January 13, 2007 (3): Decisions!

It all began when one of my colleagues and I parlayed the insights of knowledge management into an attempt to identify the role of communication and understanding in corporate decision-making. This began to take the form of a critique of decision support technology or, more properly, the ways in which that technology has now been appropriated by more recent enterprise software; and, with my tendency to always “push back to basics,” I found myself asking more general questions about the current state of decision theory and how consistent it is with decision practice.

There was a real irritant in asking these questions, however; and it seemed to lie in how “understanding,” as we were trying to study it, serves to “inform us to make informed decisions” (allowing for a circular turn of phrase). Well, for a start, what is it that we need to understand? The answer to that seems to be that we need to understand the situation (i.e. state of affairs, where I am choosing that word “state” because this involves taking a flow of events and relationships in which we are embedded and rendering it as something static) in which one or more actions need to be taken; and those actions need to be selected on the basis of one or more decisions. In other words, as any number of philosophers probably discovered long before I did, any theory of decision making must rest on a foundation of understanding the situation.

At this point I have to share some frustration with a book I am trying to read: Narrative Policy Analysis by Emery Roe. At the very least this book should wean me away from too much indulgence in postmodern deconstructionism; but, putting aside his stylistic preferences (obsessions), Roe is reluctant to come right out and say that he is trying to explore how narrative can serve explanation. This is not an unreasonable point to make; but for anyone of a philosophical bent it opens a real can of worms (if not several).

The most important can of worms is the very nature of explanation itself. I had A9 do an exact phrase search on “nature of explanation;” and the Amazon.com frame came up with 1355 books. My guess is that most of them have their roots in analytic philosophy, all sharing a positivist streak that can be traced back to Hempel (or someone who inspired Hempel). In my own intellectual development this is basically the pile of manure in the barn that convinces me that there must be a pony somewhere in the vicinity (but not in the pile of manure)! All that means, though, is that I am still looking for the pony.

However, finding the pony is only part of the story. Once you home in on the nature of explanation, you still have to worry about communicating an explanation to others. In other words you have to account for an explanation, and usually we do this by articulating it through text. This is another can of worms, since we now encounter all the subtleties associated with different text types and how we arrive at communication and understanding through those text types.

On the other hand, if we go back to Ancient Greece (well, if we go back to either Plato or Socrates as Plato tried to represent him), we discover that the two cans merge into one. The label on that can is the Greek noun λόγος, which means all sorts of things that, taken together, seem to orbit around the concept of an explanatory account rendered as text. (This is why “ology” is such a great suffix. The validity of the explanatory account is not necessarily part of the story. So “scientology” involves λόγος as much as “neurology” does!)

The good news is that, with all my experience in writing, I am never afraid of text. Furthermore, as my own blog header tries to proclaim, I do not try to hide from uncertainty or complexity behind fear, superstition, and/or pettiness. However, this may be an occasion to reflect on some wisdom of Richard Feynman:

In physics the truth is rarely perfectly clear, and that is certainly universally the case in human affairs. Hence, what is not surrounded by uncertainty cannot be the truth.

Thus, I am beginning to feel that just about any action we take (not to mention the decision-making preceding that action) cannot help but be “surrounded by uncertainty;” and all we can to do manage is to keep expressing ourselves through texts that we utter and/or write, knowing full well that they will never be clearer than our all-too-muddled thoughts! In other words the final say goes to one of Feynman's most honored predecessors, Niels Bohr:

Never express yourself more clearly than you think.

January 07, 2007: Everything is no Longer Beautiful at the Ballet

Regular readers, as well as those surveying my current Tag Cloud, have probably detected my interest in opera; and, here in San Francisco, that interest is well satisfied by the San Francisco Opera. As is often the case, our Opera House divides it time, roughly equally, between the San Francisco Opera and the San Francisco Ballet. So I am frequently asked if I spend as much time at San Francisco Ballet performances as I devote to the Opera. I have answered this question in the negative so many times that I think I am now well-enough rehearsed to express it in text!

Those who know more about my than Google is ever likely to reveal know that, back when I was working on my doctoral thesis, I was fanatical about the dance, writing regularly for Boston After Dark and sending dispatched from Boston to Dance Magazine. New York was the place to be for such fanaticism, but Boston was not that bad. In fact, it was in a used bookstore in Boston (one of the best places to gather material about dance history) that I first met Leslie Getz, who probably had the most awesome collection of dance-related literature I had ever seen, all in an apartment in Palo Alto! Leslie was the one who taught me the aphorism of dance history that shaped much of my personal aesthetic: Fokine was the Father, Balanchine was the Son, and Ashton was the Holy Ghost. Two other choreographers eventually shared close proximity with this "holy trinity:" Anthony Tudor and Merce Cunningham.

