The Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University hosted a panel discussion on the Promise of Information- and Communication Technology on April 19th 2010 with four interesting participants:

Philip Taubman – Stanford University
Megan Smith – Google.org
Jared Cohen – US Department of State
Joshua Cohen – Stanford University

Although the event itself was invitation only and is long over we can get a glimpse of what the discussion entailed by watching the video (or audio) of the event. At least one promise of the technology fulfilled.

Two weeks ago the Critical Point of View conference in Leipzig (Germany) focused on critical approaches to the study of wikipedia. It brought together international speakers from scientists to Wikipedia authors and practioners in the realm of knowledge preservation. Two major themes were the role of academics in authorship and quality control on the one and the role of the readers and the way they use knowledge on the other. The latter theme, of course, being of particular interest to me. Overall, the lively mixture and the varying formats of the conference made it a thoroughly enjoyable and informative experience. I would hope that kind of conference and dialogue becomes and example for the all too often closed up world of social science.

The second event has not yet taken place but will start tomorrow. The 3rd Free Culture Research Conference assembles resarchers and practitioners in Berlin and centres around issues relating business and free culture, knowledge production, copyright and licensing. The programme sounds very promising and also contains innovative formats such as lightening talks and break.out sessions. I will try to come back with a little report on what I liked best. Maybe I should take the netbook and do that on site….

David Harvey (Quelle: Wikimedia Commons)

A Colleague, Jonathan Heaney at NIU Galway, posted this a while ago and seeing I almost got locked into watching it because it was so intriguing I repost it here and go back to work. Basically, David Harvey’s lectures on Marx’s Capital are available freely on the net and a great experience for those willing to listen. Enjoy!

Pierre de Fermat (Quelle: Wikimedia Commons)

I shouldn’t and won’t ever claim to be as brilliant as Fermat. When he scribbled his famous theorem by the margins of a book he was reading (or so the legend goes), he was certainly referring to a proof that he had somewhere on paper and not just an idea. Else, he might have felt like I do right now. I have this wonderfully brief and quite clear footnote in my dissertation that summarises what I believe is an interesting connection between Hannah Arendt’s thinking on power and Niccolo Machiavelli’s writings. It claims, more or less, that both have similar ideas of power and violence, but tend to emphasize different aspects of the relationship because they reflect upon different historical circumstances. I, intuitively and wholeheartedly, stand by that. However, I am planning to give a paper on the topic soon and it turns out that the idea is much more complex and difficult to explain than I thought. So, I keep thinking of Fermat all day, because he scribbled his idea down, claimed it was proven and it took a solid 500 years and whole new fields of mathematics to actually find prove of the theorem. I just hope, I can explain my idea by the end of the week, else I am in trouble… Keep you updated.

By the way, Amir Daczel wrote a highly recommendable book on Fermat’s theorem and the story of it.

UPDATE: Well, it turns out that the idea is rather complex. Yet, all things considered I made a worthwhile attempt at presenting it even if the idea not publishable quite that way. The feedback, however, has shown me what I need to do to make it work. Building an argument is a bit like architecture – lay good groundwork and even curious buildings will hold up. So, back to construction. And thanks to everyone for the help — there is nothing quite as helpful as a critical question.

Schland, o schland

The song and the video has been downloaded more than a million times on youtube and received considerable media attention. It has  also been removed from youtube.com for failing to comply with the terms of use, i.e. copyright infringement. And uploaded again by many users. And finally bought by a music company (incidently the same one that holds rights to Lena’s version…).

What is this an instance of?

…of the creativity of everybody

…of the productivity that lies in the free appropriation of intellectual ‘property’

…of the madness of fans

…of the power of social networks and their potential for resistance to attempts to control

…of the dynamics of networking technology

…of the adaptive control strategies of big (music) business

…of the importance and interlinkage of transnational cultural events

…of the global-local interaction, the resituating of global events in local contextes

…of the underused capacity to to just act in a political sense

Anything else?

It was entitled An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization – incidently the title of her new book. And from the abstract this was to present interesting ideas on the future of the humanities and the importance of an aesthetic education precisely now, when we are dealing with crisis. But well, Spivak decided to talk about something else instead. Personally, I don’t like that too much. I usually want people to talk about what they said they would talk about. Simply because that is why I came. Since I was there just for fun, I decided to go with the flow and it turned out to be quite inspiring albeit in different ways from the expected.

