Christian Henrich-Franke (Siegen): From Dahlbruch to the World: Organizing a Company for International Markets in the 1960s

The SIEMAG in Dahlbruch is among the oldest companies in this region. It was founded in 1871 as hammer and in 1927 the company entered the market for rolling mills. After World War II the SIEMAG expanded their array of products and began to produce typewriters as one of the largest manufacturer in Germany with more than 2000 employers. Typewriters were the springboard for the company to enter the expanding market for data procession and data communication. Together with the ZUSE KG the SIEMAG developed the Saldoquick 1, a combination of typewriter and desktop calculator, that very successfully entered the market in 1954.

To sell and produce their products on international markets across Europe and the globe the company decided to reorganise its internal structure in the 1950s. A professional sales centre was opened in Düsseldorf, a new manufacturing base was set up in Eiserfeld and a new office organisation was established at the traditional headquarters in Dahlbruch and Buschhütten. Such a decentralised organisation required new methods and technologies of cooperation. Information systems had to be implemented, which connected the different sites and staff members.

The presentation will discuss the different modes of cooperation between sites, employers and media (technologies), which were established by the SIEMAG in the 1950s and 1960s. Particular focus is put on the interaction between humans and techniques.

Laura Meneghello (Siegen): Meta-Infrastructure and Cooperation in Enterprises: The Pneumatic Tube System

 Pneumatic tube systems have been and partly still are an important element both in communication and transport infrastructure: they can convey letters, files, official documents, small objects, and medicines in a reliable and speedy way. What role they played in private companies and state-owned enterprises and what meaning was attributed to them in the context of organization, modernization, and rationalization of work, but also of employees’ cohesion and identification with the enterprise, will be the object of my contribution. In order to answer these questions, I will bring some examples from sources originating from different actors, such as producers of pneumatic mail systems, companies’ magazines for employees and administrative offices. Moreover, I will apply the concept of meta-infrastructure as an analytical tool in order to grasp the entanglement of the pneumatic tubes with other systems, infrastructures, and practices of communication and organization. I intend the concept of meta-infrastructure as describing both horizontal (in a network) and vertical (hierarchical) relations between medias and technologies. In this way, the pneumatic tube system can be understood as a presupposition for other cooperative practices, but also – due to its system errors – as an element potentially disturbing the attempts and the image of modernization.

Laura Elsner (Siegen): Enterprise Communication in the 1980s based on ISDN

 Recognizing the continuing growth in digitization of the telecommunications network and the advantages and additional capabilities of an end-to-end digital network, the concept of a single integrated network was born in the 1970s. The first set of standards for the Integrated services digital Networks (ISDN) were issued by the Telegraph and Telephone Consultative Committee (CCITT) of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) in 1984. From a networking perspective, ISDN was a new network infrastructure that provided a single point of access to multiple newtworks and to different kinds of networks. In the beginning, ISDN systems and services interoperated with existing services. A full implementation of some ISDN concepts took several years. Before ISDN finally became the international communications standard for allowing voice and data to be transmitted simultaneously across the world, using end-to-end digital connectivity, ISDN were tested in pilot projects.

 The presentation will discuss the role of Enterprise Communication for the ISDN standardisation process and implementation.

Christine Hanke (Bayreuth): Tables and Databases – Multiple Infrastructures of Appropriation and Accessibility

Tables as repository structures enable multiple cooperation in space and time. Significantly their excessive use is closely linked to European colonialism in 19^th century and its powerful attempts to grant accessibility and appropriation of ’new worlds‘.

Taking 1900 anthropology as an example I will discuss in which way tables have been serving as ‚immutable mobiles‘ (Latour) as well as ‚boundary objects‘ (Star/Griesemer) to enable interdisciplinary and international cooperation and vice versa: how these repositories have been shaped through collaborative processes. Following anthropological tables through time I will discuss the afterlives of this colonial medial format and its knowledge and power effects up to today, where they appear as neutral scientific devices that make data accessible for multiple purposes.

