formats. In order to display the direct sociological relevance of this approach, I move to the macro level, developing the conceptual apparatus of a decentered social theory via the discussion of a historical example of major sociological significance—the systematic gearing together of scientific research, technological innovation and industrial production that originated in the synthetic dye industry in the second half of the nineteenth century. Besides the interest of the topic itself, the aim is thus to exemplify in some detail what a decentered sociology might look like, both empirically and conceptually. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Asian Eels and Global Warming:A Posthumanist Perspective on Society and the EnvironmentAndrew Pickering (bio)My idea in this essay is to talk about how some recent developments in my field—science and technology studies—might pass over into environmental studies. In particular, I want to talk about a certain posthumanist perspective, as I call it, on the relation between people and things, because I think that it transfers nicely from thinking about (...) people and machines to thinking about people and the environment.1 I want to say in advance that while the word 'posthumanist' might sound a bit peculiar, the posthumanist perspective is straightforward enough. If scholars have taken a long time to arrive it, the difficulty lies, I believe, in a disciplinary division of labor rather than in any intrinsic incomprehensibility. And I can start with a few general remarks about that.The basic point to note is that the academic disciplines carve up the visible world in a systematic way. On the one hand, the natural sciences, engineering, and so on, like to talk about a world of things from which people are notably absent. This is clear in fields like physics and chemistry, but it is probably true enough in the environmental sciences, too. Human beings might disturb ecosystems, say, but the job of the ecologist [End Page 29] is to understand the systems themselves, not the disturbances. The social sciences and humanities, in contrast, like to talk about people but not about things. Durkheimian sociology is a great example. Durkheim insisted that the social was a separate reality, sui generis, and that the social therefore has its own pure dynamics, cut off from, say, the material world.We find, then, a beautiful disciplinary dualism: to the harder sciences goes the world of things; to the softer sciences goes the world of people. What about the interface of people and things, the zone of intersection? This is of no concern to the hard sciences: one can easily imagine the world of things going on without people. But what about the soft sciences? One can't really imagine a world of people without things. Here various maneuvers have traditionally served to maintain the humanist purity of disciplines like sociology; I will just mention one. We encounter the material world, it is said, not in its raw state (as studied by physicists or ecologists, say) but as drenched in meaning. The world means something, or many different things, to us. And the point to note is that 'meaning' functions here as a cut-off, a circuit-breaker. Meanings are in our heads and in society; they are not in the material world. So, sociologists can go ahead and study the meanings that people attach to machines or nature without encroaching on the territory of the hard sciences, and the disciplinary division of labor, enshrined in the universities since the 19th century, can live on. The social sciences are about the human meanings of, or attitudes towards, machines, the environment, or whatever; the hard sciences are about things in themselves. That is the basic split that I want to focus on in what follows—actually, to undo it. But I can quickly mention one further twist for the sake of clarity.The basic split between meanings and things-in-themselves is an index of a certain realism—a bow from the soft sciences to the harder sciences, an acknowledgment that the latter somehow gets things right and that what the soft sciences study is a soggy social residue. But some social scientists have refused to bend the knee. They argue that we are all humans, even hard scientists. Therefore we can never get beyond meanings. And therefore we should think of the material world as itself somehow constructed in social practice. The harder sciences find this view absurd, but it is manifest in a split in the social sciences between 'realists' [End Page 30] and 'constructivists'—a split which shows up in many places, including geography and environmental studies. The point I would stress, however, is that the social retains its purity, even in social constructivism—it is simply that there 'the social' expands without limit to encompass... (shrink)

This article situates the emergence of cybernetic concepts in postwar French thought within a longer history of struggles surrounding the technocratic reform of French universities, including Marcel Mauss’s failed efforts to establish a large-scale centre for social-scientific research with support from the Rockefeller Foundation, the intellectual and administrative endeavours of Claude Lévi-Strauss during the 1940s and 1950s, and the rise of communications research in connection with the Centre d’Études des Communications de Masse (CECMAS). Although semioticians and poststructuralists used cybernetic discourse (...) critically and ironically, I argue that their embrace of a ‘textocratic’ perspective – that is, a theory of power and epistemology as tied to technical inscription – sustained elements of the technocratic reasoning dating back to these 1920s efforts to reform French universities. (shrink)

This article analyzes US drone operations through a historical and ethnographic analysis of the remote split paradigm used by the US Air Force. Remote split refers to the globally distributed command and control of drone operations and entails a network of human operators and analysts in the Middle East, Europe, and Southeast Asia as well as in the continental United States. Though often viewed as a teleological progression of “unmanned” warfare, this paper argues that historically specific technopolitical logics establish the (...) conditions of possibility for the work of war to be divisible into discreet and computationally mediated tasks that are viewed as effective in US military engagements. To do so, the article traces how new forms of authorized evidence and expertise have shaped developments in military operations and command and control priorities from the Cold War and the “electronic battlefield” of Vietnam through the Gulf War and the conflict in the Balkans to contemporary deployments of drone operations. The article concludes by suggesting that it is by paying attention to divisions of labor and human–machine configurations that we can begin to understand the everyday and often invisible structures that sustain perpetual war as a military strategy of the United States. (shrink)