On the popular front this was a time when Jerome Robbins was attracting a good deal of attention, particularly after the impact of West Side Story. He came up through the ranks of the early efforts in American ballet choreography; and, at a time when I would drive from Boston to New York every chance I had to catch the New York City Ballet at the New York State Theater, his "Afternoon of a Faun" was a fixture in the company repertoire. Similarly, Ballet Theater would do his "Les Noces" regularly. With all this as context, Robbins decided to "return to his roots" by introducing "Dances at a Gathering," a near-epic setting of Chopin piano music, complete with an on-stage pianist. (If imitation is the greatest form of flattery and parody the highest art of imitation, then the greatest honor to Robbins' effort came when Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo added "Yes Virginia, Another Piano Ballet" to their repertoire!) I was never particularly happy with Robbins working at this scale (I was even less happy when he tried to take on the "Goldberg Variations"); but this was where the "buzz" was (even if we did not use that noun in those days).

Run the time-line closer to the present when I discovered that San Francisco Ballet was going to include "Dances at a Gathering" in one of their seasons. My wife had never seen it; but she was curious about the company and had a lot more enthusiasm for Chopin than I usually do. I had not seen the company since 1967, when they had visited Jacob's Pillow; and they had gone through a lot of changes since then. So we went, and I am afraid that it did not take me long to start grumbling. What I began to realize was that the days of my fanatical interest in dance were actually the "twilight period" of the "good old days;" and it was unclear when the sun would next rise.

Back in those days, of course, one could not live by Balanchine, Ashton, Tudor, and Cunningham alone; but the alternatives could be pretty disappointing. Robert Joffrey and Gerald Arpino tended to have the strongest hold on consistently putting out disappointing stuff. Time magazine may have been excited about Joffrey's "Astarte;" but all I ever remembered was the way in which the cyclorama had an erection! Nevertheless, even the most rabid fans would still go to see the Joffrey Ballet because they performed "The Green Table;" and they did it very well, probably because the original choreographer, Kurt Joos had an active had in its reconstruction. Also, when we could not go to "live" performances, we would seek out movie revival houses, not just for old ballet films but for Hollywood musicals with "real" choreography in them. Balanchine frequently confessed to being a great admirer of Astaire, and you do not have to watch many of the RKO films with Ginger to see why.

So why is there now such a long dark night of an art form I once loved so passionately? The best explanation I can give is that it all comes down to energy. From the evidence I have gathered, "The Green Table" is a perfect example because Joos understood the role of energy in both theory (some of which he apparently got from Laban) and practice. Both Astaire and Kelly were masters of energy control; and, in Astaire's case, that came in through his very conception of choreography. Every now and then I see a choreographer (such as Forsythe) who seems to understand the role of energy; but that understanding does not matter very much if the dancer's can't "get it." Here in San Francisco I really could not fault the local company on any of the steps in "Dances at a Gathering" (particularly since, given the volume of them, my memory was not that strong); but my grumbling all had to do with the fact that I experienced no sense at all of how to control energy in order to turn the steps into dance.

Will this trend change? That is impossible to predict. When Balanchine came to the United States, no one expected that American ballet would rise to a level that had been associated almost exclusively with its Russian heritage; but, between Lincoln Center, City Center, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York could justifiably claim to be the Dance Capital of the World. Perhaps it will regain that title. Perhaps San Francisco will make a serious play for it. More likely, however, we now live in a digital culture with far less admiration for such performing arts, which means that the best we can hope for is that any records we have of any of those art forms be properly preserved for posterity!

January 02, 2007: Augustine on (in?) the Brain

For me the most fascinating part of Augustine's Confessions is his attempt to come to terms with the concept of time. From the very beginning he makes it clear that he is up against a serious challenge:

What then is time? Provided that no one asks me, I know. If I want to explain it to an inquirer, I do not know. But I confidently affirm myself to know that if nothing passes away, there is no past time, and if nothing arrives, there is no future time, and if nothing existed there would be no present time. Take the two tenses, past and future. How can they ‘be’ when the past is not now present and the future is not yet present? Yet if the present were always present, it would not pass into the past: it would not be time but eternity. If then, in order to be time at all, the present is so made that it passes into the past, how can we say that this present also ‘is’? The cause of its being is that it will cease to be. So indeed we cannot truly say that time exists except in the sense that it tends towards non-existence.

Ultimately, he can do little more than clarify his terminology, anticipating Wittgenstein by concentrating more on how the terms are used than on what they mean or are:

What is by now evident and clear is that neither future nor past exists, and it is inexact language to speak of three times—past, present, and future. Perhaps it would be exact to say: there are three times, a present of things past, a present of things present, a present of things to come. In the soul there are these three aspects of time, and I do not see them anywhere else. The present considering the past is the memory, the present considering the present is immediate awareness, the present considering the future is expectation.