Before this background, I will finally sketch, what it means to understand contemporary databases from the perspective of the colonial legacy of this repository practice and it’s enabling of cooperation.

Florian Hoof (Frankfurt/M.): Standardizing Uncertainty: Digital Streaming Platforms

 Contemporary film and media culture is characterized by uncertainty as a result of new technological and economic dynamics: digitization and the advent of disruptive technologies and business models. Movies are no longer viewed in movie theaters alone but also on mobile devices (Casetti 2015). Digitized media files are readily available via streaming platforms, such as Netflix or Amazon Video, or even from highly illegal sources. Uncertainty affects the media industries as well as the citizens, consumers or users within digital culture (Esposito 2013, 2014). Albeit these diverse actors have rather different interests within digital culture, at a certain point they are linked by infrastructural means that underpin the digital network markets. A crucial site where infrastructure, information goods, consumers, pirates at home, jurisdiction, and the market are related are streaming platforms. I approach streaming platforms as “piles of ‘objects’ which are indexed in a standardized fashion” (Star/Griesemer 1989, 410) and look at the strategies involved to deal with heterogeneity and uncertainty. How do they function as an environment for decision-making? What does it mean to attempt to standardize digital uncertainty for the purpose of decision-making (Luhmann 1993)? I analyze the structure of legal and illegal streaming sites to find out more about the basic structural principles of digital uncertainty. It is a critical intervention to challenge arguments from media economics and cultural theory that describe digital network markets as new forms of collaborative capitalism.

Axel Volmar (Siegen): Formats as Media of Cooperation. Some Thoughts on Format Theory

During the last two decades, not least due to the ongoing dissolution of ‘old’ media in the ‘universal solvent’ of digital representation and networks, the notion of the ‘medium’ seems to have become increasingly blurred or even outdated: in the essay collection Was waren Medien? (Pias 2015), for example, ‘media’ are already addressed in the past tense. As one reaction to this situation, media scholars developed a growing interest in the category of formats. In order to better account for the “distributed character of culture in our age,” Jonathan Sterne traces the cultural, intellectual, and political history of the mp3-format in his acclaimed book MP3: The Meaning of a Format (2012, p. 1). In the introduction to the book, Sterne stresses a general need for ‘format theory’ as a supplement to contemporary media theory and offers valuable methodological suggestions toward the study of formats. Yet, a more systematic and historical approach to a theory of formats remains a desideratum. Therefore, instead of focusing on a specific case study, I will explore the diverse significations of formats, both through an etymology of the term and a small typology of its various manifestations and uses. Furthermore, I will present a set of features and functions common to formats in order to pin down their characteristics and media-theoretical significance. By turning to Susan Leigh Star’s notion of “boundary objects,” forged to denote structured spaces, material objects, diagrammatic surfaces or symbolic concepts devised to enable (as well as enforce) cooperation between heterogeneous actors groups and social worlds, I will argue that formats should be regarded as paradigmatic media of cooperation. I will further suggest that formats form fundamental resources and repositories for scaling (media-) cultural production and thus a necessary prerequisite in order to help media-technological processes, such as the process of photographic inscription, grow into ubiquitous media systems and industries, such as‚ ‘photography’ as a whole.

Annette Strauch, Matthias Razum (Siegen, Karlsruhe): Research Data Management for the Collaborative Research Centre 1187 and Research Data Repositories

