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February 20, 2005

Donald Norman - "Why Interfaces Don't Work"

Norman, Donald. "Why Interfaces Don't Work" in The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design. Brenda Laurel (editor). Addision-Wesley. 1992. 209-219.

Notes:

"The real problem with the interface is that it is an interface. Interfaces get in the way. I don't want to focus my energies on an interface. I want to focus on the job" (210).

"What are computers for? The user, that's what - making life easier for the user" (217).

The bulk of this article focuses on how interfaces are problematic and how the computer is a terrible tool because it can be used for so much and doesn't specialize in anything particular. He talks about how game consoles are better for users because of their specialized nature.

Product design priorities (217):
1) The user - what does that person really need to have accomplished?
2) The task - analyze the task. How best can the job be done?, taking into account the whole setting in which it is embedded, including the other tasks to be accomplished, the social setting, the people, and the organization.
3) As much as possible, make the task dominate; make the tools invisible.
4) Then, get the interaction right...

Personal opinion:

Norman and i don't share the same opinion on interfaces. I do believe that they currently get in the way, but not for the same reasons. Our main site of disagreement concerns the task.

The bulk of my computer use is not task-oriented - i spend an absurd amount of time futzing, communicating or surfing. I would argue that i'm not in the minority, particularly of consumer users.

For me, it's great that i use the same device to communicate, surf information and write papers - it allows me to multitask in a meaningful way. I don't _want_ specialized devices for communicating and writing papers - i value the ability to procrastinate my paper by communicating with others (otherwise known as collaboration). What i love the most about the computer is its flexibility and the ability that i have to repurpose it over time and given a particular context.

The computer is not simply a tool that i approach with a task. It is a place AND a space and i enter it for its flexibility, just as i enter a cafe for its flexibility. If i could only go to a cafe to talk to people, i would rarely go. Instead, i go to work and complement my working with social interaction. Fantastic.

That said, i'm not a huge fan of most interface. Then again, i'm not a huge fan of the architecture of most cafes - they're simply not conducive for the diversity of uses i want. But this isn't because i don't want interfaces, bodies or architectures - they're all the site of performativity that allows me to interact with them. And they all affect the kinds of interaction that i want to have.

Interfaces affect the task and that's part of the point. Consider the differences in blogging styles that emerge from people who use Typepad interfaces vs. Blogger vs. LiveJournal - three different textbox styles and three different outcomes - the interface matters - it's not something that can simply go away.

Category: HCI

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February 13, 2005

Nancy Fraser - "Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy"

Fraser, Nancy. 1992. "Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy" in Habermas and the Public Sphere (Craig Calhoun, ed.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 109-142.

Notes:

In this essay, Fraser seeks to problematize Habermas' notion of 'public space'. She views this as necessary in order for critical theory to actually deal with the public because "Habermas's concept of the public sphere provides a way of circumventing some confusions that have plagued progressive social movements and the political theories associated with them" [109] in part because of a tendency for socialist progressives to conflate issues like the state apparatus and the public sphere.

By referring to "private" as "everything that is outside of the domestic or familial sphere," Habermas conflates "the state, the official economy of paid employment, and arenas of public discourse" [110]. This is in part because he primarily views the public sphere simply as a "theater in modern societies in which political participation is enacted through the medium of talk" [110].

In section 2, Fraser offers an exceptionally cogent overview of Habermas, so much so that i must repeat it here:

According to Habermas, the idea of a public sphere is that of a body of "private persons" assembled to discuss matters of "public concern" or "common interest." This idea acquired force and reality in early modern Europe in the constitution of "bourgeois public spheres" as counterweights to absolutist states. These publics aimed to mediate between society and the state by holding the state accountable to society via publicity. At first this meant requiring that information about state functioning be made accessible so that state activities would be subject to critical scrutiny and the force of public opinion. Later it meant transmitting the considered "general interest" of "bourgeois society" to the state via forms of legally guaranteed free speech, free press, and free assembly, and eventually through the parliamentary institutions of representative government.

Thus at one level the idea of the public sphere designated an institutional mechanism for rationalizing political domination by rendering states accountable to (some of) the citizenry. At another level, it designated a specific kind of discursive interaction. here the public sphere connoted an ideal of unrestricted rational discussion of public matters. The discussion was to be open and accessible to all, merely private interests were to be inadmissible, inequalities of status were to be bracketed, and discussants were to deliberate as peers. The result of such discussion would be public opinion in the strong sense of a consensus about the common good.