What has interested me the most is the extent to which our increasing knowledge of the physical brain has turned out to align nicely with Augustine's metaphysical soul-concept. The "present of things past" anticipated that engram that Lashley invested so much of his life in trying to find without success, although within the last ten years in appears that Richard Thompson and his colleagues at USC have managed to associate it with a localized region in the cerebellum. Meanwhile, we have Gerald Edelman to thank for demonstrating that the "present of things present" is actually a "remembered" present. New BBC NEWS has reported results from Washington University concerning the "present of things to come," presenting evidence that this, too, is localized, in this case in the left lateral premotor cortex, the left precuneus and the right posterior cerebellum. It is nice finally to home in on some good news at the start of a year that began with so many ill omens!

December 29, 2006: Organizational "Health Maintenance"

I would like to continue to explore the point I raised on December 26 to the effect that enterprises need "health maintenance," rather than "illness treatment." Obviously, if an organization is in a pathological state, then that pathology needs to be treated; but there are (at least) two aspects of health maintenance that are likely to facilitate treatment.

1. There is the need to cultivate an awareness of pathologies, since, as if often the case with human patients, it is often (frequently?) the case that the organization does not know when it is in a pathological state.
2. There is also the need to cultivate preventative measures: An organization that is aware of a potential pathology is better equipped to "nip that pathology in the bud," dealing with it before it has a serious impact.

So how do we implement such measures for an organization? In medicine we know about the physical examination and the frequency with which it should be performed (having now "graduated" to an age where I have to have mine annually). However, this time scale is to coarse for the world of business. An enterprise functions on the basis of ongoing business processes, and those processes need to be monitored in the course of their functioning. IT is now in a position the make sure that such processes are running reliably and accurately; so this is the first step towards making the health maintenance metaphor "work."

However, such monitoring cannot be conducted for its own sake. The data generated by monitoring drives the formulation of hypotheses that address detecting, diagnosing, and treating pathologies. Some rather interesting visualization technology has gone into "driving" dashboard displays that deliver monitoring data; but the hypothesis data generated by managers at all levels of the enterprise are equally important to health maintenance. When a hypothesis is posed, it will (almost?) always need to be vetted by several managers throughout the enterprise; so we need some kind of "dashboard visualization" to provide awareness of the current "state of the hypothesis space" and facilitate the vetting process.

How can all of this take place? In his book Images of Organization, Gareth Morgan addressed this question by bringing another metaphor into play:

The formal analysis and diagnosis of organizations, like the process of reading, always rests in applying some kind of theory to the situation being considered.

In other words the real purpose of visualization, of both monitoring data and hypothesis spaces, is to enable managers to read their organization, a concept that inspired the subtitle of James Taylor's fascinating book on organizational communication. I would further argue, to draw upon another previous discussion, that we are talking here about a literary approach to reading, rather than any kind of objective or analytic one. In the context of another favorite theme, managers should be able to think about the people in an organization as subjects rather than objects. The danger of visualization is that it serves up abstractions that entail excessive objectification, but this danger is more likely to add to any looming pathologies than to deal with them.

This then leads to my final point, which is the recurring question of whether or not tools such as Wikipedia and Google are eroding our skills for being critical readers, whether of texts or of organizations. We are more interested in tools that deliver answers, and reading is not necessarily about delivering answers. As I previously suggested, sometime one has to go "roundabout" the questions; and literary reading enables such "roundabout" thinking. This may take more time that finding an answer from a search result or a Wikipedia entry; but, where the health of an organization is concerned, getting to the most effective answer is more important than getting there "efficiently."

December 28, 2006: On Tags

I was glad to see Yahoo! 360° introduce a tagging feature for blog entries. Given that I cannot really count on the Search tool for anything useful, tagging is the next best thing. Readers may even recall that I started experimenting with using Flickr for the images I was incorporating in order to tag those images (many of which were not photographs). However, once I hit the maximum number of images I was able to store without charge, I decided that I was not getting enough benefit to justify paying for an upgrade. So over the last couple of days I have been adding tags to all of my blog entries, drawing upon the tags I had assigned to the images where appropriate; and, so far at least, I have been relatively satisfied with the results. (Among other things, they helped me to find the proper destination for the above hyperlink!)

Having said all that, however, I should make it clear that these are my own tags for my own use purposes. I do not expect them to be of much use to anyone else unless I tell someone to look at a collection of entries associated with a specific tag. In this respect I subscribe to one of Wittgenstein's fundamental precepts: Words only convey meaning in the context of how they are used. I know my own contexts of use well enough to use my own tags; but I doubt that any amount of my reading of anyone else's texts will provide me with a use-model that will allow me to negotiate that persons tags for my own use-purposes. To put this another way (and draw upon a past discussion), tags are a highly impoverished "solution" (which is why I am using scare quotes) to the problem of description. This is because, at the end of the day, description is most effective if it is recognized and rendered as a literary form, far more subtle than we tend to take it to be. We tend to associate description at its best with well-written fiction; but, to reflect on a recent discussion, the well-edited review is also, by its very nature, an excellent example of good descriptive writing. My great fear is that our increased immersion in the use of "rich media" may eventually erode the talent of skilled literary description, and we may be left with little more than increasingly sophisticated tagging systems. This will erode not only our literary capabilities but our very capacity to make ourselves understood.