 Text files, notes, spreadsheets, video footage, voice recordings, archive materials, letters in PDF-format, Code, Software and much more: Research Data in the CRC 1187 comprises any supporting material which underpins or enriches the outputs of research in the age of digitisation. Demands by the DFG to manage any CRC’s data are supported through the implementation of a data management strategy and information infrastructure. The Research Data Policy of the University of Siegen just like any other such policies details how Research Data Management is supported which is fundamental for both quality research and, undeniably, for good scientific practice. The presentation looks briefly at the creation of data in some of the CRC 1187’s subprojects, its processing, analysis, data archiving, data access and data re-use where possible. It asks how can the data be organised w.r.t. planning, creating and preserving with considerations relating to ethical requirements, data-protection-law, copyright and sensitive concerns. A focus will be on the subproject P01: Practice Theory’s Scholarly Media: Harold Garfinkel and Ludwig Wittgen-stein along the Data Curation Continuum. It is intended to illustrate the engagement of the University of Siegen, esp. through joint efforts of ZIMT, together with the University Library of Siegen and other cooperations in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, and beyond, in the creation of a sensible e-Science-Infrastructure for collaborative research on the basis of a wider digital infrastructure with resources (e.g. platforms) and computational tools (e.g. TEI) with the focus on Research Data Management.

Out of the community for the community: this cooperation has been the aim of the RADAR (Research Data Repository) project, a cooperation project of 5 research institutes, funded by the DFG which was to set up to establish an infrastructure that facilitates Research Data Management. The RADAR service is placed in the Persistent Domain of the Curation Continuum. The infrastructure allows researchers to store, manage, annotate, cite, curate, search data in a digital platform available at any time that can be used by multiple (specialized) disciplines. The data repository archives as well as it publishes research data with the focus on the “long tail research domains”. DOI assignment (e.g. cooperation with Data Cite), licences, metadata will be discussed in this presentation. RADAR is in no competition with other established discipline-specific data centres. Possible cooperations include libraries, research institutions, publishers and open platforms that desire an adaptable digital infrastructure to archive and publish data according to their institutional requirements and workflows.

Stefan Wesner, Uli Hahn, Volodymyr Kushnarenko (Ulm): How to Preserve Data Generated by Complex Software and Process Chains? Initial Results from the Replay-DH and SARA Projects

Very often the process of data creation is abstracted as “researchers’ problem space” and considered as input step to the research data management activities performed in “infrastructure operators’ problem space”. As a result, the potentially highly complex processes and steps to produce the data are only covered in a flat data model as entries in the metadata field. To overcome this problem and achieve more accurate descriptions of the steps from input to the output data the collection process must run in parallel to the daily activities of the researchers. While the adoption of even light-weighted data management processes is still in its infancy in many research disciplines asking for a manual bookkeeping of all relevant details seems not to be realistic.

Within the Replay-DH project we therefore aim to collect the necessary information automatically from the working environment of the researchers. More specifically we have developed a client using a novel metadata schema for describing processes in the field of Digital Humanities. As often complex software systems are used within such processes additionally the problem of maintaining unique and long term identifiers for a specific software version needs to be addressed. This can be realised using immutable software releases e.g. in binary form referenceable from a repository. However, if amending or changing the software is part of the data creation process this method cannot be applied. This requires a mechanism to reference a specific development status on source code level for software potentially consisting out of many files, contributed by dozens of developers. Within the SARA project we propose a solution based on Git as code repository and DSpace as repository.

Francesca Morselli (Den Haag), Timo Gnadt, Mike Mertens (Göttingen): Technological Challenges for a Sensible Research Data Management for the Social Sciences and Digital Humanities, Example: DARIAH‐EU

Research Data Management (RDM) is a task which, for many researchers, still lies outside their regular regime, competing as it does with precious time and resources for doing research while confronting them with technological questions that optimally could therefore be outsourced. How can research infrastructures, research institutions and local infrastructure providers assist researchers in coping with the new challenges, creating awareness of the benefits of good RDM practices and cooperating on new solutions? How can requirements across disciplines be assessed in order to establish efficient and practical services? In this talk, we will present some strategies applied at the University of Göttingen and within DARIAH-EU, their motivational and technical challenges and their outcomes to date. With the adoption of a Research Data Policy and the establishment of the Göttingen eResearch Alliance (eRA), the University of Göttingen has undertaken a decisive intervention in strengthening the RDM culture on the Göttingen campus.

