Tag Antonio Gramsci

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And Lose the Name of Action

Oct 7, ’10 2:23 AM

There’s some interesting discussions on the subject of social action and the role of awareness as well as social media.
For two contrasting views, consider Malcolm Gladwell’s essay in suspect of certain social media and their relationship to genuine, “strong-tie” connections and Maria Popova’s article on why Gladwell’s perspective is wrong.

Popova has an part of her article which makes the argument that empathy is the process/mechanism we need to bridge us from awareness to action:

What does this have to do with activism? It’s simple. Online communities broaden our scope of empathy. They do so by introducing new issues to our collective consciousness and exposing us to the lives these issues affect. In cases where our “in-group” lacks direct experience of such concerns, empathy is the missing link between awareness and action — it’s what enables us to act for the well-being of others …

Empathy derived from instilling personal identification and meaning as necessitating change? What is empathy? How does it work? If one ponders hard enough, does it come about? To love my neighbor as myself … a discussion from a theological perspective is one area that sounds like an interesting possibility for a later entry …
My concern in this post is not about social activism nor is it about who is correct. I’m interested in method and process; in all the literature so far on positivism, empiricism, and design science, I have not yet run into a rich account of how change is made. Many theorists/researchers/designers/philosophers so far have been making it clear that the natural and particularly social sciences are concerned about the importance of fluidity and change. Yet no one really knows how to talk about the mechanism behind change.

Kuhn writes about history is comprised of shifting from one paradigm to another. Many times, this is triggered with the accumulation of anomolies in the midst of an emerging crisis environment. However, when describing the actual process of how this transition occurs, he doesn’t quite know how to articulate it. Chalmers writes,

On Kuhn’s view, the kinds of factors that do prove effective in causing scientists to change paradigms is a matter to be discovered by psychological and sociological investigation … A scientific revolution corresponds to the abandonment of one paradigm and the adoption of a new one, not by an individual scientist only but by the relevant scientific community as a whole. As more and more individual scientists, for a variety of reasons, are converted to the new paradigm, there is an “increasing shift in the distribution of professional allegiances” (Kuhn, 1970a, p. 158). If the revolution is to be successful, this shift will spread so as to include the majority of the relevant scientific community, leaving a few dissenters. (Chalmers, What is This Thing Called Science?, 1999, pp. 116-117)

According to Chalmers, Kuhn attributes the agency of change to the scientific community, who in turn are responsible for the change. But just when the reader is curious as to how this happens, Kuhn says its a matter of psychological and sociological exploration.
Next to Kuhn, I’ve also read Kenneth Gergen‘s essay on Generative Theory in hopes of finding some of this sociological exploration in the field of social psychology. Perhaps he has some details in some other writings on how generative theory works, but it doesn’t say in the article I just read. He writes,

It may be useful, then, to consider competing theoretical accounts in terms of their generative capacity, that is the capacity to challenge the guiding assumptions of the culture, to raise fundamental questions regarding contemporary social life, to foster reconsideration of that which is “taken for granted,” and thereby to furnish new alternatives for social action. It is the generative theory that can provoke debate, transform social reality, and ultimately serve to reorder social conduct. (Gergen, “Toward Generative Theory,” 1978, p. 1346)

How does change occur? What is the mechanism? It seems like people know how to talk about this in retrospect (Kuhn) and know that it has to occur (Gergen) but it’s really hard to articulate the conditions for change as it applies to the present. But isn’t this the very nature of design?

I’m familar with Antonio Gramsci’s process of hegemony. He articulates very well one mechanism for creating change. I’m hungry for another perspective with just as much richness that Gramsci provides.