According to Habermas, the full utopian potential of the bourgeois conception of the public sphere was never realized in practice. The claim to open access in particular was not made good. Moreover, the bourgeois conception of the public sphere was premised on a social order in which the state was sharply differentiated from the newly privatized market economy; it was this clear separation of society and state that was supposed to underpin a form of public discussion that excluded "private interests." But these conditions eventually eroded as non-bourgeois strata gained access to the public sphere. Then "the social question" came to the fore, society was polarized by class struggle, and the public fragmented into a mass of competing interest groups. Street demonstrations and back room, brokered compromises among private interests replaced reasoned public debate about the common good. Finally, with the emergence of welfare-state mass democracy, society and the state became mutually intertwined; publicity in the sense of critical scrutiny of the state gave way to public relations, mass-mediated staged displays and the manufacture and manipulation of public opinion. [112-113]

Fraser's next turn is to complicate Habermas' account.

Scholars have argued that Habermas' account "idealizes the liberal public sphere" even though "the official public sphere rested on, indeed was importantly constituted by, a number of significant exclusions" [113] (namely race, gender, property ownership). The public sphere was really a way for bourgeois men to see themselves as "a 'universal class' and preparing to assert their fitness to govern" [114]. Of course, they were successful in that the norms of the public sphere eventually became "hegemonic, sometimes imposed on, sometimes embraced by, broader segments of society" [115]. "A discourse of publicity touting accessibility, rationality, and the suspension of status hierarchies is itself deployed as a strategy of distinction" [115].

By marking the domestic sphere as private, they were able to exclude issues central to women. "The view that women were excluded from the public sphere turns out to be ideological; it rests on a class- and gender-biased notion of publicity, one which accepts at face value the bourgeois public's claim to be the public. In fact, ... the bourgeois public was never the public" [116]. "The relations between bourgeois publics and other publics were always conflictual... [they] deliberately sought to block broader participation... the public sphere was always constituted by conflict" [116]. In essence, "we can no longer assume that the bourgeois conception of the public sphere was simply an unrealized utopian ideal; it was also a masculinist ideological notion that functioned to legitimate an emergent form of class rule" [116].

There's, in fact a "Gramscian moral from the story: the official bourgeois public sphere is the institutional vehicle for a major historical transformation in the nature of political domination. ... The official public sphere, then, was, and indeed is, the prime institutional site for the construction of the consent that defines the new hegemonic mode of domination" [117]. !!!!

Fraser's next move is to articulate four assumptions that are central to Habermas' "bourgeois, masculinist conception of the public sphere" [117-118]:

  1. The assumption that it is possible for interlocutors in a public sphere to bracket status differentials and to deliberate as if they were social equals; the assumption, therefore, that societal equality is not a necessary condition for political democracy
  2. The assumption that the proliferation of a multiplicity of competing publics is necessarily a step away from, rather than toward, greater democracy, and that a single, comprehensive public sphere is always preferable to a nexus of multiple publics
  3. The assumption that discourse in public spheres should be restricted to the deliberation about the common good, and that the appearance of private interests and private issues is always undesirable
  4. The assumption that a functioning democratic public sphere requires a sharp separation between civil society and the state

The remainder of the essay convincingly defends these observations.

On #1. People are impeded from participating and "deliberation can serve as a mask for domination" [119]. Furthermore, efforts to turn the 'i' into the 'we' homogenize and subordinate groups are often disempowered by not having the proper voice [119]. "Social inequalities can infect deliberation, even in the absence of any formal exclusions" [119]. Given that inequalities affect, there's no way to have participatory parity; the only way to achieve this is the elimination of systemic social inequalities [121].

On #2. "In stratified societies, arrangements that accommodate contestation among a plurality of competing publics better promote the ideal of participatory parity than does a single, comprehensive, overarching public" [122]. "In stratified societies, subaltern counterpublics have a dual character. On the one hand, they function as spaces of withdrawal and regroupment; on the other hand, they also function as bases and training groups for agitational activities directed toward wider publics" [124]. "In stratified societies the discursive relations among differentially empowered publics are as likely to take the form of contestation as that of deliberation" [125].

"Since there can be no such lens that is genuinely culturally neutral, [one public] would effectively privilege the expressive norms of one cultural group over others and thereby make discursive assimilation a condition for participation in public debate... [resulting in] the demise of multiculturalism and ... social equality" [126]. Multiple publics is necessary.

On #3. Public often refers to: "1) state-related, 2) accessible to everyone, 3) concern to everyone, and 4) pertaining to a common good or shared interest" while private refers to "5) pertaining to private property in a market economy and 6) pertaining to intimate domestic or personal life, including sexual life" [128]. But things like common concern can only be decided by the participants. For example, domestic violence was considered private until women, as a separate public, demanded that the broader public make it a concern to them. It's hard to find a common good and it's not something that is known on the outset which means that it shouldn't be structured. Public/private are not obvious words - they are "cultural classifications and rhetorical labels" [131]. Notions of private are usually used to restrict, to keep people out and to keep their (special) interests out. In other words, private in a common public is usually used to maintain hegemony.

