Dear Jean,  
 
Much appreciated. I too can be a bit of a
structuralist at times, so your answer does fit with some of my concerns.
However, a few notes on my part. You say: 
 
"as you write, it appears first of
all as a "discourse" (and not necessarily as a practice or even an
experience" 
 
 Actually, I would argue it is a form of experience.
My initial hesitation in calling it experience refers to the structure of
corporate research more than to the actual problem in hand. Corporate research,
as you know, is made of strict deadlines and short periods of field immersion.
That makes it a lot harder to set apart experience from discourse. In a final
analysis, doing so is the task at hand as the predominance of the semiotic
viewpoint in industrial research feeds off the difference (or communicates itself as of feeding off
that difference, which in the logic of industry, tends to make things one and
the same). 
 
"the side effect of technocracy is
that it opposes two classes : the experts, and the "users" (? /
victims ? / ). Participation is beeing seen at the moment as a way to bridge
some of the gap, but I am wondering if it truly can, if the question of who
ultimately decides, what are the compensations,etc. are not put in the middle
of the table".
 
I really appreciate the mechanical metaphor you
evoke to describe democracy. The technology metaphor is tempting not only to
think democracy but to think society in general. Take a step back to Durkheim's
mechanical and organic solidarities. For a long time now, our predominant
metaphors to think society have been either biology, technology or ideas of
"system" informed by either or both. Some eminent social scientists,
like Strathern, have gone to the point of asking if the notion of society has
become "theoretically obsolete" (which is the same as asking if the
metaphors we set against society in order to explain it, systems or else, have
become themselves obsolete). Hopefully, as technology progresses and
concomitantly our knowledge of biological systems evolves through technology,
so will the metaphors we use. Of course, this does not answer the question if
participation is an appropriate metaphor for
representing the expert/user relation and/or intervening in it. 
It feels to me that in industry,
"participation" is a useful metaphor to bridge the gap between
experts and users if the sale of a given product or service is truly dependent
on the satisfaction of the end user. In that respect, personal technologies as
things that we "choose" are likely to feed strongly on user
participation. Our leisure has become more participatory than our work (or
maybe this was always the case and technology merely its mirror). By
contrast, at least in my cultural context, work technologies do not require an
idea of user participation to bridge a gap between expert and user because: 1) more often than not, the
end user is not a significant part of the sales decision; 2) it follows, the gap that you
mention, between those who ultimately decide and "the other" doesn't
need to be addressed by the product. A product that reiterates the gap and
gives the system back a vision of the crystallised hierarchies it is founded on
is often the case. Of course, this does not imply that this mind frame cannot
be challenged or questioned. It means simply that one must start with the
assumption that this mind frame feels it can do without the questioning to
start with. 
It is interesting (at least to me) that
with research participants who haven't yet turned into total recession zombies, when
asked about the work software they have to use everyday, I am often confronted
with the smartphone they take out of their pockets while commenting
something on the lines of 'if only this worked a bit more like this'. We may
claim that people are asking of work software to become closer to personal
technology. I think they're just asking for more participation. In short: it's not a
claim for different objects as much as claim for participation as a metaphor.
Hence, my question: is this metaphor contingent on the duration of democracy in
the context in which the metaphor is being asked for? 
 
"I don't think so. As an example, I
see a major divide between the functionalist approach of the design of the
mid-20th century (e.g. Max Bill), and the cognitivist approach of the late 20
century user interface design. Only (some of) the words look the same, but the
"projects" are socially different" 
 
