In view of our reading of Latour’s rearticulation of the assumptions informing the concepts of “facts” and “values” into new terms that recognize the processual cyclicity of institutionalizing always-debatable uncertainties into useful certainties, and in view of Alice Munro’s having just been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, an article entitled “Denied Nobel Prize Yet Again, Margaret Atwood Plots Post-Apocalyptic Revenge” seems timely. The article appears on the website Newslo, which boasts (with apropos unabashedness with respect to facticity) the title of “The First Ever Hybrid New/Satire Platform!” The title captures accurately, however, the Newslo site’s hallmark article-viewing functionality: a toggle for “Show Facts” and “Hide Facts” foots every article. Activating the former button highlights the portion of the article that has been institutionalized to the realm of what we would previously have called facticity; re-negating these highlights (back to the article’s default appearance) returns smoothly and non-libelously the factual portions into formal homogeneity with the sensationalist satirical tabloid remainder. “Just Enough News,” runs the site’s motto, which is just as well an ironic motto for news in general nowadays: there’s too much news, and yet never enough “(f)actual” news in that news (and never enough fiction in our “fiction“). How can we better define that “just enough” (with pun on “just”)? We need what Latour proposes: a better “power to take into account” (Facebook account or otherwise): we need to evolve our filter-feeders.

Indeed, Newslo’s filtering system typifies the related problem of facticity in regard to digital public spheres that we discussed both yesterday in relation to a Quebec provincial voting commercial, which we argued exemplified the complex relations governing the way in which the mob rule of social media gets billed as democracy via that social media itself, as well as last month in relation to our discussion of print newspapers versus databased newspapers and the personalized newsfeed. “Filter bubbles,” Ted Talker Eli Pariser calls it, this Internet censorship phenomenon in which our bias towards our own politics of interest can actually work against our own interests – especially when, as Pariser relates, Facebook one day decides to run an algorithm (just for “you,” i.e. for you) that converts all your visible news into whatever your Good News happens to be. While the talk is scarcely worth skimming beyond what I am graciously filtering for you, Pariser does end up proposing that databases like Google adopt what amounts to an extension of the logic of Newslo’s system: namely, including among our “sort by” options checkboxes for things like “Relevant”, “Important”, “Uncomfortable”, “Challenging”, and “Other Points of View”. The metaphysics of presence points to an obvious problem with this system, or rather with the utopian version of it (a database will never represent what is truly Other to it – we, and even Google, simply cannot know how “Other Points of View” is itself being filtered; and is a comfortable way to find the “uncomfortable” possible?), but nevertheless the gesture seems valuable, and maybe even represents a crude attempt at doing for the database what John Law proposes scholars do for research in general: making explicit to our readers the always-messy contingency of that research. Perhaps databases should have a “messy” filter (kind of like the trope of the button which you’re told never to press because no one knows what it does), which when you press it simply puts everything through a glitch-randomizer and fucks everything up.

It is such mess, though, that Latour likewise encourages as the one of two requirements of his proposed initial phase for institutionalization (what in the old language we would call fact-making), the phase of taking into account all of the entities that we have at our disposal to debate for institutionalization candidacy: namely, the requirement of perplexity, a “provocation (in the etymological sense of ‘production of voices’)” in which “the number of candidate entities must not be arbitrarily reduced in the interests of facility or convenience” (110). Its corollary is the requirement of relevance – considering the relevance of the various stakeholding voices to perplex what is being, by debate, perplexed. This latter somewhat relates to Pariser’s proposed (re)search filter category, but more to that mark is the requirement of hierarchization in Latour’s second of the two institutionalization phases, arranging in rank order. For, Pariser’s category of “Relevance” (and rather than simply pertaining to the already-familiar category of “sort by relevance” vis-a-vis search terms) comes in critical response to Mark Zuckerburg’s cited remark that “[a] squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.” Pariser’s point is that, if newsfeeds or other search results are ever to even approach something more like the impossible ideal of information democracy to which popular media discourse so often articulates them, then the squirrel pictures that come up in our newsfeeds should perhaps not be placed at the same level of relevance as humanitarian crises in what Latour calls society’s “hierarchy of values” (107) (which also, notably, functions by a “[r]equirement of publicity” [111, emphasis added]).

