Accounting For Mobile Computing



From Flow to Habitus:

Notes on Software, Accounting, Environment

Benjamin H. Bratton

The Culture Industry, SCI_Arc and UCLA

November 20, 2002

Current interest in the problematics of “flow” as a figure through which to imagine the interrelations of software and architecture directs concern toward dynamic, bodily habitation as –again- the key environmental design conditions and criteria.[i] Flows configure the movement of things, real and virtual, through landscapes, concrete and infomatic, pulsing forward as capital fluidity. The language of “flow” affords a definition and conception of subjects and objects as processes, and of processes as dynamic encounters across multiple environmental membranes.

The temporality of architectonic space is modeled as a kinetic swarm, as a plateau of incorporation and fragmentation on which cross-pollinating trajectories of individuation and exchange are mobilized mobilize themselves. The blending of a spatial understanding of the materiality of information with a environmental design agenda for bodies-in-motion has both analytic and practical importance. For digital architecture, the reprioritization of the cultural complexities of social and bodily organization is an improvement over the 1990’s preoccupation with “information” as, on the one hand, an operation of (hardware + “users”) modeled as cognitive processing devices, and on the other as a purely formal, aesthetic generative apparatus on the other. This maturation should allow architects and environmental designers to conceive information technology systems as central to the core programmatic functions of the spaces they construct. Instead of only painting with electronic forms as an element of material surface, architects deploy software programming as an operation of site programming. Software becomes a fundamental element not only with which we model spaces before building them, but also out of which we fashion and construct those spaces, as both tangible structure and experiential flow: “bricks and bits.”[ii] Likewise, spaces from furniture to factories to urban systems become infrastructure for the strategic design of information technology as a core medium of social, bodily complexity.

But the limit of flow as an imaginary is that it tends to direct our attention toward the mechanical performance of software-augmented space, accomplishing this at the expense of affective and cultural performance. The social dynamics of individuation, collectivization, differential embodiment frame and ultimately realize social denotation, distinction, and domination. To the extend that “software,” broadly indexe, is the new mode of production, mode of communication and –for architects of flow- the new mode of habitation, it is certain that software is also a technology of value and valuation. Software –as linguistic convention, as environmental condition- is a medium through which economies of financial, cognitive, aesthetic or functional value are assigned and communicated. However, flow’s overriding interest in field dynamics and organizational tectonics tends to flatten the expressivity of valuation and counter-valuation into just another emergent system behavior. Flow is experience, but experience is embodied, not only infomatic. Flow prioritizes fluidity over interference, and thereby backgrounds resistance.

My appreciation of flow, as a spatial figure of computation, is its dynamic sociocentrism; as my appreciation of flow, as social figure of space, is its technocentrism. Again, program into program. The blending of computational program with spatial program points toward several activations of software-narrated experience: indexical, inscriptive, and predictive. These are the functions of “accounting,” which is and will remain the killer app of augmented space (apologies to gaming, which serves a different set of purposes.) Within the accounting discourse, I (the user/inhabitant) construct a database of information indexing everything known about a certain organizational field according to the cognitive categorical conventions at play (rent, equipment, depreciation, lunch, car payment, meeting with Michael, etc.) As new events ‘take place’ they are cognized and categorized according to those conventions, ongoing inscription grows my indexical database (“new entry”).[iii] In turn upon encountering ambiguous events, I refer to my database in order to make sense of the event and to give it meaning, I administrate its significance (“is there room in my schedule for that?”). The culturally constructed quality of each of these processes, their instrumentality and affect, is precisely why cultural performativity, not just mechanical performativity, is the condition whereby architectonic program and computational program can merge. That accounting institutionalizes the division and organization of experience into conventional embedded hierarchies of information, and legitimizes those as technologies of organization –personal and political- makes it a rich discursive prism through which to critically focus that merging.