I wouldn't be able to retrieve an intellectual history of ideas from Max Bill to cognition, yet the shift from function to cognition isn't
exclusive to design. It happened in anthropology and psychology as well, to
name but two disciplines. Sadly, to some honourable exceptions (Roy D'Andrade,
Jean Lave, Rita Astuti, Maurice Bloch, Christina Toren, to name a few)
cognition didn't stay in anthropology as long (or as 'strong') as it did in
psychology, where post-modernism took over. Perhaps the problem in anthropology is not so much that post-modernism took over, but that it took over in a very unclear relation with cognition, yet that would be the object of another email. In fact, one of the problems with
the knowledge we produce is that we tend to spend too much time telling each
other's internal disciplinary stories and not enough time cross-comparing them.
Therefore, I am not totally convinced by your answer because what you are
talking about is a cross-disciplinary shift. What I am thinking about is how
possible it is for certain modes of representing and intervening exist in
countries where users haven't lived in democracy enough, to feel that they can participate in its making; subsequently, I am thinking if helplessness as an answer towards participation as a metaphor  extends to the making of technology, and ultimately to design as an answer.  This leads to the question of what design can - or cannot do - when democracy hasn't stayed for long enough, something that most likely evokes a collective, cross-comparative answer, out of the scope of my present work.  
Having said that, if also feels to me that there is
a transversal concern to your email, my email and David Sless's. I suppose the
way I formulate it, at least in my language, has to do with the current upsurge
of neoliberalism. As neoliberalism
advances, how long will "participation" be allowed as a metaphor? I
wonder if that is the question that many of us - I one of them - should be
trying to answer, via anthropology, design or whatever can help us in the
sketch of an answer. 

 

Cheers, 
Pedro 
    
 
PhD Anthropologist/Independent Ethnographic
Consultant/Global Partner at Practica LLC 

Dear Pedro, Here are my modest thoughts (I'd better say : questions) to some of your concerns. You write :
"It has recently dawn on me that the similarities between the discourse towards technology and the discourse towards political representation found in this country (passive acceptance of the “authority” contained in the technology or in the government)are traits of a country with a very short history of democracy."
>>> as you write, it appears first of all as a "discourse" (and not necessarily as a practice or even an experience). The fact is that democracy is organically constituted by layers of institutions that split the levels of decision(s) in order to (deliberately) avoid tyranny. Parliament, Senates, assemblies of some kind, the independance of justice make the analogy of the machine / technology a tempting metaphor. Or maybe, beyond the metaphors, and worth investigating, there is a set of articulations that are worth looking at (if you are a bit of a structuralist… which I tend to be). Some people, for instance, have studied how the vocabulary used to explain the organisation of the computer is feeding back into the biotechnologies and the (re)programming of our bodies.
>>> but it is not democracy but technocracy, that I would compare to technology. Which is the contemporary way in which the social vision of a nation, as expressed through the democratic debate, cascades down into concrete actions. E.g. : managing unemployed people takes the face of forms, regulations, rights and compensations of some kind. It does not look at the societal aspects social bonds, alternative / informal economies, hidden work, black market… Or it looks at that when the (financial) limits are reached.
>>> the side effect of technocracy is that it opposes two classes : the experts, and the "users" (? / victims ? / ). Participation is beeing seen at the moment as a way to bridge some of the gap, but I am wondering if it truly can, if the question of who ultimately decides, what are the compensations,etc. are not put in the middle of the table. 
One nice case that might look a bit off-tracks is the studies that have been done about the early aids victims, and the expertise that they co-developped with the doctors, which was a major transformation in the history of the advancement of medicine. 
>>> and it remains true that the Bauhaus and Ulm where probably the only two schools that articulated so strongly the figure of the architect (bauhaus) / designer (ulm) as being the individual (in the Kantian sense, not the Nietzschean) that would bridge the gap. Hence the importance of the spiritual (bauhaus) / humanistic (ulm) educational foundation. "I wonder if other people here also see a relation between historical duration of democracy and a concern with the end user. In other words: is the concern with the end user a characteristic of countries/cultures with a longer history of democracy?" 
>>> I don't think so. As an example, I see a major divide between the functionalist approach of the design of the mid-20th century (e.g. Max Bill), and the cognitivist approach of the late 20 century user interface design. Only (some of) the words look the same, but the "projects" are socially different. One includes beauty within the function (the reality is a bit more complex —just to prevent overreactions from colleagues), whereas I don't remember that word being part of the readings I had when working on UI (but that was long ago, it might have changed since). Of course, people will argue that Apple interfaces (as an archetypal example) mix the two. But this to me is an example of the legacy of the functionalist design culture : one might be reduce this to the fact that Ives connects to Rams, I prefer to thinks that it is simply because designers and engineers share their work reasonably well together in the company (but that's pure interpretation,
 I have never been there). Best wishes,
 
Jean 


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