Going back to Kuhn, he does say this about the community of scientists,

To discover how scientific revolutions are effected, we shall therefore have to examine not only the impact of nature and of logic, but also the techniques of persuasive argumentation (emphasis mine) effective within the quite special groups that constitute the community of scientists. (Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 1996, p. 94)

Ah, yes. Rhetoric … finding the places of the arguments. This seems like the mechanism for change, but this is all he mentions along with an example of how Galileo used persuasive arguments to convince his colleagues (According to Chalmers, Feyeraband says Galileo used propaganda and trickery (Chalmers, p. 154)).
This theme of mechanism(s) for change deserves more attention …

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Notes to Self

Dec 20, ’08 9:43 PM

Just spent the afternoon reading and had a few random thoughts:

1. A THOUGHT ON GOING TO THE SOURCE

The origin or primary source of something is very important. Hence, knowing the arts (what guides one’s thinking) is just as important than trying to learn all the methodologies that one can choose from to understand a specific subject matter. It’s like having a framework.

Some examples:

  • When looking for concepts for my thesis, I came upon “assimilation/integration” as a possible process in which culture takes shape. This came from a reading of a book on Asian American cultural politics. I was also vaguely familiar with Raymond Williams. However, Dick’s suggestion to go to the source of both authors’ inspiration, Antonio Gramsci, provided a greater insight into a more fundamental concept – “hegemony,” a complex yet fascinating topic. [download thesis]
  • Donald Schon’s “designerly ways of knowing, thinking, and acting” = repackaging of John Dewey’s thoughts on “Having an Experience.”
  • Herb Simon’s thoughts on the artificial echo Aristotle’s thoughts on poetics.
  • Thoughts around “service design” started over a hundred years ago (ex. Kodak’s “You press the button, we do the rest“).

2. A THOUGHT ON DESIGNING PRACTICE & DESIGNING MANAGEMENT

Forlizzi writes that “Participatory Design” and “Experience Prototyping” are attitudinal rather than procedural/prescriptive methods [by Forlizzi]. Is this the same way “attitude” is used by Boland & Collopy when they describe design attitude v. decision attitude in Managing as Designing? [see previous post]

Forlizzi writes, “… the Product Ecology approach involves doing fieldwork over an extended period of time” in her article to show that a comprehensive understanding of people takes time. This is an important point about design research.

However in the context of the professional world, this is not as easy to implement. Due to constraints, such as budget issues, there’s a disconnect in taking our thoughts towards action. Perhaps designing management, with a similar attitude, may help in bridging the gap between what we would like to have done to what we can get done in our organizations.

3. A THOUGHT ON USER NEEDS

A lot of people talk about being obsessed with finding and identifying user needs. When new products create new habits (ex. we need toothpaste to support the activity of brushing our teeth but this is a 20th century product that didn’t exist in, say, the 15th century), have we created a new “need” or is this something that’s been a latent need in individuals all along? If this is an example of a latent need, is there an infinite amount of needs we can design for? Probably not. Or maybe there are certain core needs that can be addressed differently with the changing times. Hmm. [see previous post on habits]

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Problem of Theory & Practice in Gramsci & Dewey

Mar 21, ’08 12:04 PM

I’ve been reading a bit more Antonio Gramsci (Marxist Theorist) and John Dewey’s Art as Experience. Although the two have two very different notions of reality, they seem to have the same macro-problem.

PROBLEM: Separation of Thought and Action.

FOR GRAMSCI:
Thought is the theory of contradictions in a society and action is the people’s actual consciousness. Because of a separation between the two, he was interested in how to align the people’s consciousness with the theoretical. For him, there is a crucial issue of freedom at stake. When thought and action are one, this is freedom (he calls this the philosophy of praxis, a.k.a. Marxism).

Ok, this is interesting but what does it mean? Well, Gramsci lived in a time when the Italian populace was more in tune with foreign culture than a national Italian culture. That’s because, according to Gramsci, the intellectuals/elite in Italy weren’t concerned with the lower classes; they were still tied to the caste tradition. He writes,

All this means that the entire “educated class,” with its intellectual activity, is detached from the people-nation, not because the latter has not shown and does not show itself to be interested in this activity at all levels … but because in relation to the people-nation the indigenous intellectual element is more foreign than the foreigners.
(An Antonio Gramsci Reader, p. 369)

He asks, “What is the meaning of the fact that the Italian people prefer to read foreign writers?” For him, with the exception of opera, there was no organic relationship between high culture and low culture. Then what is needed to bridge the gap between thought and action? Well, for Gramsci, he says that organic intellectuals are needed (to help create a counter-hegemony). Organic intellectuals are intellectuals from among the people. This makes sense. These individuals from the people feel tied to them, know their needs, aspirations, and feelings (Isn’t this what we do as interaction designers?).