Interface

The practical and discursive constructions of “accounting” interfaces for mobile and pervasive computation……. Toward locating these processes of indexing, inscribing and predicting as core functions of augmented space, I review below some (perhaps by 2003, even pedestrian) examples of accounting as a display and input interface. Attentive to Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of the habitus, I critique those interface systems as differential “structures of durable dispositions of action.”[iv] Emergent pervasive software systems, whether hand-held or environmentally embedded, both displace and relocate the interface between embodied social actors and the “linguistic” technologies with which those actors construct systems of meaningful interaction. “Software” needs to be understood simultaneously as language (interface, code) and as architecture (as both habit (cognitive, corporeal) and habitat (environmental, enveloping). “Interface” is understood as both the textual condensations that operate computational choice (the screen interface), and the conversion or transposition of embodied action into a technology of software. The differences between interfaces can be mapped according to different qualities of the private and the public, and according to different modes of transposition (or, after Manovich, “transcoding”) between embodied and virtual layers of action.

The discourse of accounting organizes the subject position of the user as a specific agent of naming, categorizing, exchanging and compiling. As a control text that helps guide activity in the production of practical space, accounting interfaces create circuits between embodied economic activity, the management of that activity according to software, and the production of self as a manifestation of that personal computational management. Accounting software concretizes those habitual categorizations and process-related valuations of experience into interactive confession-narratives, ones that reveal and allow for more general understandings of the social constructions of individuation through software interfaces.

Habitus

Habitus is understood as “the systems of durable, transposable dispositions that structure”[v] Aaron Cicourel defines it as, “a self-regulating system of generative principles whose durable existence produces practices that are the outcome of both an objective structure of social relations and the particularity of the individual phenomenological experience in and of that structure.”[vi] That phenomenology names the experience of being embodied in a navigable, meaningful world. The forms taken by habitus are the categories of possibility afforded by a particular form of embodiment. Human technologies form the horizon of worldly experience: we experience the world through them, and we reflect upon that experience. Habitus is itself that mode of embodiment.

Etymologically, habitus is related to both “habit” and “habitat.” Habitat is the artifactual residue of specific, habitual actions over time, grooves worn into the surface of the environment over multiple durations, and, simultaneously, bodily habits that are the subjective reflection of environment onto self. These processes, habituation and habitation, coordinate each other. They form a circuit whereby habit informs habitat as the artifactual residue of its performative repetition, and also whereby habitat stabilizes the stage and condition for those very habitual repetitions.[vii]

The concept of habitus is employed by Bourdieu to convert the limits of both phenomenological and existentialist perspectives, as well as structuralist and historical-materialist interpretations, into a general instrument of sociological investigation. Central to this conversion is the common nexus of the body, understood as both a repository of historical construction, manifested as disposition, and as an agent in the limit-conditions of those constructions. Categorization of the life-world is a manifest function of this active embodiment., performing the instrumentality of social life: the competitions over the production, definition, valuation and expenditure of various modes of capital (social, economic, cultural) as each themselves are functions of differential embodiment.

Software as Habit

Software condenses embodied habits of thought and action into economic systems of cognitive hierarchies. As “language” software both inscribes and describes social action, and as technology an actor enunciates those systems of cognitive hierarchy as the medium of social action. As a structure of disposable inhabitation, software affords a reproducible form of habit, inhabitation and practice. Some contemporary software, designed specifically for the fabrication and maintenance of “self,” as technologies of its accountability, are direct materializations of computational subjectivization. As for any other sort of habitus, access to sites of reproduction is the architectonic capital with which habitat becomes habit. Software acumen provides access to the dispositions of practice it embodies: access to frames and institutions of reproduction and capital-formation in the digital economy. Software, as the operant life-world technology in the network society, structures in its image the construction of individual identity.[viii] Software becomes not only a variable in the differential display of habitus; it becomes a grammar for the generation of doxa, of the conditions of the game itself. Software not only cleaves a new sort of class distinction deep into a new sort of social space, it is also reorganizes in its own image the terrain on which capital is produced.

The cultural and social legitimacy of any sort of continuous exercise of power is dependent upon its ability to restructure the techniques of the social field into its own terms and shape, and upon its ability to reproduce itself formally and institutionally. The social field in which, and over which, habitus organizes modes of capital is one not simply mediated by software, but most directly composed of software, built of software and of “soft” interactions. The production of the software-enabled habitus is in turn, reinforced by the production of habitus-enabled soft spaces. The acquisition and application of software-related skills is a crucial social strategy in the network society. Software acumen, considered broadly, does not only define the practical means with which to work and communicate in a software-based economy. Because of its importance in the definition and acquisition of economic capital in that economy, it also serves to redefine the quality and character of social and symbolic capital in general. Software produces the conditions of material space in its own image.