On #4. "Laissez-faire capitalism does not foster socioeconomic equality and that some form of politically regulated economic reorganization and redistribution is needed to achieve that end" [133]. The assumption is that the public would become the state, but in fact, it should be conceived as a counterweight to it - "a critical discursive check" [134]. This would be lost if the public became the state.

Category: anthropology, privacy

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February 12, 2005

Rebecca Schneider - "Hello Dolly Well Hello Dolly: The Double and Its Theatre"

Schneider, Rebecca. 2001. "Hello Dolly Well Hello Dolly: The Double and Its Theatre" in Psycho-analysis and Performance edited by Patrick Campbell and Adrian Kear. New York: Routledge.


Notes:

By juxtaposing Dolly (the sheep clone) with theatrical notions of the 'double', Schneider seeks to expose our fears around cloning, namely that it challenges patriarchy at a core. "This is the fearful potential that the copy will, in the case of clones, literally become the original... The copy will re-place the original even as it founds an original, backward, as having come first" [103]. This calls for a "radical acknowledgment of an insight generally repressed in the name of phallogentrism, that the original is always already mediated, that is, inscribed backward - a (fictional or secondary) effect of mediation. We might be forced to acknowledge, in other words, that the original becomes itself through repetition (disavowed), just as repetition (disavowed) becomes the original" [103].

"The clone becomes a terrifying and feminized body present as the should-be-lost past, a living remain - an oxymoron like an archive of the mother - the father not as dead, but as alive, and born of mimesis" [111]. "If real life is a matter of memory, then the threatening irony of the clone is that it copies our copying too precisely - it 'travels back in time' to become itself" [110].

The power of cloning is that it "adds emphasis by noting an emphasis already there but not acknowledged, indeed disavowed" [98-99]. In other words, the clone challenges the significance of the original, of the root.

In a patriarchal society, the root is the father - "father as original" [103]. Cloning disrupts the hierarchy of fathers because a clone would not be 'true' as it would not have the same father [107]. "The problem with the clone is that the old original/copy divide is threatened not simply by wiggy performance artists, cyber-celebrating computer geeks, or worse smithy theorists - but the threat comes from the antiseptic halls of the laboratory with, as Probio America declared, 'commercial reality' just around the corner" [111]. In other words, the threat comes from the very crux of masculine power. There is a "fear of mimesis, or a feminized realm of replication itself, where Origins are fictions, or if not complete fictions then proton pseudoi, or 'first lies,' and Foundations are outed as performative re-foundations" [103].

All along, theatre has been struggling with the implications of cloning, of doubling. Artists have sought to make "the copy explicitly, again and again beside itself, indeed touching itself... [to recover] the intrinsic queer appeal of a mass-cultural representation which would otherwise disavow the presence of its (admiring) gay male audience" [98]. In other words, artistic doubling shows the problem of the 'original' by forcing situations where one must reflect and recognize the shift in power that occurs with such doubling. "The clone functions to remark 'emphasis in original' and press acknowledgment of what has otherwise been a subject of refusal" [101].

"To parody parody - but that is perhaps part of the clonal point, where appropriation becomes strangely original" [100]. Self-replicas, doubling doubling, parodies on parodies - all of this has been used to expose the underlying assumption that this is and should be an original and that this original has the authentic aura and that authenticity is essential.

Category: performance studies

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Philip Auslander - "Tryin' to Make it Real"

Auslander, Philip. 1999. "Tryin' to Make it Real" in Performance in a Mediatized Culture . Routledge, 61-111.

Notes:

This essay tracks the the tension between performance and recording in relation to 'authenticity.' "Rock authenticity resides in a dialectical relationship between recording and live performance" [95]. "I am suggesting that the determination of rock authenticity cannot be made on the basis of either visual or aural evidence alone, but only by considering both, and the relationship of one to the other in light of other knowledge the listener brings to bear" [76].

I should note before i proceed that i have issues with this essay. First, i think that the key factor that generates 'authenticity' in music is missing - social networks a.k.a. "friends." It is referenced briefly (and dismissed) in relation to going to concerts with friends.

Authenticity in music is discussed explicitly in "Club Cultures" by Thornton (preceeds Auslander's book) and does a better job of handling that tension, although does not have the depth of this essay.