Spivak read from her autobiography, which is less a theoretical treatise of the world, but more a deliberate attempt to treat the women of her family, their dreams and experiences and explore how that contributed to who she is. Some of the stories were quite moving talking about resistance and failure as well as love, marriage and family. Spivak portrayed herself as a “singularity”, which she designated as “repetition with a difference”. Her biography, she argued, mirrored and continued the stories of the women before her, yet was of an entirely different nature and truly singular. It reminded me, how much we all are a product of our histories, and yet, unique, a thought I also find expressed in Arendt’s notion of plurality. It also made me wonder how different I am from a women who has had an academic career at a time when that was still very different for women (and men for this matter). My choices are quite different ones, and so are my attitudes. The evening was interesting, even if Spivak’s remarks on the role of the humanities were limited and my more theoretical expectations remained unfulfilled.

And she is right, we can always read her stuff, but hearing stories is clearly something for a light summer evening. And for all who care to hear about the future of the humanities, there is still a 2007 lecture to turn to – thank you, internet.

Today I had the opportunity, together with some colleagues, to engage in an informal exchange with Jeffrey Checkel, who has been working on transnationalism for quite some time and is currently focusing on the transnational/social dynamics of civil war. It was an interesting and informing discussion and he was helpfully open to our different approaches and problems.

We spent a good deal of our time talking about mechanisms, which is an important point for me as well in the context of the soft governing project we have been working on over the last years. In a recent text, Checkel gives an interesting overview of the approaches to studying mechanisms (and what that study contributes to the literature on civil war). It seems to be fairly easy to agree on minimalistic definitions that pose mechanisms as some recurring pattern of change, usually discernible through careful process tracing. Causality, however, seems to remain a major problem in two respects. Firstly, it is quite difficult to really establish causality. In our case it is particular difficult, because we look at horizontal mechanims of governing and it is not easy to clearly capture the effects in terms of their causes. This leads to a second problem, namely that of alternative explanations. Checkel described the process of empirically investigating mechanisms as one that went to a number of stages (theorizing, operationalising, data collection, evaluation) and than needed to be complemented by an at least minimal analysis of possible alternative mechanisms in order to avoid the problems caused be equifinality. In the context of soft governing this is, of course, not easy and points towards the need to establish what the relationship between soft governing and other forms of governing is. What we know so far is, that soft governing can occur where hierchical governing and formal sanctioning mechanisms are absent. It can, however, also support hierarchical structures where they are ineffective. It may, finally, also support other forms of governing by enabling further results than could be achieved by the means available to the more formal forms of governing. In each area, causality is to be established in a different way and, I believe, that it cannot be established by theoretical deduction but only by empirical comparative analysis. But than, that’s probably no surprise.

The bridging of gaps was another theme that recurred in different guises. Checkel talked about the challenges of connecting constructivist with rational choice kinds of approaches. And pointed out that it was not wise to work with the more radical positions of either in a collaborative approach. I myself observed another striking gap, which may be exemplified by another line of argumen t of mechanisms we discussed. Typically, mechanisms are deducted, but some cases require an inductive approach, because the literature is too vague or simply inappropriate to make useful deductions about mechanisms. By extension this relates to the ways in which theoretical and empirical research can speak to each other. And I mean that from the point of political theory rather than from the kind of IR-theory and others that are designed as tools for empirical research. It is a long way to go to from a Foucauldian text to an empirical research design. And all too often that way is cut short and leaves one wondering why Foucault was even brought in there (from a theorists point of view) and raises suspicions (primarily by empiricists) that this kind of theory is of little or no relevance to the real world. The important thing in developing empirically relevant theory seems to be that deductive statements are as specific on what things an empiricist should be looking for when trying to empirically investigate theoretically deducted mechanisms. And really, as a theorist I have to say that it is this step that really forces you to think hard and often can only be done at the expense of theoretical complexity and argumentative rigour. Most of the time that is worthwhile. However, it is a relief to remember, that empirical applicably is not the only criterion for theory. Especially in social science it also fulfils the important task of providing spaces in which to critically engage with preconceptions, worldviews and the more general problems of society. It complements thereby the radical explorative research done by anthropologists and others that challenge preconceptions by thick and detailed descriptions of reality.

To me this morning’s discussion was very much about engaging with the empirical viewpoints and testing in what ways theoretical inserts can inform the debate. It remains a challenge, but it is also fun and – I believe – an important task. I am not sure, however, that the interaction between theoretical and empirical discourses is strong enough to really let each profit from the other. On a final note then, this morning was also a stark reminder of the fact, that American political science at this point is favoring strongly empirical, preferably quantitative research. There seems to be a remarkable reluctance to engage in more qualitative or even, beware, theoretical approaches. Maybe it should also be the task of theorists to speak to empirical researchers explaining the added value of our work as a critical and reflective tool. All in all, two well-spent hours this morning.