Software as Habitat

Software, as both language and technology, is not only a device-language with which we act upon space, it is also itself a material architecture. As surely as any other architectural reality, software is a lively, embedded feature of the social world. Glowing screens co-populate our homes and workplaces, fiber and copper wires traverse and materialize economic routes, and through those routes, software powers and provides multiple species of capital. Increasingly, it is impossible to imagine architectural or urban design projects without considering built space as an infrastructure for software-mediated activity, and without a foregrounding of software as a primary stage on which habitation will play out there.

The “interface, ” as both textual post-genre and as generic metaphor of connection and communication, has emerged as perhaps the dominant material discourse of action across multiple global cultures. Interfaces generalize and condense the utility of physical features and affordances of the life-world. Considered as nodes along the trajectory of a given day, modulating interfaces narrate everyday life. The practice of everyday life requires the navigation of a complex geography of interfaces. The scenario of the day involves a complex mapping of the distributed spread of interface. Interfaces animate most of our important social technologies; they are concentrated in automobiles, on television screens, on telephones, on PDA’s, videogame consoles, on desktop computers, on cash registers, on ATM’s, on portable music players, on remote controls, etc.

Interfaces are central to the programmatic logics of space. Specific interfaces are utilized in specific architectonic conditions: “Offices” are not just where certain kinds of socio-economic activity takes place, they are more specifically where certain software and material interfaces are activated; “living rooms” are not just where other kinds of culture take place, they are, likewise, more specifically where certain software and material interfaces are activated. The same interface specificity differentiates the inhabitation of public banking terminals, automobile interiors, retail purchasing registers, etc. Software and the interfaces that make software into social technologies frame the practice and personality of everyday space, and these modulations of interface discourses are crucial to practical urban and architectural design in the network society.

Mobile Computing and Augmented Architecture

Mobile computing and augmented architecture are two interrelated modes of pervasive computation. Both are dependent upon different modes of user-data interfaces, and accordingly produce different discourses of self-accounting, as well as attendant subject-positions.

The PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) is the iconic device of mobile computation. Representative products run the Palm OS or Pocket PC applications, but others, like the RIM Blackberry, are based less on the model of the handheld computer and geared more toward wireless email functions. Next generation phones running Psion OS or scaled down Java-applets, for example, drive handheld device convergence from the conventions of telephony and speech. Taken as a whole mobile computation should be understood not just as a technique for making data portable, but as a unique, socially complex system for the ritualistic, performative and emotional mediation of personal and public spaces. Mobile computation does not just link individuals and groups; it is also a technology for the production of social agencies and new modes of cultural organization. It demands difficult and contentious new definitions of privacy and publicity, of connection and dislocation. Mobile computing devices allow users to interpret the world, and accordingly input new data to their portable “personal data stack.” Users are able to judge events as they happen by making reference to that stack, and to anticipate or organize upcoming events. Portable software allows for individual users to construct personal control-texts that assist in their mastery of the field conditions of the life-world. It accordingly constructs self-identities in the practical image of those control-texts and that mastery. They do not simply enable the conditions of communication; they also produce the structure of that very enabling.[ix] The interface organizes the world for the user of mobile computation.

Corollary to the outfitting of users-in-motion with personal computational devices is the embedding of software into the physical habitats that surround those users, a concept that may be understood by several related terms: augmented space, pervasive computing, reflexive architecture, embedded software, augmented architecture, etc. Some visions for such a world of augmented architecture describe scenarios in which nearly every object or surface is both computationally intelligent and/or interactively addressable.[x] This convergence of artificial intelligence and artifactual environmental design is commonly understood in relation to either “smart building” initiatives, which employ action-sensitive computers to assist in security and comfort, in stylized infotainment experiments, or in architecturally-scaled digital media arts. Each represents a temporary trans-space pointing toward affective physical data-spaces as potentially generalizable architectural conditions. More mundane, but more widespread and perhaps more durable uses of augmented architecture include factory automation; road-sensing automobiles (and automobile-sensing roads); unobtrusive security and surveillance systems; and augmented vision for diagnostic and repair workers on highly complex machinery such as aircraft. .

