The list of things I want/need/should (or should not) blog about are piling high and they range from the insignificant though unbelievable footage of an octopus gorging on a shark, to a long bit on the “Tale of A Tub” workshop that I attended last week at Rutgers (an amazing book).

But all of this will have to wait as my plate is overflowing. But, before I forget, I would like to point out for those who work on psychiatry, gloablization and medicine, or for those who just want to read what looks like a promising STS-Anthro ethnography, Andrew Lakoff’s book
Pharmaceutical Reason has finally been released! I have been wanting to sink my teeth in for a while now and I am sure it will be a tasty read.

Andrew Lakoff argues that a new ‘pharmaceutical’ way of thinking about and acting upon mental disorder will reshape the field of psychiatry. Drawing from a comprehensive ethnography of psychiatric practice in Argentina (a country which boasts the most psychoanalysts per capita in the world), Lakoff looks at new ways of understanding and intervening in human behavior. He charts the globalization of pharmacology, particularily the global impact of US psychiatry and US models of illness, and further illustrates the clashes, conflicts, alliances and reformulations that take place when psychoanalytic and psychopharmacological models of illness and cure meet.

If there is one thing that drove me a little nuts about my fieldwork, it was trying to get a very precise handle over the reasons that hackers loved to joke about the existence of a cabal. On the one hand, the joke’s significance was obvious: hackers distrust centralized authority so any whiff of it will attract attention, and joking about the so called existence of a cabal is at once a reflection of this unease and a mechanism to remind those with power that they must always act with good intentions and defer to the group when it comes to technical decisions.

But in fact joking about the cabal opens up into a much vaster savanna related to the tensions between elitism and populism in hacking, as well as the general potential for meritocracies to degrade into corruption. While hackers distrust centralized authority, they do happen to trust those who have proved their worth to peers (though a combination of talent and dedication) and dole out respect and recognition to them. Often this means that some folks will eventually be entrusted with some sort of technical role, and thus, power and this is fine so long as he does not block the process of open ended debate and deliberation by which they achieved power in the first place. I address the question of the cabal and meritocracy in Debian here and am soon going to release another chapter of my dissertation that takes a closer look at the tension between populism and elitism.

But of course there is a much longer history of the general corruptibility of meritocracy (check out Plato’s Republic for an old examination of this problem and if anyone knows of more current accounts of it, please feel free to email me) and of cabal joking within hacking. Just recently I came across a really good piece on free speech, populism, and elitism by Bryam Pfaffenberger: If I want it, it’s OK: Usenet and the (outer) limits of free speech

This piece is not only a solid history of early Usenet, but gives us a clear window into how the value for freedom and free speech grew on the Net, and through very particular conditions (behind the backs of academic, corporate managers and administrators, for example), the enablers and constraints of newsgroup technologies, and of course the unavoidable fact of contingency. Moreover, this commitment to openness grew in the midst of a tension between what he calls the “ethos of collaborative egalitarianism” and the elitism of the wizards who controlled the backbone of Usenet. He sums it up nicely here:

“In spite of Usenet’s implicitly antibureaucratic ethos, it was soon apparent that sites could not function unless someone took responsibility for the many administrative tasks involved, such as placing the late-night calls (and disguising phone charges). UNIX system administrators (abbreviated sysadmins) soon came to have more or less officially recognized Usenet-supervision roles within companies, organizations, and universities they served. This role has never been a particularly happy or easy one. Sysadmins had to balance the needs and interests of their organizations against the ever-more-voracious appetite of Usenet—and later.., they had to deal with the conviction of many Usenet users that Usenet gave them the right to speak and distribute anything they liked” p. 370

For anyone interested in how the net became such a hotbed for the fever of the flavor for the free(dom/speech), this is a must read. In this piece, what comes out so strongly is that the tension between elitism/hierarchy and populism/openness is of course not just a function of social norms, but emerges out of the very contradictions of technology but technology-in-use. Though Usenet was first envisioned as a forum for discussing Unix and providing technical support, it soon burst out of the early seams of its intended birth to become a more global, unwieldy entity. But there were still those with the technical power in charge to manage the network, assign accounts, delete controversial newsgroups and so on. Eventually geeks themselves led a mini-revolution to democratize access (which meant really control over the means of production).

The problem between elitism and populism has not left the halls of geekdom yet but there are certainly more technologies than ever that tend to allow, in potentia at least, for a type of equality than before. And getting a hold on this early history helps clarify the problems and issues of today.