December 27, 2006: Identity Meets the Cluetrain Manifesto

What is Hecuba to you or you to Hecuba? This injunction (shameless appropriated from Shakespeare's Hamlet) applies not only to actors but to all of us in the “roles” we play (our “presentation of self,” as Goffman called it) in everyday life. However, there is also a grander scheme of things that I introduced some time ago. This involves what I feel is the most important lesson from Plato’s “Theaetetus” dialogue. This is that, while none of the four definitions of knowledge considered can survive Socrates' critical examination, Socrates does demonstrate how the concept of knowledge is tightly coupled to three other key concepts: memory, being, and description (λόγος).

I would now like to pick up where my last discussion left off and examine the concept of “Being.” I would argue that this concept needs to be sorted into the being of objects and the being of subjects, i.e., the agents who engage with objects; and this latter class of being has to do with identity. In other words any inquiry into the nature of identity involves pulling at a thread that is tightly woven to many other critical threads, including the thread of knowledge itself!

These couplings have been particularly well appreciated by George Herbert Mead, particularly in his exploration of the concept of symbolic interactionism. I like to say that the motto of symbolic interactionism is: “No perception without personal interaction.” For my money this is the underlying premise without which the assertion that “markets are conversations” cannot make any sense. Indeed, it is also the premise behind Habermas’ theory of communicative action, which argues that “communicative action” (as Habermas defines it) is the fundamental prerequisite for understanding. Since it seems valid to assume that markets can only operate effectively within a context of understanding between buyers and sellers, Habermas’ theory ultimately explains why markets are conversations; but I am afraid that this kind of foundational thinking has gotten lost amid the 95 theses of the Cluetrain manifesto!

December 26, 2006: "Clinical" IT

I would like to continue my thoughts on the question of whether or not there is a suitable academic foundation for "service science" as inspired by my reading of Decision Support Systems: An Organizational Perspective, by Peter G. W. Keen and Michael S. Scott Morton. This time I would like to begin with a question posed to me last October by a friend working at Accenture: He wanted to know what Accenture could do to make IT organizations better at what they do. My point of departure for answering this question involved an analogy from medical practice, viewing the IT organization as responsible for the "health" of the organization. I argued that IT developers needed to take a clinical approach to "taking the history of the patient," who comes in with some set of possibly pathological symptoms. I then extended the analogy by arguing that enterprises need "health maintenance," rather than "illness treatment." Ultimately, this conversation did not progress, possibly because the analogy was too much of a departure from the "normal practices" (as in "normal science") of both Accenture and its customers.

Imagine my surprise then in discovering that Keen and Scott Morton proposed a "clinical" approach to the development of decision support systems! What was particularly interesting was that they recognized two different levels of diagnosis that need to be performed by IT developers. The primary level of diagnosis relates to what I called "taking the history," identifying what needs to be changed and how IT can facilitate that change. However, they insisted that it is also important to diagnose symptoms of resistance to change, because, if the resistance is not "treated," it is not going to matter very much how effective the proposed solution is. The forces of resistance can undermine even the best of ideas, no matter how well they are implemented!

I then noticed in the Bibliography that Keen had been advocating this clinical stance since 1975, when he wrote a Sloan School Working Paper on the subject. That means that the idea has been around for over 30 years but has never really "taken" in the world of enterprise software. I suspect one reason for this is that this kind of thinking does not fit into the specializations found in most academic curricula. One does not go to business school (or, for that matter, computer science departments) to learn about "the socio-technology of diagnosis," let alone the intellectual skills required for such diagnosis, such as an understanding of the subjective (as well as objective) motives behind speech acts or the use of narrative as a tool for "thinking in time." As a result, Keen's insights seem to have faded into obscurity.

Meanwhile, the history of attempts to make IT useful to the enterprise continues to repeat itself. As Marx said, what is tragedy the first time around becomes farce with the next iteration. However, he did not say anything about any subsequent repetitions!

December 23, 2006: What Business Schools SHOULD Teach about Service Science

During this week's escape to Death Valley (where even a dial-up connection to the Internet is not very reliable), I took along my used copy of Decision Support Systems: An Organizational Perspective, by Peter G. W. Keen and Michael S. Scott Morton. The more I looked into this "time capsule" from the mid-seventies, the more I realized that the service science evangelists were doing themselves a great disservice by ignoring it. The authors even go so far as to say that decision support technology should not be viewed as a product that a technical team installs and then goes on to the next client. Instead, the team has a service obligation to the client to familiarize the client with the technology, bring the client up to speed on how that technology may best be used, and even update the technology to accommodate newly discovered client needs. Could it be that we knew more about service 30 years ago than we do today (and may I be contentious enough to suggest that we owe our "acquired ignorance" to the social beings we have become by virtue [sic] of the Internet)?