In such projects, “architecture” is being redefined as the dynamic integration of embodied and informational spaces. But the integration of architectural design and interface design remains an uneasy collaboration.[xi] Integrating what happens inside the glowing rectangles that co-populate social space with us, and what happens outside of them into a focused, functional program for a truly hybrid space remains an elusive goal. The practical coordination of both design logics involves the elaboration of highly complex negotiations of the private and the public, manifested on the ground in real social exchange. The success of software as habitat is dependent on the success of software as habit, and it is not the data per se that allows for regular, doxic social action. For software to be habit, it is the interface. And as such, it is the interface that both accounts for and allows for the significant accounting of those actions.[xii]

Contemporary and Alternative Accounting Interfaces:

[pic][pic][pic]

Figure One: Pocket Quicken screen shots. Accounting is first a function of categorization, of dividing the world and the things one does in it into discrete fields of interchangeable valuation: a task for which conventional interfaces are extremely well-suited.

Conventional Graphical User Interfaces (GUI) are, but do not have to be, materializations of procedural, referential and instrumental cognitivism. That instrumentalism takes the form of an obsessive economism. Consider Pocket Quicken, the personal accounting package. Pocket Quicken is the most widely used personal accounting software for PDA’s. It is a mobile/handheld version of Intuit’s market defining title for fixed-desktop computing, Quicken. With Pocket Quicken the individual becomes an auto-incorporation as the discourses of organizational accounting are transposed onto the intimate spaces of everyday life. Not only is every penny accounted for, but also every thought, action and expenditure is translated into the discursive codes of the cognitive self. It is a means by which one can keep track of all cultural, social, economic and symbolic capital in a conveniently quantified system of investment and accounting. The cognitive ‘self’ produced by these modes of social relationship to artifactual reality requires, like all constructions of social self, symbolic demonstrations of its limits and capacities. An interdependent genealogy is developed: as the cognitive metaphor comes to reveal itself in accounting (and in accounting software where cognitive classifications are made material as contingent possibilities of infomatic action), and as changes in the information systems of organizations place greater burdens on accounting softwares as the tools of labor where “accounting” comes to stand for organizational action in general, the “cognitivist” mode of labor comes to stand for human social action in general and “cognitivist” software for the conditions of that labor. This cognitive, accounting subjectivity moves out of the organizational field as a generalized condition of social subjectivity and a technically-enforced, reflective, confessional ethics of action and valuation.

As a technology of self, the Pocket Quicken user-experience creates a spreadsheet-narrated biographical circuit between action and inscription, which is based on a transposition of the interface-action institution of one architecture, the office, onto another, the ambient world of the mobile user. As an interface narrative, Pocket Quicken is rooted in the conventions of both the office and Office, the GUI conventions of Microsoft Office’s suite of applications, the lingua franca of contemporary business. Office habituates the field of the office, condensing the particular interaction-forms of the generic global office into both practical taxonomies and dispositions of action. The personal internalization of those durable dispositions is a transposition of habitus, condensed as habit into other habitats. And it is precisely the arbitrariness of those condensations (file, edit, copy, save) that habituates the office/Office hexis into an institution that is socially useful because it is familiar.

[pic]

Figure Two: An image from Asymptote’s dizzying plan for a virtual trading floor for the New York Stock Exchange. 1998.

Alternative accounting interfaces, ones not based on the Office hexis, are organized according to different material metaphors of information, embodiment and architecture. Consider Asymptote’s “Virtual New York Stock Exchange” project in which the architects constructed a sort of immersive interface-environment conceived not around the literal and figurative metaphors of desks and desktops, but of transversal infomatics as a unique generative spatial vocabulary. This literal “environmentalization” of information flow converts data into a dynamic sort of mechanical field in which accounting and acting (trading) involves the pushing and pulling of virtual floors, walls and floating acronyms. The descriptive, prescriptive and predictive technologies of accounting are rendered as floating in a metaphysical vortex of charts and indexes. But when all one requires from a reporting technology is a simple yes or no, interfaces like Asymptote’s may be unnecessarily baroque. Accounting is after all about that primary binary: the bottom line, plus money or minus money, positive or negative balances.