The papers presented were quite varied and included theoretical treatises – referencing people as diverse as Foucault, Habermas, Bauman and Elias among others – as well as empirical case studies in environmental politics and the politics of the welfare state. Instead of falling apart, however, our discussions soon began to evolve around a rather concise and not necessarily expected set of issues.  So, instead of summarising the individual contributions in their various draft stages, I will try and sketch out what these issue were and how they relate to the research presented.

Firstly, there was, it seemed, an implicit understanding that it is time to move beyond any stark divisions in power analysis and instead think of the diversity and theories as a chance to understand more and better. While of course the issue “what power is” came up, it was not necessary to attempt to settle the issue but quite possible to engage in different mindsets. While approaches could not be abitrarily combined, it was quite apparent that much can be gained by drawing on different sources and even ontological approaches.

The second, maybe more surprising insight was that many papers pointed toward the need to recognise the more affective dimensions of the phenomenon of power. Emotions, imagination and the mechanisms of self-restraint and civilization are fundamental for understanding power. And while the rational, communicative and coercive aspects have dominated the debate, these more tacit aspects remain undertheorised. Interestingly these debates also drew us back to the seemingly inescapable twin of power – namely violence. The papers also showed, however, that there is a broad variety of research in sociology, psycholoy, anthropology and political theory to draw upon to make that connection. It could be one of the important areas of future research on power to look at how theses ideas may be adapted to power analysis.

The final set of questions I want to mention is indicative of the open and even pragmatic approach to power that informed our discussions. Power as an idea is divisive and provocative. Positioning oneself often leads to rigid discussions that lead nowhere. In Soeterbeeck it was enjoyably different. We approached many central questions: What are the normative (and/or biographical) preconceptions that inform our research? How do they play into the analysis (or not)? And how can normative and analytical language games be reconciled? It lead us to discuss ideas such as whether there could be an ethic of power, what the limits of normative and analytic conceptions are and what role there is for critical engagement with the world. Discussing such issues in a differentiated and open way was one of the great pleasures of that meeting.

As social scientists are, of course, in between papers we also touched upon the more general topics of where the world may be going. Quite appropriately, I believe, we spent Saturday afternoon in ’s Hertogenbosch following the traces Hieronymus Bosch (1450-1516)  left in his hometown. His times, I am convinced, in many ways mirrored our own and paintings so full of imaginative ideas and apocalyptic versions are quite an impressive symbol of the difficulty that lies in making sense of a complex and changing world.

How volcanoes come into all this? Well, while (almost) everyone arrived at Soeterbeeck all right on Thursday night, a volcano in Iceland erupted and air travel in Europe came to a complete hold. So ever since Friday morning, the volcano has been a recurring theme as much as power. Everyone travelling back to places like Helsinki, Newark, Milan and Ireland had to develop quite imaginative abilities to develop alternatives and some, finally, had to resign themselves to the fact, that the next week was to go by before they would actually get home. It put a whole different perspective on the way we organise our exchanges, because wonderful as these kinds of workshops are, they involve quite a lot of flying around and make the social scientist’s ecological footprint bigger than maybe it should be. I myself was lucky, deciding on the train months ago when I realised it wasn’t actually faster (nor cheaper) to fly…But than, most people didn’t really have that choice. So maybe it is worth asking the question, how we can organise our discussions, collaborations and exchanges not to eliminate the important personal encounters but to make us less dependent on them.

Papers presented at the workshop:

• Flor Avelino – Power & Mobility in Transition
• Erkki Berndtson – Charles E. Merriam as a Theorist of Power
• Marina Calloni – A communicative power? Reconnecting the private sources to a legitimate political power
• Phil G. Cerny – “Smart Power” in a Globalizing World: Groping for a Compass
• Henri Goverde – Too Big to Solve? Considerations concerning Climate Change, Power and Expertise
• Mark Haugaard – Making sense of power to, power over and constitutive power
• Jonathan Heaney – Emotions & Power: Towards a theoretical analysis
• Ulrike Höppner – Power and Imagination or How to change the world
• Kieran Keohane – The Power of Love as a radiant ideal: turning around the mass psychology of neo-liberalism
• Wiebren Kuindersma/Bas Art - The four faces of power in regional governance
• Nanna Mik-Meyer – Empowerment as a modern, neoliberal form of steering and domination
• Pat O’Mahoney – Habermas and Communicative Power
• Kevin Ryan – Power, Knowledge, and Emotional ‘Detachment’

Jonathan Hearn and Mark Rigstad could not present their papers in person – because of the volcano….