The book they lost

Stories are living creatures. They, as our children, emerge through human flesh - in recent times through technologies as well. Although they emerge distinctively different from what we usually accept as living creatures, books share features that does, seen as were they the entire picture, provide convincing evidence that we should treat them as living creatures. The reason being that the way human beings relates to books resemble the way we relate to children in some very unique and important ways.

We have a habit of speaking of stories as were they some immaterial intangible "something-out-there-in-the-world-but-I-don't-quite-understand-it"-phenomena. Academic researchers holding high positions in the champion's league of research institutions worldwide have spent incredible amounts on theorizing stories in disciplines known as "literature studies", "linguistics", "theories of language", "narratology", and so forth. Disturbingly close to everyone of these distinguished ladies and gentlemen reach the same general conclusion: Stories are intangible, they are made of some stuff that is impossible to trace with technologies currently known and available. Then they go on to (and I try to catch up) discussing how we can develop a vocabulary that enables us to at least talk about what they are. I fail to catch up because I am stalled by what appears, per intuition, to be a revelation of common sense: Time has come to end this shift our focus and begin taking seriously the fact that lost from sight in the intangibility-debates went some important and disturbing reasons for treating our stories as we treat our children.

In the book they lost I drew the first examinations of the combined concepts of "stories" and "children".

Continuation

Almost two years have passed since the last time I posted here. What happened while I was gone?

Too many things for me to tell about. Most of them very irrelevant, too. This continuation does not really have to do with what happened in the time between the previous post and this post.

Actually, this post has nothing more to tell. It is merely the continuation.

Reading Studies

In an interview contained in The Haraway Reader, Donna Haraway touches the subject of those technological actors that work inside and through human and nonhuman bodies in academic practices (among others). She refers to concepts like "thinking technologies", "cognitive technologies", "the material practices of category formation and category manipulation", and "re-tooling of inherited category formation skills".

As is true or much of what I do in terms of knowledge production within the academic field I belong to, the entering of above mentioned ideas into my body has created some activity of that relentlessly irrational and non-linear kind that challenges the technologies available for delivering academic knowledge, especially the academic language and the writing genre that has become tradition in my field.

The first time I recall using the ideas of thinking technologies was in an exam paper made for an introductory course about science and technology-studies. Here I dealt with language as an information technology, discussing the distinction made by Bruno Latour between machines and language in Where are the Missing Masses? I aimed at developing a way of treating words as material phenomena which are more than just the word "words". I provided a thought experiment in which two researchers were to deliver a specific word from one place to another. I placed researcher A in a laboratory in the city of Århus, equipped with a pen, a piece of paper, and a research assistant. Then I made A recall the word the two researchers agreed upon using prior to the execution of the experiment. He then wrote down the word onto the piece of paper, and handed it over to his research assistant, who - by means of a mobile phone, sent a text message to another research assistant located in the city of Copenhagen in a laboratory with researcher B. Upon receiving the SMS from assistant A, he reads the message aloud to researcher B. Researcher B then compared the word received from assistant B to the chosen word and conclude that the word did in fact make it from Århus to Copenhagen through several links.

I created this thought experiment in order to show how a word materializes in a variety of ways throughout the process. It appears as sound waves exiting the body of one human and entering through the perception apparatus of another human. It appears as peculiar waves moving through different technological bodies, beginning and ending with mobile phones. And it appears as ink on a piece of paper. These phenomena are definitely not identical, yet they all posses the power of delivering a message in a way that renders it possible for human beings to experience the concept of "communication".

Also, the simple chain shows how not only humans are active participants in human society. It may be true that a human instructed the mobile phone to deliver the sms to a specific phone number possessed by another human being, but it is at the same time true that a mobile phone, a non human actor, was the immediate "person" who instructed assistant B in what word to say to researcher B.

What I may have achieved is to show how words are material phenomena. However, the experimental environment provided deems it difficult to derive more information from that story. That is the key leading on to the role of language as an information technology and the title of this entry, Reading Studies.

Writing and reading are two activities that researchers spend a lot of time on while working. Feminist researchers have used writing as experimental fields in which they attempted to write themselves into the fact that the field of science is not separated from society, but rather a part of this society, applying to social rules as is true of any other part. However, they concentrated mainly on writing. Donna Haraway deals with how written text is being produced in non-sterile surroundings; Laurel Richardson has proposed using writing as a method of inquiry; Helene Cixous (insert accents yourself, please) has dealt, through writing, with understanding why she started writing in the first place.

I would like to shift to the activity of reading. Writing would be a rather absurd activity were there nobody to read the writings afterwards. So, what is reading? How is reading produced, and how does it contribute to the production of knowledge? These are questions that I have now drawn the ideas of thinking technologies and the re-tooling of our inherited category formation skills into.

My current interest lies in developing a method of studying reading as a situated practice in a way that is deliverable into writing in a way that creates an empircal research field in which thinking technologies can be studied along with other co-producers of the text currently at hand. So on the one hand I wish to direct attention toward reading as an activity that should be studied as situated practice rather than being understood as a rational phenomenon in terms of eye scanning techniques and optimized reading speed. Rather, reading should be understood as a participant in knowledge production and be seen as part of this ensemble of sociotechnical co-producers which is often solely being accredited to the human author of the written end product.

On the other hand I wish to develop a method for transforming the academic text into an explorative research field which may be examined for information not only about the academic subject of the text, but also for information about how the provided knowledge came into being and continues to transform as it enters the body of the reader and meets other peculiar technological bodies within the human flesh.