[pic]

Figure Three: Ambient Device’s Orb. Binary interface as architectonic, sensory event.

Another alternative makes this binary logic dramatically clear, and may accordingly prove the superior accounting interface for augmented architecture. The Ambient ORB by Ambient Devices is a frosted glass ball that sits on your desk (or lap, or what-have-you) and receives information from a wireless data network and glows green or red depending on current market conditions. From Ambient Devices’ marketing materials: “The ORB arrives set to track the Dow Jones Industrial Average—glowing green or red to indicate market movement up or down, or yellow when the market is calm. Just plug the ORB into any standard power outlet and it is up and running on a nationwide wireless network—no Internet connection required. The ORB can be customized to a variety of different premium information sources, such as the weather, your portfolio, or your buddies online, making your information just a glance away.”[xiii] Here the informational content of accounting is rendered as a physical, environmental event: interface-as-furniture. Accordingly, “accounting” transforms itself, from a discourse about world events to a direct, sensory presentation of them. For augmented architecture, the interface operates less as an abstract regime of representation and more as one of located embodiment.

Accounting for the Interface

The practice of accounting for the world and what’s in it, and of representing that practice as a matrix of valuations is ideally suited to contemporary interface conventions of mobile computing, as both a technological and a social operation. Accounting is a social technology of comprehensive nominative construction. Accounting drafts the entire world according to the general instrument of exchange value, a totalizing index of human activity in the image of monetary incomes and outcomes. Software already operates according to comparative functions applied to interchangeable values within a compositional field (the principle of the polyvalent database) of software accounts. The mobile user turns to her computer (a transcoding of physical to virtual orders of presentation) in order to account for events past (to inscribe, value and compile them), events current (to activate, interpret and act within them), and events future (to verify, map, and anticipate them). Accounting is a procedure by which the transactions of differently valued forms are “written,” given figurative sense, materiality and systematicity through their representation. Like all regimes of figuration, accounting is a productive as well as a reporting technology. If this were not so, its usefulness would be greatly diminished. If accounting were “only accounting,” then an organization could not make predictive and prescriptive changes to its functions based on this institutional retrospection, which it surely needs to do. Successful accounting retrains thought and action in its own image.[xiv]

Like other technologies of the self, the construction of the cognitive processing in a social agent utilizes confessional rituals of self-evaluation as a means of training its subjects to the principles of their disciplines. The social subject of accounting exceeds the confines of organizational space—or rather organizational space now exceeds itself, and extends “into the home,” where, as a technology of inscription, it realizes itself as a technology of confession. Just as for Catholic confession or psychoanalytic therapy, total disclosure is paramount to the accounting confession, as acts undertaken are written toward an ongoing, unfolding identity-portrait. Particular interfaces concretize the descriptive and prescriptive acts of confession, valuation and anticipation in different ways, and are differentially available, embodied social actors in motion or at rest. As such, the narrative specificity of the interface differentiates its application toward the construction of habitus.[xv]

Concluding Notes: Interference

Flow requires interference, interference requires resistance, and resistance is the condition of complexity. Perhaps what is most interesting about flow is finally what it allows us to ask about interference and resistance, how contemplating the river critically illuminates the riverbank. Or put another way, the preoccupation with acceleration as a telos of flow is not a critical architectural position; it only is a logistical tactic. Accounting, defined epistemically, is a reduction of the expressivity of valuation to the scale of the cognitive matrix. This is not by itself, a critical operation, but it does make plain that accounting’s grammars of inscription, description and prediction are more than mechanical. Their performances are conditions of expression and affect. Flow works as a design criterion to the extent that it can exceed its immediate implication: that the temporality of architectonic space is to be modeled as the exclusive result of encounters between underlying generative systems (tectonic, geologic, algorithmic). Flow should not only make provision for, but even demand, an imagination of what surpasses, ruptures and evades those generative systems as independent operations, not as noise to be recoded and reaccelerated back into the larger metacomplex of circulation. We don’t need more empiricist systems theory; we need indiscrete software of mutation and transvaluation.