Thanks to the efforts of Bryan Pfaffenberger (thanks Bryan!), there is now an STS wiki. Here is a note from Bryan:

I’m writing to announce (somewhat earlier than I had planned) the STS
Wiki, located at http://www.stswiki.org . I had hoped to build lots of
content before getting the word out — but the word’s out anyway
(thanks, Google). In the last 24 hours the content has been expanded by
something like 200%. The rocket, it seems, has left the pad. So take a
look – and:

(1) add yourself to the worldwide directory of sts scholars;
(2) add your program to the worldwide directory of sts programs;
(3) upload a bibliography
(4) help build the link directory
(5) think of more ways to use the site!
(6) keep an eye out for vandalism
(7) forward this message to other STS scholars

If you know how to use Wikipedia, you know how to use STS Wiki. It uses
the same software. Do please visit and contribute regularly.

When I was young, one of my fondest experiences were impending hurricanes. Schools would close, we would stock up the house with supplies, my best friend’s family would throw a hurricane party dinner, my family would experience a rare sense of togetherness, and the rains and winds would come howling to leave you homebound till the furious winds made their way to some other Caribbean island.

From what I remember, 2-3 were about to strike Puerto Rico when I was a kid, but never did. Until Hurricane Hugo which hit September 1989. A category five storm, it was a merciless and was the costliest in US history until Andrew in 1992 (and I wonder if Katrina has taken over that distinction). I remember the hurricane well because these events leave an unforgettable imprint on your memory for they disrupt the everyday quality of life. Nothing is normal. I was a little annoyed actually because I was about to get my drivers license and this hurricane ruined my impending independence from bumming rides off of parents and friends.

Once the hurricane hit, I could care less about anything as petty as a license. When the hurricane got close enough to the island so that it felt “real,” I freaked out a little and I left where I lived with my father close to the ocean, to my mom’s house which was more inland. Once there, I spent most of the time watching large object fly by at speeds that seemed too fast for those objects. I was awestruck.

After the storm passed, the atmosphere was dense, heavy and especially hot. Any tree cover was gone, and if there wind had been with us for days, it all but vanished with the departure of the storm. The streets were filled with new objects that clearly did not belong there. Chunks of concrete. Tree roots. Telephone poles. And especially glass. Crunchy glass was the new floor, inches deep, it was omnipresent, causing you to look up at the buidlings now left with gaping holes.

We had no electricity and water for weeks but despite the discomfort, I remember the time fondly. It brought folks together, especially neighbors, in ways that were just impossible before. Time had slowed down because we could not use anything electrical. I fell in love for the first time during that period, via a book, Love in the Time of Cholera which took up most of my sweaty nights when I would read, under the glow of a flashlight starting at 8 pm till I got sleepy and passed out.

Life eventually normalized though many of course were left more poor, more insecure after the storm, as happens with such natural events.

I tell this short story because this weekend I read a short essay by the writer and activist, Rebecca Solnit in Harpers The Uses of Disasters which sparked many of these fond memories. I like many of Harper’s essays but I took special delight in this one because she confronted beautifully the odd question as to why we can take pleasure in natural disasters, especially when they are accompanied by misery, destruction, and death.

The answer lies in part because of the disruption of the normal, the commonsense, the opportunity for “a sense of fellowship to arise” in which humans labor and connect to help each other independent of centralized authorities and the state. It is a moment of reflection, where the outcome is uncertain; where and when political change can often follow:

“The aftermath of disaster is often peculiarly hopeful, and in the rupture of the ordinary, real changes often emerge. But this means that disaster threatens not only bodies, building, and property, but also the status quo. Disaster recovery is not just a resecute of the needy but also a scramble for power and legitimacy, one that the status quo usually—but not always—wins.”

She likens disasters to carnivals for it “is a peak moment” which is profound because “what you see from the peak stays with you while you traverse the plateau of everyday life.”

She theorizes that perhaps disaster take on special importance because in our society we lack these collective moments of carnival. I think however, as much as natural disasters do share a similar status to carnival and her essay argues this well, natural disasters do stand on their own as a type of event, one which is profound, for it brings into stark awareness how we can ethically respond to the world around us.

We are limited and constrained by many things in life; social norms, structures of governments, natural events, etc. There are elements of life our of our control. But there are clearly moments and times and instances that are in our control when we can shift the balance, so that we take some control to alter the path we traverse. Natural disasters unambigously provide such a moment (and while Carnival can, not so starkly). An event has befallen us that is uncontrollable. What we can control is the response to others, and in this way, natural disaster’s do and can take on a strong hue of liberation.