Additionally, i think that, frankly, rock is dead. Although Auslander deals with the MTVification, he doesn't deal with what 'alternative' did to rock. Post-alternative, rock fragmented so exceptionally that the only thing that is 'rock' is that which doesn't fit into one of many different subgenres. These subgenres have magnified the authenticity argument and because of their smaller sectioning, they have actually pulled in authenticity notions from punk - small shows, authenticity in fandom, "culture" of bands. Rock is no longer resistant in any of its forms (although indie rock, rap rock, etc. ...) -> MTV has pushed this, marking hip hop and rap rock (i.e. Linkin Park) as the new resistance.

Also, there's no discussion about how rock has always been in a precarious relationship with the production of blackness / badness. Even white artists in rock are often discussed in terms of blackness. And this is a lot of the difference of what is rock and what is pop.

Auslander is basically taking a path down the (de)valuations of live performance, recognizing that a primary purpose is to promote record sales [64]. "Only in live performance that the listener can ascertain that a group that looks authentic in photographs, and sound authentic on records, really is authentic in terms of rock ideology" [78].

Recordings are meant to sound real, performances are meant to sound like records. "Rock fan knows that recordings are representations but hears them as reproductions nevertheless" [65] "Because it is well known within rock culture that the sound is manufactured in the recording studio, the visual aspects of rock music performance do not work merely as a secondary confirmation of authenticity established primarily in the rock sound" [79]

"Authenticity can be heard in the music, yet is an effect not just of the music itself but also of prior musical and extra-musical knowledge and beliefs; that what counts as authentic varies among musical genres and subgenres" [66].

Issues around authenticity:
- Exclusionary [70]
- romantic bent where "rock music is imagined to be truly expressive of the artists' souls and psyches, and is necessarily politically and culturally oppositional [70]
- authenticity is deeply connected to anti-commodification and populism [70]
- effect of spontaneity, amplified sounds, american accents, aggressive vocal inflections and masculine performance [70-71]
- performative [72]
- balance of resistance and sympathies of entertainment business [73]

Authenticity is usually treated as essentialist, but Auslander is interested in the ideological concept and discursive effect [70].

"Rock musicians achieve and maintain their effect of authenticity by continuously citing in their music and performance styles the norms of authenticity for their particular rock subgenre and historical moment, and these norms change along with changes in the prevailing discourse of authenticity" [72]

Auslander argues that "rock listeners do visualize the musicians while listening to recordings" [74] - DO THEY???? Or do they visualize the MTV image?

"Listeners steeped in rock ideology are tolerant of studio manipulation only to the extent that they know or believe that the resulting sound can be reproduced on teh stage by the same performers. When that belief is substantiated, the music is authenticated. When it is shown (or even strongly suspected) to be false, the music is condemned to inauthenticity" [82] REALLY????

Auslander moves to Baudrillard and Benjamin.

"The aura must be seen as existing between the recording and the live performance. The aura is located in a dialectical relation between two cultural objects - the recording and the live performance - rather than perceived as a property inherent in a single object, and it is from this relation of mutuality that both objects derive their authenticity" [85].

"The dialectic of recordings and live performance central to rock ideology was deprived of its traditional authenticating function. Live concerts would become what recordings had always been: simulations - recreations of performances that never took place, representations without referents in the real" [86]. (UH-OH) "The crucial difference is that now one recording (the video) creates desire for another recording (the album), not for a live performance of the music" [92] "While the video authenticates the sound recording by replicating the live production of the sound, live performance authenticates the video by replicating its images in real space" [308].

"Technologies therefore 'place authenticity and creativity in crisis, not just because of the issue of theft [of musical texts], but through the increasingly automated nature of their mechanisms" [105]

Notes by me: Auslander seems to be using Benjamin and Baudrillard to back up his view that there is a dialectic, positioning them to challenge the technological development. The goal of this essay is clearly to emphasize the importance of presence (liveness) in music authenticity, an argument that Thornton tears apart as being a fantasy at best. It is Bourdieu that can be used to challenge utopian fantasy of presence.

Category: performance studies

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February 11, 2005

Peggy Phelan - "The ontology of performance: representation without reproduction"

Phelan, Peggy. 1993. "The ontology of performance: representation without reproduction" in Unmarked: The Politics of Performance, Routledge: London and New York.

Notes:

"Performance's only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance" [146]

Fundamentally, for Phelan, "The act of writing towards disappearance, rather than the act of writing towards preservation, must remember that the after-effect of disappearance is the experience of subjectivity itself" [148]. She demands an economy "not based on preseration but one which is answerable to the consequences of disappearance" [165].