If so, if (1) the doxic conventions of cogntivism and the interface conventions fertilized by them, can be bracketed as the arbitrary standards that they are, and (2) the figuration of the architectural user/inhabitant in the logistical image of the FedEx package is taken as a provisional objectification for the purposes of foregrounding the generic qualities of displacement, and not as a political acquiescence to the compulsions of speed, then it will be possible to develop a truly critical architectural language of flow as a problematic of production, scale, interaction, habitation, consumption, embodiment, power, and the decentering of agency.

-----------------------

[i] Archis #5 (2002) devotes an entire issue to the topic of “flow” as central problematic of their investigation of architecture, the city and visual culture. It parallels Doors of Perception #7, Amsterdam, November 14-16, 2002, an international conference of artists, technologists, and architects devoted to the complexities of “flow.” See flow.. Thanks are due to several people with whom I have had conversations that directly bear on what I’ve written: Adam Eeuwens, Lev Manovich, Roger Friedland, Tim Durfee, Michael Speaks, Miltos Manetas, Christian Moeller, Marcos Novak, Norman Klein, Hernan Diaz-Alonso, Cory Doctorow, Sean Crowe, Xeni Jardin, Sadie Plant and Rebeca Mendez.

[ii] In the words of Elizabeth Diller + Ricardo Scofidio

[iii] Or, alternatively, after Edmund Husserl, events are already intended by categorization.

[iv] Pierre Bourdieu has developed the concept of Habitus over the course of several years. See especially Bourdieu’s theoretical explications in Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge, England: Polity Press, 1977) and The Logic of Practice (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990) and key sociological applications in Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984) and Homo Academicus, (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988). Bourdieu discusses the role of the concept in his own work throughout Bourdieu and Loci J. D. Wacquant, For a Reflexive Sociology (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992). For another important consideration of the term for the critical interpretation of spatial practice, see Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1991) pp. 238-241.

[v] Bourdieu, Outline for a Theory of Practice, P.72.

[vi] Aaron Cicourel, “Aspects of Structural and Processural Theories of Knowledge” in Craig Calhoun, Edward LiPuma, and Moishe Postone, ed., Bourdieu: Critical Perspectives (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993), pp. 89-115.

[vii] The crucial interrelation of social performance and bodily repetition has been mapped differently by Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: Sociogenic and Psychogenic Investigations (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 2000); Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1959); and Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1989).

[viii] The phrase “network society” and some assumptions about its role in the construction of self-identity are derived from: The Rise of the Network Society and The Power of Identity, two of Manuel Castells’s volumes in his series Information Age: Economy, Society, Culture (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1997).

[ix] In “On the Mobile: The Effects of Mobile Telephones on Social and Individual Life,” a remarkable white paper commissioned by Motorola, Sadie Plant describes the cell phone as a medium not just of speech but of the different ritualistic, performative, and emotional complexities of a global culture in emergence, one call at a time. Plant is better known for her work on the history of the Situationist International and the feminist archaeology of computer science, but here she develops a textured portrait of the multiple socio-cultural constructions of connection and communication that are rehearsed around the mobile device. See mediacenter/industry/background/0,1083,,00.html for the PDF of this white paper. The success of Plant’s project—the blending of critical sociology and corporate reconnaissance—is not without controversy. See Columbia-based performance artist, Coco Fusco’s, postings to the Nettime list about Plant’s commission. Fusco rightly questions the role of the intellectual as one providing research that doubles as a sort of “paid endorsement” for corporate ventures, and speaks to the necessity of critical independence for the legitimacy of research. She incorrectly, however, reads Plant’s text as “pro-globalization” and “unscientific.” It is clear that as the university becomes more “entrepreneurial,” that hybrid-texts (or “tainted scholarship,” depending on your perspective) will form a politically complicated new discourse in the Humanities, one that is simultaneously more compromised by, and more engaged with, market cultures.

[x] IPv6 is the next-generation Internet addressing system based on a 128-bit string. This scheme would replace the current IPv4 system, which is nearly full—all possible addresses are taken. The 128-bit system would allow for roughly 1023 addresses per person on the planet. The vision of pervasive computing is based on making as many “objects” as possible into net-addressable components of a ubiquitous network. The architectonic horizon cleared by IPv6—addressable clothing, medicine, dwellings, etc.—begs the question as to whether or not one ever actually comes into contact with 1023 objects over the course of one’s lifetime.