At a European level, the arts and humanities research infrastructure DARIAH-EU has as one focus cultural heritage data that can be accessed and integrated in individual or collective research projects. On a practical level, an issue emerges when a researcher reuses an item or a collection from a cultural heritage institution: how can such resources be cited without infringing copyright restrictions or correctly reused by other researchers downstream? The Data Reuse Charter addresses these issues and supports the researcher in the reuse, citation or annotation of cultural heritage data. Since Göttingen is also home to one of the DARIAH-EU coordination offices, as well as housing the German partner project, DARIAH-DE, realising new and effective pathways for RDM issues in the Digital Humanities is viewed as one major aspect of the joint efforts addressed in supporting RDM in the Digital Humanities, and which can only be optimal for research as a whole where local, national, and international infrastructure providers work progressively together.

Matthias Korn, Gaia Mosconi (Siegen): Doing Data. Mundane Ways of Coping with Research Materials

Researchers work with data and other research materials on an everyday basis. Researchers generate and collect; store and transform; structure, organize and process; analyze and interpret research materials in individual as well as collaborative contexts. To this end, they employ a wide range of techniques, tools, platforms and infrastructures of data management. Based on interviews with members of the CRC 1187, we outline the mundane and everyday data practices and strategies that researchers employ to deal with large amounts of heterogeneous and complex research materials.

Through our analysis, we particularly highlight data practices of structuring and ordering research materials. We trace these data practices along the Research Data Lifecycle in the earlier phases of data collection, storage, transformation, and processing. We contrast structuring and ordering practices in these phases with researchers’ expectations, considerations, and attitudes toward giving access to (parts of) their data materials in later phases. By way of this comparison we are able to derive challenges and opportunities toward preempting and supporting structuring and ordering tasks for later data preservation, access, and reuse in those earlier phases. Through this work, we further compare and contrast the institutional logics of Research Data Management with researchers’ everyday and mundane data practices.

Simone Pfeifer (Mainz): Absence and Presence in Transnational Social Relationships

Transnational social relationships are characterized by the geographical separation of closely socially related persons, sometimes over long periods of time. Many studies on transnational migration argue that new technologies can effectively compress time and space to overcome distance – making the physical movement of people (almost) obsolete (Baldassar 2008). Yet rapid or instantaneous communication across distances is not always enough to produce close social relationships, as some scholars remind us (e.g. Hannaford 2014:4). Visual media such as photography, collected in photo albums and/or shared via Facebook, and videos of life-cycle events that are accompanied by conversations on mobile phones or Skype, are crucial to the establishment and maintenance of such transnational social relationships.

In this paper, I explore how wedding images are circulated and appropriated by Senegalese migrants and their families and friends in Senegal. Tracing how absences are acknowledged and presences constructed by means of montage and collage in wedding albums and videos demonstrates the fundamental significance of images – and sometimes their absence – during processes of migration, and in everyday life in translocal settings. Images of absent people travel with people, become digital and mobile, and create gendered spaces of mobility and immobility. Relating the practices of presence and absence during ritual practices and transnational social relationships to discussions on (mediated) co-presence, I show how local notions of absence and presence are strongly linked to wider configurations of love, care, and responsibility, and do not always relate to the ideal of being physically present. Considering absence and presence in visual media and transnational social relationships not as discrete, but as highly entangled fields, I show how a focus on mediation and experiences in and with images can help to understand the “complex assemblage of movement, social imaginaries and experience” (Salazar 2017: 6).

Ehler Voss (Siegen): “It Sounds Like at Least Three People Here.” Practices of Sensory Evidence Among Ghost Hunters in the US

Ghost hunting is becoming a very popular practice of ghost communication in the US and in many other parts of the world. With the help of a lot of technical media such as audio recorders, cameras, modified radios, and a variety of measuring devices, ghost hunters try to make something invisible visible, perceptible, and audible – usually ghosts that are supposed to be deceased human beings, who are still “there”. The ghost hunter’s practice is deeply based on the idea of objectivity and provability, and getting evidence for the existence of ghosts is a decisive aim of many participants. But even if on first glance technical media play a crucial role in getting evidence, sensory experiences are at least of the same importance. Based on anthropological fieldwork among ghost hunters in California, this presentation analyzes the interferences between bodily practices and media practices, and in so doing shows how technical media, human mediums, and invisible beings cooperatively come into being and assure themselves of their existence.