The comparison to be made, then, is between the (in the old terms) “fact-evaluation” process that Latour proposes for constitutional democratic government, and the way in which information is similarly filtered to and filterable by the public of such democracies within their digital news and (re)search platforms. Latour’s proposed process begins with perplexity and relevance – in other words, the collection of search results (the terms – relevance – and their results – initially, perplexity) that then, in the second part of the process, the move toward actual instutionalization (“closure”), must get hierarchized accordingly in terms of their hierarchical ethical valuation. In sum, it would seem that, in extension to Newslo’s and Pariser’s unique filtration systems, and indeed as a corollary component to the type of public network resultant of precisely the kind of (public sector) debate apparatus that Latour proposes, our new digital filtration systems should involve not just parameters like “Show Facts” and “Relevant” but precisely such a process as Latour’s, with its unique re-articulation of “facts” and “values” into less contradictory categories. Then a system such as Newslo’s could only constitute absurdity insofar as “facts” would no longer be a category for filtration. But more importantly, because the relative contingencies of what we used to call “facts” (and get mixed up with “values”), and the (traces of the) process by which they became such, might be explicitly built into all our articles and newsfeeds and other search databases. That is, the equivalent of “Show facts”, for example, would show (by a kind of markup, perhaps) what had been successfully put through Latour’s process of institutionalization.

Otherwise, Margaret Atwood might still be in the running, according to her own personalized fantasy newsfeed. For the division between “facts” and “values” (where the latter equals the explicitly skewed satire in Newslo’s articles) is never so clear as Newslo makes it. Hence the need and use for Latour’s proposed new articulations.

Works Cited

Latour, Bruno. “A New Separation of Powers.” Politics of Nature: How to bring the Sciences into Democracy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004. 91-127. Print

Law, John. “Making a Mess with Method.” Lancaster: The Centre for Science Studies, Lancaster University, 2003.
http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/sociology/papers/Law-Making-a-Mess-with-Method.pdf

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John Law first tells us to acknowledge the messiness of knowing. Ok – so I’ve accepted the fact that Bach didn’t really tell me how to play these pieces, and teachers and books have told me I can do what I want with them. But, this makes me question my role as a performer. Am I to be the link between the music and the composer, which would make the written music simply a vehicle for this transmission of ideas? Or, am I to interpret the music as I feel fit, not considering how the composer may have wanted it played?

With regards to the Actor-Network Theory (ANT), this manuscript is a perfect example of how the material affects the social. Law explains heterogeneous networks as ways of suggesting that society, organizations, agents and machines are all effects generated in patterned networks of diverse (not simply human) materials (Law 1992, 380). So, if our interactions within different networks are mediated through human or nonhuman objects, this book of printed music plays an important role in how one acts and behaves within the network. In this case, since Bach died in 1770 and I want to play his music today, in 2013, it is a network of both humans and objects that provides communication between a violinist today and Bach.

Iron Gall Ink

It all began with iron gall ink on large manuscript around 1720 (the same ink used by da Vinci, Van Gogh, and to write the US Constitution), to its first publication in 1843, and finally to the modern editions that can be found on the internet today. Within those objects are countless people who made decisions in the early editions: whether to change or add things, what size paper to print on, the overall look of the music, and then there are the performers who affect personal taste preferences in more modern editions. Perhaps an editor really loves one violinist’s version of Bach, and subsequently prints all of their fingerings, bowings and dynamics into their edition. Is it biased? Yes. But, are other editions also biased? Yes. Are the “original” manuscripts that were found in Saint Petersburg sixty-five years after Bach’s death biased? Perhaps. It is unknown if they are even originals, or if his wife may have made copies. From ink on a manuscript, through various forms of printing presses, to being able to find the sheet music through Google today, one can access countless formats of what machines and humans have contributed to the heterogenic patterning of the social. This has quickly turned into a huge network! What a mess.

Modern version and hand-written “original” manuscript

Now, things just continue to get messier the more I think about the lack of clarity in my probe object. In his article Thick Description, Clifford Geertz states that “the more deeply [your research] goes, the less complete it is.” This is a scary statement to come to terms with, especially since each of us is about to live with our research topic for at least the next several years. When we finally finish our dissertations, we are likely not going to feel a sense of completeness from what we just accomplished. I am sure we will all have questions and unknowns at the end of the process. The areas we have chosen to research are all messy in their own ways, and Law reassures (me, at least) that vague research is not necessarily “bad” research.

Towards the end of his article, Law describes how “some materials are more durable than others” (1992, 387), eventually saying that by performing these relations and materials, they may last longer. Printed music is meant to be embodied – no two violinists will approach the compositions in the same way (Affelder), and therefore the network and actors are continually changing and evolving over time, just as knowledge is as he explains in Making a Mess with Method.