[xi] The potential of these collaborations is well summarized by Hani Rashid’s (Asymptote) phrase, “architecture=space=interface.” See Rashid’s article of the same title in Neil Leach, ed., Designing for the Digital World (London: Wiley and Sons, 2002), pp. 134-137. Some interface design companies, such as Imaginary Forces and Razorfish, have engaged in collaborations with architects on augmented architectural projects, and the interest in a convergence is just as strong from the architects’ side of the divide. See the competition for the new Eyebeam new media museum for works by many of the studios currently most deeply engaged in the potential of augmented architecture at museum/arch.html.

[xii] Doxa is “unstated, taken-for-granted, assumed knowledge”—knowledge in a social and historical situation. It is made up of practices, of what is held to be given and true, as well as of belief in facts and values within a certain culture, a certain society, a certain group or a certain discipline at a certain time.

[xiii] Another alternative accounting interface to be considered is Smart Money’s Market Map. Like Ambient ORB, the market is imaged according to a green/red binary. See marketmap. We need this for comprehensive personal accounting. Kasina is a consulting company that tracks and rates innovation in web-based financial management interfaces and site features. See .

[xiv] Anthony Hopwood makes the case that accounting systems are increasingly asked to constitute the activity of management and not just report on it, and that “different information technologies are creating the potential for continued shifts in the locus and organizational significance of the accounting craft. And, not least in significance, increasingly accounting is being examined in terms of the consequences which it actually has rather than those to which it continues to aspire.” See Hopwood “The Archaeology of Accounting Systems” in Accounting, Organizations and Society, Vol. 12, No. 3 (1987), pp.207-234.

As “accounting” discourses are being asked to do the work of organizing human activity, they are also now being asked by sociologists to account for themselves as regimes of structuring culture. Hopwood argues that changes in the structural importance of information technologies have contributed to the development and expansion of the “craft” as a mode of organizational labor, where for the organization, “information...[is] in fact a direct reflection and an integral component of its system of administration and governance.” But do not these changes in structure also bring changes in the formation of the organizational social “self” whose job it is to enact them? Meyer Zald, in his analysis of the evolution of budgetary rules, approaches the issue as a negotiation of spoken and unspoken convention. For him, what is interesting are the changes in the “unspoken rules” that while remaining unspoken, or never even revealed, determine changes in the sorts of managerial action that continues to claim an intransigent “rationality” for their truths. See Zald, “The Sociology of Enterprise, Accounting and Budget Rules: Implications for Organizational Theory” in Accounting, Organizations and Society, Vol. 11, No. 4/5 (1986), pp.327-340.

Bruce G. Carruthers and Wendy Nelson Espeland also make the case that “rationality” as an organizational ethic is the contingent result of contingent rhetorical technologies of truth telling. It is not a self-revealing science, but rather highly malleable social constructions. It is clear that the formations of truth produced by accounting discourses are powerful in the formation of organizations in their own images. But do they also produce accountants in their own image? See Bruce G. Carruthers and Wendy Nelson Espeland, “Accounting for Rationality: Double-Entry Bookkeeping and the Rhetoric of Economic Rationality” in American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 97, No 1 (July, 1991), pp. 31-69.

[xv] The essays in the “Software and Habitus” series are each ventures in the spirit of Lev Manovich’s call for a critical “software studies.” The ideas in “Software and Habitus” were originally developed in a seminar on contemporary organizational theory by Roger Freidland and John Mohr. An earlier version of this piece was published as “Accounting for Pervasive Computing” in Afterimage, The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism. Vol. 30, No. 1, July/August 2002.

Benjamin H. Bratton is Principal of The Culture Industry, an design research consultancy based in Los Angeles. Recent clients inlcude Motorola, Ogilvy + Mather, General Motors and BMC. Bratton is a member of the History/Theory and Visual Studies faculties at SCI_Arc (The Southern California Institute of Architecture) and in the Department of Design | Media Arts at the University of California, Los Angeles. He can be contacted at bratton@

................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download