Ivan Tchalakov (Plovdiv): The “Scar Tissues” of Research Experience: Tracing Back the Intercorporealities that Bring in the ‘Not Yet’ There

 “… The last time any rocket of Atlas family failed was back in 1994. So one thing I really worry about is that young engineers do not understand how hard it really is… [and have no] proper respect to the difficulties we do every day… This when you live with failure and you know how horrible it is – there is nothing worse than seeing your rocket blow up, it is terrible thing! I have never lost the child, but I can imagine it is the similar! We call this ‘scar tissue’ – this is when you cut yourself, it heals but there is a trace, you keep the trace of this painful experience.” (Interview with George Sowers, former ULA vise president on research – March 2017)

The paper focuses on situations of gaining and communicating new knowledge and skills in scientific and engineering communities, where lasting relationships are developed between human actors and their material environment. The same could be framed in a different way – we focus on situations where for the first time new things (or new traits of known things) emerge for a limited (or even single) number of humans actors that are to be communicated to the others. Bringing resources from different thinkers (M. Merleau-Ponty, E. Levinas, A. Hennion, and L. Boltanski), the paper provides several short ‘theoretically loaded’ evidences for such situations, derived from the author’s field work:

• A researcher, resisting for years to the pressure of scientific community and the proves that technical objects he was designing are impossible and against the ‘Laws of physics’;
• An amateur-astronomer, fascinated by suddenly accessible technical advances and crossing Deep Sky’s ‘professional divide’;
• A man at high-mountain dam, who after servicing a section of water catchment ducts since several decades becomes ‘one’ with it;
• New Space entrepreneurs designing reusable rocket engine at odds with the established commonsense of the rocket community…

Based on Actor-Network Theory view on such situations as agonistic field of ‘trial of strength’, the paper departs from it in a tentative attempt to develop a non-agonistic approach in studying such situations. It claims that an important part of what is going on there does not manifests itself  and remains unaccounted for the traditional semiotic and discursive methods of study. Based on findings and theoretical frames developed in camera ethnography, the author rise the hypothesis about the relevance of the new methods of filming and analyzing visual data developed there, that might open for empirical observation phenomena of passivity of human actors, inter-corporeality, and reflexivity of objects that have been only theoretically accessible till now.

Bina Mohn, Pip Hare, Astrid Vogelpohl, Erik Wittbusch (Siegen): Sometimes There, Sometimes Not: Children in Families with Smartphones vis-à-vis Ethnographers with Cameras

 With an arrangement of dense film miniatures, we offer an exploration of the diversity of ways of being – more or less – ‘there’ and/or ‘not there’. Our presentation showcases some of the work currently being produced by the camera ethnography team in the project “Early Childhood and Smartphone” (Wiesemann) within the Collaborative Research Centre “Media of Cooperation” (University of Siegen). Camera ethnography, as developed by Mohn, starts from the assumption that what we wish to discover may not (yet) be visible. Hence, camera ethnography aims to learn to see, to make visible, to reflect upon ways of seeing, and to actively engage viewers in the co-construction of ‘thick showing’. Our presentation invites the audience to perceive, distinguish, compare, and interrelate the manifold inter-corporeal and socio-material constellations, relationships, and practices screened in order to discover how presence and absence are collaboratively enacted in early childhood with digital media.

The following ethnographic ‘how’ questions guide our observations, as we focus on the phenomena and (media) practices of doing being there:

How are children and digital media incorporated into practices of doing being there?
How can one be there and not there at the same time?
How can one be more or less there?
What roles can new media play in traditional games of hide and seek?

How are “That’s you” and “I’m here” related?
How are ‘on and off’ and ‘there and not there’ related?
How is doing being there collaborative?
“There’s no there there”, wrote Stein (1937, in “Everybody’s Autobiography”). What happens to ‘thereness” in today’s digitalized world?