One passage in the final chapter of this book has stuck with me with regard to all the quibbling over creating an "academic discipline of service science." It is in a paragraph in which the authors discuss how those managers who are most likely to benefit from decision support technology should learn about that technology:

The best education for them is the building of a relationship with an effective DSS developer and, most importantly--the insistence on being committed and involved in the design an implementation process. A skilled manager who has flexibility of mind can and almost certainly should play a major role in the design of any DSS that she or he sponsors.

In other words what counts most on the managerial side is that "flexibility of mind" that will support a rich and profitable engagement with the developers trying to bring a new technology into play. This is as true today as it was thirty years ago. You would think we would know this by now; but, as the cliche keeps saying, "The Internet changes everything." Perhaps that crack about "acquired ignorance" has more to it than fiesty contentiousness!

December 18, 2006: Another Triumph for Virtuality

It would appear that Time has now lined up behind all of the other lemmings trying to escape reality. They have drunk the Kool-Aid of Web 2.0 propaganda and named as Person of the Year the new Digital Everyman who locks out reality with his iPod earbuds, neverending cellphone activity, and a desperate search for companionship on Second Life. To reflect on a much older cover of this magazine, the question is not whether God is dead but whether, at least in the Time view of the world, reality is dead!

December 14, 2006: An Economist for the Age of the Service Economy

As we continue to debate the question of whether or not service is a "science" and what sort of academic curriculum (if any) provides the necessary foundations for study we would do well to check out the resume of Deirdre McCloskey in Alan Ryan's New York Review article about her recent epic volume, The Bourgeois Virtues. McCloskey is, in Ryan's words, "a professional economist, trained in the Chicago School;" and, back when she was Donald McCloskey, he was one of the key economic advisers to the Reagan administration. (The "pronoun shift" was documented in her book Crossings, briefly cited by Ryan and excellently reviewed by Maxine Kumin in the November 14, 1999 New York Times Book Review.) With both Ronald Reagan and a sex-change operation behind her, McCloskey is now a distinguished professor of economics at both Erasmus University in Rotterdam and the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is also a professor of rhetoric and English and has published knowledgeably in the areas of history of ideas, social theory, and philosophy. Given that both the theory and the practice of economics now has to contend with the rise of the service economy (not to mention globalization), I can think of no better combination of academic disciplines to meet this challenge!

December 13, 2006: World Bank Optimism

Some (all?) stories are best read in context. Today's Financial Times ran a story under the headline "World Bank offers robust global outlook." Here are the lead paragraphs:

The World Bank's annual global economic prospects report, released on Wednesday, is a rare thing these days: a study glowing with optimism about the future for globalisation.

The report not only says that the global economy should do well in the next two years, but that globalisation between now and 2030 will proceed apace.

This is one of those articles I had to read all the way from beginning to end, just to see if anywhere in this rosy account was any column space devoted to the more pessimistic account from the World Bank's own independent assessment arm. Sure enough, any evidence of the World Bank's own exercise in self-criticism was missing from this story; but then that assessment was yesterday's news (actually from December 8)! Have we come to the point where the annual report from the World Bank is about as credible as the annual reports from Enron used to be?

Alternative, it this just evidence of the extent of our addiction to optimism? The other day I was watching La Haine on the Sundance Channel. There is a running gag about a guy who has been pushed off the roof of a skyscraper. As he passes each floor, he says to himself, "So far, so good!" The punch line is: "It's not how well you fall but how well you land!" The independent assessment of the World Bank seems to be asking questions about how this institution will land, but the annual report would rather talk about how well they are falling!

December 10, 2006: Two Banks

In one of those rare ironies of coincidence, the Nobel Peace Prize was just presented to Muhammad Yunus and his Grameen Bank in the wake of a report highly critical of the World Bank released by its own independent assessment arm. Here are some specific numbers from the account of this report in Friday's SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE:

Among 25 poor countries probed in detail by the bank's Independent Evaluation Group, only 11 saw reductions in poverty between the mid-1990s and the early 2000s, while the other 14 suffered the same or worse rates over that term. The group said the sample is representative of the global picture.

It is easy enough to be glib about the fact that Grameen is doing everything right and the World Bank is doing everything wrong, and that would obviously be a specious generalization. Nevertheless, it might be worth considering what differentiates these two lending organizations besides the magnitude of money involved. I would like to propose the hypothesis that, because of its magnitude, the World Bank operates on an institution-to-institution basis (a generalization of the B2B concept that has become part of our technical jargon). Grameen, on the other hand, was conceived by Yunus to operate on an individual-to-individual basis. It is only by thinking of a loan applicant as an individual person (subject) that one can consider the value of advancing a $2 loan (an example given on the radio the other day). This is not to say that the world would be a better place without institutions, since there are clearly situations in which we benefit from them. However, poverty and related disasters, such as flood and famine, are, as I have previously tried to articulate, problems of individual subjects; and institutions that can only deal with those people as objects inevitably make matters worse, just by virtue of that institution-to-institution thinking. Since I am still basically a Hegelian, I would certainly like to see a dialectical synthesis of these two perspectives; but I doubt that we can arrive at such a synthesis before beefing up the individual-to-individual side of the argument. Also, while there is no doubt that Yunus' efforts have advanced the cause of peace, the Nobel Committee could have made an even more powerful statement by also awarding him the Economics prize!