This particular theme of Gramsci deals with his concern for the lack of a vernacular Italian novel that consists of both the national and popular. Simply put, he was envious of the French who had an Alexandre Dumas. He wanted an Italian Alexandre Dumas.

Gramsci and Design:
Is it possible to create products (whether they be novels, artifacts, services, organizations) that reflect the people’s popular psyche? By “people,” I don’t just mean the majority; people can come to mean subaltern people, especially in the context of a great chunk of Gramsci’s works. For example, can we have a Korean American Alexandre Dumas? (This is the theme of my thesis) Or design for the vision-impaired?

FOR DEWEY:
Unlike Gramsci’s entitative/materialist reality, Dewey has an essentialist reality. He is concerned with man, the “live creature,” and his environment (note: different from “surrounding”). In Art as Experience, he, too, is concerned with the separation of thought and action.

Dewey begins his book by stating that a philosophy/theory of art is an effort to understand the actual experiences. He writes,

For theory is concerned with understanding, insight, not without exclamations of admiration, and stimulation of that emotional outburst often called appreciation. It is quite possible to enjoy flowers in their colored form and delicate fragrance without knowing anything about plants theoretically. But if one sets out to understand the flowering of plants, he is committed to finding out something about the interactions of soil, air, water and sunlight that condition the growth of plants. (p. 2)

Hence, the situation or environment is key to understanding. It is in the action, the actual doing that one experiences life at the fullest and it’s these fulfilling experiences that man is incessantly after.

When he talks about this experience, it consists of both thought (esthetic undergoing, perception) and action (artistic doing, making) – his artistic-esthetic experience. He says that there cannot be a distinction between esthetic and artistic; they must be united for an experience to be an experience. An artist must have both doing and undergoing while creating a product, and a beholder/audience must also do both in order to create his/her own experience.

So how does he relate to Gramsci? Well, he, too, is uncomfortable with how we’ve come to distinguish between high art (placing them in museums) and low art. This wasn’t so in past cultures. His goal is to recover the continuity of esthetic experience with normal processes of living. He says, we need to go back to “experience of the common or mill run of things” (p. 9).

Activities, such as dancing, making music, painting, making drama, were just parts of group life – the significant life of an organized community. In fact, the Greeks formed the idea that art is an act of reproduction/imitation. Art used to have such a close connection with daily life. Now, we must go out of our way to go to a museum, a theatre, etc. Art has lost its indigenous status and great paintings, for example, are secluded in the homes of the wealthy and powerful. Gramsci would not be happy.

Dewey and Design:
Dewey’s pragmatism and works have enormous implications for design. He’s all about interaction. In fact, Moholy-Nagy, when he came to Chicago to start the New Bauhaus (didn’t last long although from what I know, it’s had influence in the creation of IIT’s design school), met Dewey through a mutual friend in NY. Dewey’s treatise on art became a textbook for the New Bauhaus. His chapter, “Having an Experience,” as Richard Buchanan says, is THE text, the foundational piece, for CMU’s interaction design program.

FINAL THOUGHTS:
What does all this mean for the nature of products or even the purpose of the things we create? For example, I think it’s great that the i-pod is in the MOMA as an iconic artifact of everyday life along with Eames’ chair. Taking parts from Gramsci and Dewey, can we start talking more about the products we can make and how they support/shape sub-cultures, groups of cultures, and Culture?

(btw, I’m in no-wise a marxist. I’m taking the parts that are interesting to me in these theories and looking for practical applications for Design)

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