For those who have not read this piece, well, it is probably clear by now that I wholeheartedly recommend it.

One of the truly great things about my postdoc is I am reading again. And reading a wide range of books and articles. Some of it is reading for our working groups (for example Jody Greene’s excellent, really excellent, work on the the relationship between liability and property established by copyright), other reading is on psychiatric survivors and then I am catching up on some theoretical stuff on politics, being that is the backbone of much of my work.

I just finished “Contingent Foundations” by Judith Butler, which is a concise and short piece touching on her signature topic: the nature of politics when you are anti-foundationalist and you confront the reality of discursive constraint. On the one hand, some of her work deeply resonates with me, for after all, I am not one to champion individuality along the lines of unhinged agency and am precisely interested in how political action manifests within a field of various constraints. What I like about Butler is that despite her penchant for deconstruction, she steers clear from the twin towers of cynicsm and nihilism and attempts to affirm a positive (if not positivist) and emancipatory politics. In her own words:

“… if feminism presupposes that “women” designates an undesignatable field of differences, one that cannot be totalized or summarized by a descriptive category, then the very term becomes a site of permanent openness and resignifiability.. To deconstruct the subject of feminism is not, then to censure its usage, but on the contrary, to release the term into a future of multiple signification, to emancipate it from the maternal or racialist ontologies to which it has been restricted and to give it play as a site where unanticipated meanings might come to bear. Paradoxically, it may be that only through releasing the category of women from a fixed referent that something like ‘agency’ becomes possible. For if the term permits resignification, if its referent is not fixed, then possibilities for new configurations of the term become possible.” (1992: 16).

On the other hand, despite a positive politics, I feel that the nature of political action in her work and many in her class, is left unspecified, and here I mean in a very pragmatic sense. How is it exactly do we “release the term into a future of multiple signification”?

I agree with her that categories, words, etc., the world of the discursive, is much more bloated than most language ideologies will let on. Resignification is possible, especially when we contest the universalisms that presuppose some of our cherished categories. Yet, sometimes you get the feeling that resignification is a simple act of language and will (just the thing she writes against) as opposed to requiring an engaged and difficult material practice by which new subjectivities and moralities can be born through building of alternative moralities. One must engage in a dialectic between a desire for alternatives that exists in an inchoate and imaginary plane, and its realization through the medium of intersubjective action. For it is through a material vehicle in which one can participate in the process of resignification and more importantly embody new meanings.

My friend Karl Fogel has recently published a book on free software projects that should be of interest to researchers and developers alike: Producing Open Source Software. Karl and I were feverishly writing our free software “stuff” at the same time, meeting up for dinner and late night deserts to take small breaks from what was an obsessive and compulsive time in our lives.

Karl is an excellent writer and has put a LOT of thought into this book, which gives to-be-project-leaders a serious heads up on how to go about organizing a project. Even if it is more of a “how to” book, it is ethnographic in the sense that he derives his data from, well, being a participant in free software development. And for those who like to pick apart the cultural and ethical world of F/OSS, well this is an excellent book to scour because of its normativity.

Truly he has thought of almost everything to cover, from the technologies that are imperative for development to the problem ofdifficult people

And true to his geek ethics, the book is free as in speech. So order it, or download it, or read it online; it is there for you to read and share!

On Farting
Bodily Wind in the Middle Ages

By Valerie Allen and John Thompson
Palgrave
Due/Published September 2005, 256 pages, cloth
ISBN 0312234937
The study of the fart in medieval culture participates in the widespread and
productive contemporary study of the body, its practices and its
hermeneutics. As a consequence of the cultural materialist interest in the
quotidian, recent criticism has moved away from an abstracted conception of
selfhood toward an appreciation of how the concrete daily regimens of bodily
“habitus, generally taken for granted, shape the horizon of our cultural and
individual consciousness. The fart, in its parodying of language and its
logic of affinity, leads us ultimately to the problem of hermeneutics, of
the art of interpretation itself. Although much of the medieval
preoccupation with flatulence originates from the aesthetic of comic
inversion, whereby farts “sing” or parody human language or are mistaken for
departed souls, it also reflects a more serious interest in bodily health. A
multifarious typology of the fart will permit a better understanding of the
phenomenon’s protean wealth of meaning.