December 06, 2006: The Digital Highway just got more Hazardous!

Last month it was motorists wearing iPod ear buds while driving. In the American tradition of one-upmanship, we now have a CNET report of a motorist in Washington tapping into his BlackBerry while driving on Interstate 5 (presumably at Interstate speeds). Paying more attention to the BlackBerry, this motorist failed to notice that the traffic in front of him had stopped. Caroline McCarthy delivered the punch line for CNET News.com as follows:

The result was a five-vehicle crunch that included a 28-passenger Community Transit bus and a car that was carrying a woman and her 5-month-old son.

As of this writing, seven indignant comments have already come in for Ms. McCarthy's report; but one has to wonder how many of those indignant writers are fully focused on driving when they are behind the wheel!

December 02, 2006: Psychoanalysis at the Opera

Following the final matinee of their current production of Puccini's Manon Lescaut, the San Francisco Opera is joining forces with two members of the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute & Society, Linda Lagemann and Milton Schaefer, for "an exciting psychoanalytic discussion" of the opera. Now I am in favor of anything that helps opera audiences to pay more attention to what is happening (either on the stage or in the pit); so I would have preferred such a discussion to take place before the final performance. However, where this particular opera is involved, it is worth asking these analysts just whose psyche they plan to analyze.

Opera fans know that two operas in the standard repertoire have been written about Manon. The really rabid fans probably also know that Puccini's publisher went to great lengths to make sure that Puccini's project would be substantially different from the earlier opera by Massenet, since that earlier production had become a major hit in the opera world. Anyone with this background probably knows that Manon was the creation of the Abbé Prévost. What is probably less well known is that the "novel" Manon Lescaut is actually Books V through XI of Mémoires d'un homme de qualité qui s'est retiré du monde. I have never encountered this work in its entirety, nor met anyone who has done so. I am not even sure of the total number of Books in it, but I think I found one source that said it was twelve. The general consensus it that the whole thing is a rather tedious autobiographical meditation (confessional?), which would have been totally forgotten had not the Manon portion been extracted and become one of the most heavily-sold books of all time in France.

This is where things get interesting. First of all it would appear that Manon is based on one of Prévost's own (probably unhappy) memories. She may even have been the reason he decided to withdraw from the world. Secondly, Prévost's text, because it is autobiographical, is a first-person narrative. The account of Manon is told by the young "man of quality" who was smitten by here, the Chevalier Des Grieux. So, if we are going to talk about psyches, the first question we need to ask is whether or not Des Grieux is a reliable narrator. My guess is that he is not. I would bet that Prévost lusted after some peasant girl in his callow youth, never mustered up the courage to talk to her, and wove an elaborate story around her instead. In other words Manon stands in relation to Des Grieux/Prévost somewhat the way Dulcinea stands in relation to Don Quixote. However, Prévost is more interested in the primrose path to perdition than in chivalry; so Manon becomes the instrument of his cautionary tale.

I would now guess that Puccini never bothered to think about such details. Indeed, the documentary evidence seems to indicate that he was a smitten with Manon and Des Grieux was. So here he is taking on the fictitious product of an unreliable narrator (and, while this was one of his earlier works, I find more depth in the music than in his more warhorse-like operas). So who belongs on the analyst's couch?

Puccini is my number-one candidate. Anyone who can get that wrapped up in an imaginary character has got to have a psyche worth investigating! I would even argue that, at the end of the day, Puccini is probably a far more interesting figure that either Des Grieux or his creator Prévost. Indeed, if we could get to the bottom of Puccini's obsession with Manon in youth, we might have a better understanding of why, at the end of his life, he decided to take on the suitor-killing Turandot!

December 01, 2006 (2): The Fear Factor Compounds

The impact of the "imams on a plane" story is still being felt. Reuters began a story with a Washington byline this morning as follows:

When radio host Jerry Klein suggested that all Muslims in the United States should be identified with a crescent-shape tattoo or a distinctive arm band, the phone lines jammed instantly.

The story then went on to describe a depressing sample of callers who reinforced Klein's suggestion in any number of vindictive ways. After an hour of this, Klein let the cat out of the bag:

At the end of the one-hour show, rich with arguments on why visual identification of "the threat in our midst" would alleviate the public's fears, Klein revealed that he had staged a hoax. It drew out reactions that are not uncommon in post-9/11 America.