Thilo Hagendorff (Tübingen): Information Control and Trust in the Context of Digital Technologies

 Modern information societies are characterized by a virtually unbroken trend towards the networking of more and more technical artifacts. Among other factors, this trend is illustrated by the Internet of Things and by „pervasive computing“ or „ubiquitous computing“. However, simultaneously networking creates a range of vulnerabilities: Security gaps, the repression of data protection, breaches of privacy, hacking or cyber-attacks, the surveillance of telecommunications, etc. The essential feature of all these phenomena is a loss of information control. Methods used to exercise control over the collection, processing and dissemination of personal information particularly in the context of digital media have largely failed. One consequence of this failure and the subsequent end of information control, is a loss of trust in digital services and platforms. This, in turn, results in an increased use of security technologies, making the use of digital media more complex or more complicated and thus make successful cooperation increasingly difficult.

Niklas Barth (München), Martin Stempfhuber (Würzburg): Facebook’s Secretaries. (Un-)Desired Practices of Order

Facebook’s business model consists in channeling and discretizing social networking services and take advantage of the emergence of sociality and subjectivity. It has often been observed how the back end archiving of information leads to a problematic control over private data. What has been noticed less frequently is how this logic of the archive produces front end effects and triggers a “secretary culture” (see Siegert and Vogl 2003) as an incidental side effect. In this paper, we analyze specific practices of handling the like button on the social networking service Facebook. Complementing prevalent critical views that analyze these practices as instances of a culture of insubstantial communication and subjugation, we discover a media ecology of the network that is characterized by secretary work. While users are busy registering, taking stock, filing, administering, and organizing contact lists, commentaries, photos, and likes, a contemporary technique of selfmanagement and self-accounting comes into view.

David Waldecker, Kathrin Englert, Wolfgang Ludwig-Mayerhofer, Oliver Schmidtke (Siegen): On (Not) Being Lost in Cooperation. Perspectives of Young Adults

Online cooperative practices comprise desired and undesired cooperation simultaneously. Web-based companies – Google and Facebook could be named as two big players – use the data presented and connected by users for advertising and thereby monetize the very cooperation they advocate. If we add the ever increasing governmental surveillance and intelligence operations (in which said companies are also known to participate), the inevitable conclusion is that people using web-based services and social media platforms have to rely on technologically and institutionally superior and thus uncontrollable third parties. Hence users cannot be fully informed about what is done to and with their data (deletion or preservation, failing or flawed encryption etc.). The loss of information control in contemporary, digitally networked media has been widely discussed. But do users perceive themselves as being lost in cooperation? The paper addresses this empirical question drawing on qualitative data collected with the research project B06 of the Collaborative Research Centre at Siegen University. We want to investigate how (17- to 19-year old) teenagers and young adults deal with this issue in their everyday online activities. This age group is interesting because the tension of un/desired cooperation is particularly relevant for young people: they engage extensively in online activities and thus are especially challenged to take questions of observability and information control into account. Our preliminary findings detail to what degree young adults consider themselves lost in cooperation and how this relates to their understanding of desired and undesired cooperation.

Asta Cekaite (Linköping): Social Touch and ‘Carnal Subjectivity’: Coordination of Affection and Control in Embodied Social Interaction