As an example, let’s take a live recording of Gidon Kremer: Gidon Kremer – Bach. This is the third movement from the last partita of the set of six works. We don’t know whether Kremer is performing only one of the six works, or if he is in the process of playing them as a set, as scholars believe Bach intended them to be performed (Fulkerson). Judging by the sweat on Kremer’s face, it looks as if he’s been playing for awhile, which leads me to believe he has just played the five other sonatas and partitas that precede this one (which would take about two hours).

What objects and people make up this social network? There are many actors, such as the choice of edition from which Kremer learned the music, the teacher who once coached him through learning the music years prior, the audience watching this particular performance, or the tempo at which he has chosen to play the piece. But, connected to each of those actors are other networks as well. Each audience member comes in with different expectations of what they’re about to hear. Some of them will have listened to multiple versions and know their preferences, while others will be hearing it for the first time. Does Kremer take into consideration for whom he is playing? Would he perform the piece differently if he knew a particular person was in the audience? All of these factors contribute to the social network at that particular time. As a complete contrast, here’s another example of the same piece played by Gil Shaham – Bach - notice how different the tempo, volume and overall approach is compared to the first clip.

Law describes ANT as a claim that “people are who they are because they are a patterned network of heterogeneous materials” (Law 1992, 383). He goes on to explain that actors are also networks, for example, Law uses as an analogy, a machine that has various parts and roles within it. Back to my example: this would make the printed music an actor as well as a network, and if it is a network acting as one unit, it can disguise itself as a black box of sorts. One can look closely into the networks that are hidden from view (for example, the processes of transformation from hand-written manuscript to computer-processed sheet music), or they could choose to view the object as a single actor as part of a larger network.

Just like the YouTube videos: one could see it strictly as a performance playing an actor role in a social network, or one could dig deeper into the networks that make up and surround the actual performance.

This is still all very messy.

To try and sum up the mess and vagueness, I will discuss knowledge and the various forms in which it can be found. When I hold this book of music in my hand, I know what an important body of musical work it is. The weight and number of pages inside is daunting, but it gets worse when you open it up. One has the choice to either read from the edited version of the “original” manuscript, or to try and read off of the shrunken version of the “original” manuscript. There is a great deal of collaborative knowledge that went into the printing of this edition, which I now know makes things even messier because Law explains that collaborative research is messy because you never fully know what your collaborator(s) know. If I choose to read the edited version, I am consciously playing it the way that the editor (in this case, Galamian), wants me to play. But, I am unaware of what his knowledge was at the time of putting his ideas onto the music. I believe that Galamian’s way of dealing with the messiness of the situation was to include Bach’s manuscripts at the back of the book. It still appears that there is a precise system to it, but one is able to see into the messiness if they so desire. I haven’t even gotten into the argument of performance practice and whether or not Bach’s music should be played on modern instruments, or violins from the period from which the music was composed. That is another pile of mess altogether.

Music is truly a moving target. There will be future editions, and people will continue to learn from past editions. All of these are affected by live performance and recordings, which change along with the trends and what the style at the time of editing is. This shape-shifting reality, as Law puts it, makes it extremely difficult to study and document since it is so heterogeneous and widespread.

On grant applications, I will do my best to present a precise and clear description of my research, but for now and at least for the next few years, I will continue to struggle with the vague and imprecise nature of social sciences research.

Works Cited

Bach, Johann Sebastian. “6 Sonatas and Partitas for Violin Solo.” Edited by Ivan Galamian, foreword by Paul Affelder. New York: International Music Company.

Fulkerson, Gergory. “Unaccompanied Sonatas and Partitas 
of Johann Sebastian Bach.” Sheila’s Corner, 2000. Accessed 11 September, 2013. http://www.sheilascorner.com/bach.html

Geertz, Clifford. “Thick Description.” The Interpretation of cultures; selected essays. New York: Basic Books, 1973.

Law, John. “Notes on the Theory of the Actor Network: Ordering, Strategy and Heterogeneity,” Lancaster: The Centre for Science Studies, Lancaster University, 1999. Revised 2003. http://www.heterogeneities.net/publications/Law1992NotesOnTheTheoryOfTheActor-Network.pdf

__. “Making a Mess with Method.” Lancaster: The Centre for Science Studies, Lancaster University, 2003. http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/sociology/papers/Law-Making-a-mess-with-Method.pdf

Vittes, Laurence. “Titans Talk about the Bach Solo Violin Works.” All Things Strings, January 2007. http://www.allthingsstrings.com/News/Interviews-Profiles/Titans-Talk-about-the-Bach-Solo-Violin-Works/

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