"I can't believe any of you are sick enough to have agreed for one second with anything I said," he told his audience on the AM station 630 WMAL (http://www.wmal.com/), which covers Washington, Northern Virginia and Maryland

"For me to suggest to tattoo marks on people's bodies, have them wear armbands, put a crescent moon on their driver's license on their passport or birth certificate is disgusting. It's beyond disgusting.

"Because basically what you just did was show me how the German people allowed what happened to the Jews to happen ... We need to separate them, we need to tattoo their arms, we need to make them wear the yellow Star of David, we need to put them in concentration camps, we basically just need to kill them all because they are dangerous."

As far as I am concerned, responsibility for this culture of fear lies primarily, if not entirely, with our Federal Government, particularly in the Executive Branch, which has probably done more than any previous administration to achieve results through fear. Any number of analysts have discussed the extent to which this administration was planning its moves according to the Nazi playbook, but that kind of analysis tends to be too abstract for the general public. Klein had the guts to move from the abstract to the concrete, but it remains to be seen whether or not his demonstration will have any impact.

December 01, 2006 (1): It's the People, Stupid!

Elise Ackerman has a great article in today's San Jose Mercury News, now available through E-Commerce Times. It is basically a "report from the trenches" on how Google Checkout is being received as a potential threat to PayPal. One of the major punch lines has to do with what happens when things go wrong. Dallas comedian Amelia Klaymann hit one of those speed bumps and ended up getting charged five times for a computer monitor. Needless to say, she responded with a sense of urgency, only to discover that there was no help desk she could call: all communication was conducted through electronic mail.

Now, in all fairness, if Google Checkout is providing electronic mail communication with customer support, then at least they are ahead of Amazon.com in this game, who only provides you with a rather limited form to fill out. If you have a problem with Amazon.com and you have screen shots to support your claims, there is no way you can pass that information to them. So, if Google Checkout lets you send "real" electronic mail, complete with whatever attachments may be useful, such as screen shots or scans of paper receipts, they are at least better than some of the other players.

However, the other punch line has to do with how Ms. Klaymann finally managed to communicate with Google. She wrote up her experiences in her blog. More specifically, she wrote, "It turns out Google does not have anyone you can talk to in real life -- only via e-mail;" and, as fate would have it, a Google manager happened to read her blog (which happened to be hosted by Google's Blogger service). So Ms. Klaymann ended up getting the $20 incentive credit for using Google Checkout in the first place and had all five charges voided, meaning that she got her monitor for free.

Before we write this off as a happily-ever-after story, though, we should ask a couple of questions:

• If Ms. Klaymann had not used Google Blogger for her blog, would any Google manager has seen it? (Hint: I have given the URL for this blog to Google Blog Search and have yet to find anything on it with their search tool. So much for me keeping my blog in "enemy territory!")
• Has Ms. Klaymann's experience had any impact on Google Checkout operations; or, for that matter, has Ms. Ackerman's report of those experiences had any impact?
• When will the purveyor's of e-commerce recognize that there are all sorts of things that the "e" can facilitate; but, as soon as things go wrong, people want to talk to people willing to take the time to listen, understand, and act?

November 30, 2006: Does Music Have a Future?

I decided to do a Google phrase search on "future of music." I got 1,970,000 hits. Pride of place under the current page-ranking algorithm went to the Future of Music Coalition. These guys have a manifesto, which was written and published on June 1, 2000. It starts off with wonderful manifesto-like language, which we do not encounter very much these days:

The history of the American Music Industry is a disheartening one, which largely details the exploitation of artists and musicians by opportunists and those without the musicians' best interests at heart.

For too long musicians have had too little voice in the manufacture, distribution and promotion of their music on a national and international level and too little means to extract fair support and compensation for their work.

So what we are really talking about here is the future of the music business, particularly the commercial survival of people wanting to make a living as musicians. This is also the focus of a recent book entitled The Future of Music. The cover is pictured above and is hopefully clear enough to show that this book also calls itself a manifesto; and its manifesto is also about music as a business.

Now I do not have anything against professional musicians (particularly since my kid brother is one). However, all this trafficking in manifestos probably needs to be examined in the context of my recent attempt to get below the surface of the iPod phenomenon. See, as soon as the manifesto writers get on the bandwagon of a digital future (which is definitely the case with the aforementioned book), then it is not long before the iPod is paraded out as the wave of the future. At this point it is important to remember that iPods now provide content other than music, so any examination of the technology must take content such as video and podcasts into account. Consequently, if we buy into the argument I have been trying to promote, which is that the iPod is, above all other things, a convenient mechanisms for detaching from reality, then the fact that it provides music as content becomes relatively incidental.