This presentation focuses on cooperating bodies in social interaction by engaging in an examination of touch in adult-child encounters in Sweden. Social touch plays an important role in human relations, including areas such as achieving another person’s compliance, displaying intimacy and affection, guiding and monitoring the recipient’s attention (Cekaite, 2010; Goodwin, M. & Cekaite, A., forthcoming/2018). Because of its inherently bidirectional and relational character, social touch provides a fruitful avenue both for examining the concept of bodily cooperation, co-ordination of actions and modalities, and for demonstrating the interactional anchoredness of ‘carnal subjectivity’ of humans as “sentient-sensible beings” (Merleau-Ponty, 1964). In this presentation, I discuss the interactional organization of haptic affectionate control episodes in adult-child interactions. Taking a point of departure in multimodal interactional approach (Goodwin, C., 2000), various characteristics of touch conduct are examined: type, location, approximate duration, function, its interactional context, body-spatial formations and laminating talk. Multimodal sensory design of affectionate and controlling acts involves lamination of touch, talk, gazes and facial expressions. Such acts are deployed in, for instance, encounters, where adults’ disciplining talk is coordinated, i.e., simultaneously embellished with affectionate touch (stroking, patting, half-embracing the child), and ‘positive’ facial expressions. It is demonstrated how the communicative potentials of touch are commonly bidirectional and contingent upon simultaneous acts and experiences, and the participants’ progressively evolving embodied actions. Such interactional encounters highlight the dialectics of care and control, power and intimacy, co-inhabiting the social use and experience of touch.

Marén Schorch, Claudia Müller (Siegen): Negotiation and Presentation of Bodily Perception and Performance in the Design of Supportive Technologies for Older Adults

The making of conditions for cooperation in design projects aiming at supportive technologies for older adults is highly embedded in the negotiations on images about what “successful ageing” might be or should be. Thus, interdisciplinary and user-centred design projects often have to deal with manifold perceptions and images on behalf of varying participating stakeholder groups, such as engineers, social scientists, local organizations and representatives of the very target group. Bodily perceptions and performances and the imaginations thereof appear in manifold facets, may change or may be reinforced, and may have impacts on the final design results.  Diverse lines can be traced to the visioning, design, implementation and appropriation of technologies in IT design projects, for instance the multi-facetted and dynamic aspects of ageing and the discrepancies between imposed images of ageing versus the self-images of elderly people. By examining these dominant body-related attributes we may explore the question how the ways old people are described shape technology design and define a set of ‘principles’ for further HCI research in the ageing domain.

Larissa Schindler (Mainz): Entangling Bodies and Things in the Air

Bodies and things are central dimensions of the „materiality of the social“, yet they are mostly investigated in different lines of discourse. How can we study these dimensions in one perspective? How do bodies and things entangle in social processes and „become“ together?

In my contribution, I tackle these questions based on an empirical study on air travel. In the course of a travel by airplane, bodies and things become relevant in different forms. They have to be gathered and at the day of travel assembled to a mobile formation of bodies and things at the day of travel—the „traveler“ is formed by this entanglement. At the airport this formation is decomposed and subject to different controls in order to form a „passenger“. In the air craft finally bodies are held still by being „parked“ in the seats like things. Especially when bodies behave recalcitrantly, it becomes evident that this is a demanding accomplishment. „Flying bodies“ are fluid formations of bodies and things that are brought into being situationally and change repeatedly in the course of the travel. Bodies and things (resp. technologies) are both media of cooperation, and at the same time, they thereby produce themselves and each other.

Albert Müller (Wien): Cooperation among Cyberneticians

In 1968 US anthropologist Margareth Mead stipulated that problems of cybernetics (and problems of the American Society of Cybernetics as well) should be solved cybernetically. In other words she demanded self-application from the field of cybernetics. In such a way cybernetics of cybernetics became a guiding principle for the further development of the field in the direction of second order cybernetics. Cooperation of systems (of any kind) has been a key topic of cybernetics from its beginnings, so it might be an interesting question of self-application, too, tracing cooperation among cyberneticians.

The term cooperation itself might relate to various dimensions of collaborative work in the sciences (finally, also the persons who cleans the lab contributes in some sense to results). For our purposes cooperation is measured in terms of joint publications. Modern cybernetics started in 1943 with two articles published by two related groups on embracing Norbert Wiener, Arturo Rosenblueth and Julian Bigelow, the other one consisting of Warren Sturgis McCulloch and Walter Pitts. 