Phelan is interested in the political act of performance, the ways in which it challenges but also re-inscribes hegemonic structures of power.
- by being nonreproductive, "clogs the smooth machinery of reproductive representation necessary to the circulation of capital" [148]

Performance 1) "implicates the real through the presence of living bodies"; 2) requires consumption; 3) "plunges into visibility - in a maniacally charged present - and disappears into memory" because of lack of copy; 4) offers the "possibility of revaluing that emptiness" [148]

"To acknowledge the Other's (always partial) presence is to acknowledge one's own (always partial) absence" [149].

Performance challenges writing to become performative [149].

Performance is tightly bound to metaphor and metonomy whereby, "metaphor works to secure a vertical hierarchy of value and is reproductive; it works by erasing dissimilarity and negating difference" and "metonymy is additive and associative; it works to secure a horizontal axis of contiguity and displacement" [150]

Phelan uses the work of performance artists to highlight the political element of performance that brings into question presence.

Sophie Calle:

"By placing memories in the place of paintings, Calle asks that the ghosts of memory be seen as equivalent to the 'permanent collection' of 'great works.' One senses that if she asks the same people over and over about the same paintings, each time they would describe a slightly different painting. In this sense, Calle demonstrates the performative quality of all seeing" [147]

"Seeing and memory forget the object itself and enter the subject's own set of personal meanings and associations... forgetting (or stealing) of the object is fundamental energy of its descriptive recovering" [147]

Angelika Festa:

"Appears in order to disappear" [152], "a direct and unmediated Presentation-of-Presence" [162]

"By taking the notion that women are not visible within the dominant narratives of history and the contemporary customs of performance literally, Festa prompts new considerations about the central 'absence' integral to the representation of women in patriarchy. Part of the function of women's absence is to perpetuate and maintain the presence of male desire as desire - an unsatisfied quest" [163-164]

"Festa's performance work underlines the suspension of the female body between teh polarities of presence and absence, and insists that 'the woman' can exist only between these categories of analysis" [164]


Phelan's critique is firmly situated in a feminist approach wile recognizing the performative desires of a feminist critique because "feminist critical writing is an enactment of belief in a better future; the act of writing brings that future closer" [150].

The spectator has dominance, a reality that is often unchecked particularly in American theatre.

Category: performance studies

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February 10, 2005

Derrida - "The Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation"

Derrida, Jacques. "The Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation" In Writing and Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), pp. 232-250.

Notes:

Derrida seeks to define (scope) the theatre of cruelty. He is speaking in direct response to the thoughts of Artaud.

Theatre of cruelty is NOT [243-245]:
- non-sacred theatre
- theatre that privileges speech/verb over the act --> this is simply speech
- abstract theatre
- theatre of alienation
- non-political theatre
- ideological, cultural communicative, interpretive theatre

Theatre of cruelty:
- is about affirmation [232]
- expulses God from the stage, produces a nontheological space [235]
- is not representation, but life itself (to which life is unrepresentable) [234]
- does not allow voyeurism to overcome pure visibility [235]
- theatre of cruel dreams (a.k.a. "absolutely necessary and determined dreams, dreams calculated and given direction... [not] the empirical disorder of spontaneous dreams" [242]) -- law of dreams, not interpretation that must be produced
- takes place one time [247]

Beneath this is a belief that "Theatricality must traverse and restore 'existence' and 'flesh' in each of their aspects.... whatever can be said of the body can be said of theatre" [232].

Cruelty is about recognizing death (and thus life), the point beyond the void. It is about making this active, present, about giving it presence. It is not representation, but life itself whereby "life is the nonrepresentatable origin of representation" [234].

The illusion of representation is that it "creates nothing, has only the illusion of having created" [235].

"The stage will no longer operate as the repetition of a present, will no longer re-present a present that would exist elsewhere and prior to it, a present that would exist elsewhere and prior to it" [237].

The goal is to rid theatre of producing a space that is about absence (representation, interpretation). Visibility and sensibility, not simply representation [238]. Connected to this is the death of the author and director (who is just an artisan of translation anyhow).

"It is less a question of constructing a mute stage than of constructing a stage whose clamor has not yet been pacified into words" [240]

"The subconscious will not play any true rule on stage" [242].

"The theater of cruelty thus would not be a theater of the unconscious. Almost the contrary. Cruelty is consciousness, is exposed lucidity" [242].

"Dialectics is always that which has finished us, because it is always that which takes into account our rejection of it. As does affirmation. To reject death as repetition is to affirm death as a present expenditure without return. And inversely" [246].

"The theater of cruelty neither begins nor is completed within the purity of simple presence, but rather is already within representation" ... thus cruelty must let itself be penetrated. "The origin is always penetrated" [248].

Category: performance studies

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