The emerging development of cybernetics was mainly based on the work within the so called Macy meetings. The design of this series of conferences taking place until the beginning of the 1950ies focused on cooperation of scientists aiming at creating of new sets of concepts and terms for use and testing in several or better: all of the disciplines. Parallels between the activities of the cybernetics group and those of the Vienna Circle working in the direction of unified science should not be ignored.

A more informal group working on comparable topics started to meet in Great Britain, the so called Ratio Club.

Although the Macy group itself dissolved in the early 1950ies key elements of this network remained active in the following years and decades. At the MIT and at the newly found BCL there was institutional space for further work. The principle of cooperation remained stable, too. As case studies serve Warren S. McCulloch, W. Ross Ashby, Heinz von Foerster, Gordon Pask, Humberto Maturana, among others.

There was one significant exception within the occasional work of small groups and couples of cooperative publishing scientists: the publication of a compendium of the field of cybernetics in the midst of the 1970ies organised by Heinz von Foerster and a group of his students, one of the rare attempts to redefine the field as a whole and paving the way for second order cybernetics. In this case cooperation was not only the basis but became in a reflexive way the subject of the presentation itself.

Natascha Gruver (Wien, Berkeley): Interdisciplinary Cooperation in Philosophy: a Case Study and some Reflections

In my contribution I would like to present and discuss a project collaboration I am currently building at UC Berkeley with various on and off campus partner institutions (e.g. American Institute of Physics, Max Planck Institute, University of Vienna). The main content and data corpus of the project will be the Archive for the History of Quantum Physics (AHQP, various repositories in the US and EU). The (inter-)disciplinary framework of the project includes philosophy (epistemology, ontology), history and social studies of early and contemporary quantum physics. Alongside the institutional and disciplinary dimensions of collaboration, I am embedding the project into the Digital Humanities environment, as the scientific ‘product’ will be a digital archive and website, the AHQP Digital Platform. New tools of Digital Humanities such as data visualization, network analysis or computational text analysis will be employed for exploring, plotting and modeling the archival material.

Drafting and building this complex project, raises not only various questions regarding conditions, scaling and composing an interdisciplinary research collaboration. It also raises questions of science communication across traditional faculty domains, such as natural sciences (physics) and humanities (philosophy), regarding their respective terminology and problem/research horizons. – An exciting challenge I particularly would like to address and discuss in the panel.

Thomas Wallgren (Helsinki): Socratic-Wittgensteinian Philosophy as True Politics

1. In the case of Socrates the ambivalence in the relation between philosophy and politics is explicit. Socrates says he would have died soon, had he engaged in the normal politics of his times, but at one place he also says that his philosophy is true politics. In Wittgenstein’s writings politics is rarely a topic at all, and when it is one the perspective is that of an outsider and the tone usually gloomy.

I want to explain why and in what sense a reading of Wittgenstein which stresses the Socratic aspects of his later philosophy can help to bring to light, in our times, the intrinsic connection between a philosophy radically committed to reason and democratic, emancipatory politics. Here of course only a sketch of the basic arguments and findings can be presented.

2. In this section I explain the main features of the idea that in Wittgenstein’s later philosophy his method of polyphonic dialogue that does not terminate in fixed results is the high point in his effort to understand what unbound commitment to the Socratic ideal of openness to public criticism implies for us as we search for truth. Key for us how Wittgenstein’s search leads to a rediscovery of the Socratic notion that philosophy is „examining of self and others“ and hence both ethical work on oneself and a political search for a community one could feel at home in.

3. Here I explore the suggestion that philosophical examination of self and others is an exercise of freedom in which the search for truth about how to live and act and how to think, praxis and theory, coincide. There is no true philosophy that is not a search for political liberation and there is no true politics that is not always open to the challenge of true philosophy. I note, in passing, that other conceptions of philosophy can also be found legitimate heirs of the Western tradition, but only at the cost of giving up radical commitment to the Socratic, Kantian and Habermasian notion of the public nature of philosophical reasoning.

4. In the last section I try to concretize my highly abstract claims by addressing some examples of how philosophy and politics are one in the discourses of globalization and contemporary philosophy of mind.