At the end of the day, if there is a "digital music revolution," then it has precious little to do with music; and the primary reason for this is that the technology behind this revolution is solidly locked into what Noam Cook and John Seely Brown call an "epistemology of possession." The iPod is a handy little toy that provides us with a new way to acquire and manage old possessions, and it delivers those possessions as a cocoon to protect us from the cruel world out there. However, if we want to talk about music, we have to recognize that music (as opposed to the music business) is more about practice than about possession. Those practices involve not only making music (composing or performing) but also going to performances and playing recordings. Cook and Brown argued that talking about practice requires a different epistemology from talking about possession; and they envisage a "generative dance" that engages both epistemologies.

My fear is that if the only talk we hear about the future of music has to do with possession, then practice may drop out of even our peripheral vision of the world of music. Unfortunately, I am "old school" enough to believe that you cannot have music without practice. Thus my choice of headline: If we embrace the manifestos of the "future of music" with too much enthusiasm, the consequence may be that music has no future at all!

November 28, 2006: Terrorism 101

One of the things that makes Max Rodenbeck's essay on terrorism for the November 30 issue of The New York Review so compelling is his choice of introductory quotations. The one from Clausewitz could be expected: where else would we turn when having to confront the fiasco of our own military adventurism. However, it is the perceptiveness of the second quotation that is far more fascinating:

The actual reason for the failure of the US policy in its political field and international relations is their lack of information regarding the world's realities and also the enclosure of the decision making people of that country in their own fabricated and false political propaganda.

It would not be hard to imagine these words coming from the apologetic mouth of Robert McNamara in The Fog of War, but that guess would fall about as far from the mark as one might imagine. No, the author of that sentence is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad; and the text is an entry from his personal blog written after his visit to New York this past September. Of course one of the ways in which we all deprive ourselves of "information regarding the world's realities" is through our assumption that those who disagree with us substitute fanaticism for reflection; and, as far as Ahmadinejad is concerned, the media (with the possible exception of Mike Wallace), do a very good job of fueling that assumption. I suspect that Ahmadinejad's blog is written in a language that I cannot read very well (if at all); so I have no idea how consistently reflective he is in his writing. However, Rodenbeck made a powerful rhetorical move by situating him next to Clausewitz as the "voices of reason" that preface his analysis.

His next rhetorical move resides in his choice of language to describe the current "state of play" in those military adventures:

What has happened … is that the mental construct that framed the Bush administration's reaction to September 11 as a "war" is beginning to fall apart.

At the end of the day, it is not a matter of the illogic of White House rhetoric about democracy. Instead, it is about a "mental construct," "fabricated" (to use Ahmadinejad's language) by virtue (sic) of "lack of information regarding the world's realities." We can, of course, address the question of whether this lack of information had to do with the willful decision to sublate information in deference to faith; or we can flip the coin around and blame it on the myopia of those "dogmas" of Western civilization that sublate other cultural perspectives in deference to "scientific" thinking. Whether we followed the faith-based path of fundamentalism or the rationalist path that consumed McNamara, we blundered badly; and there is a supreme irony that a blog entry by a supposed faith-based fundamentalist should reveal such reflective insight into our blunder.

Most of Rodenbeck's article has to do with why it took so long for the general American public to recognize this insight; but he never really factors in the role that media play in shaping public opinion (or the role that the White House played in controlling those media). Instead, he writes about books that will probably never come to general public attention. The core of the article focuses on a "Terrorism 101" textbook entitled What Terrorists Want: Understanding the Enemy, Containing the Threat:

One of the best [recent explanatory books] is by Louise Richardson, a Harvard professor who not only has been teaching about terrorism for a decade, but brings the experience of an Irish childhood, including youthful enthusiasm for the IRA, to understanding the phenomenon. As she explains, she had always thought it wise for academics to stay out of politics. The sheer boneheadedness of Washington's incumbents, who have ignored decades of accumulated wisdom on her subject, prompted her to write a belated primer.

Nevertheless, we can see the problem in getting out Richardson's message when, at this point in the article, Rodenbeck's rhetoric fails him. He decides to outline a dozen points from the book, and I believe that contemporary rhetoric would do well to acknowledge the cognitive impact of honoring "Miller's magic number" (seven plus or minus two). The Macarthur Report on media literacy makes a similar rhetorical blunder; but, while each of the Macarthur items can be distilled down to a relatively manageable phrase, each of Rodenbeck's points involves (at least) one paragraph of subtleties that would impede such distillation. Whether we like it or not, the path to public opinion leads through quick slogans and compelling images; and there we have it. Those "boneheads" know how to play the slogan-and-image game; and, once again, analytic thinking, regardless of how powerful its message may be, is left out in the cold. Once again we must confront that postmodern world in which fiction rules with a double-edged sword.

November 27, 2006: Why Call it "Science?"

Over a quiet Thanksgiving meal I had the chance to vent some of my discontent with the terminology of "service science" with a friend who teaches philosophy at San Jose State. With his background in philosophy, he asked a fundamental question that I realized I had ignored: Why do its proponents insist on calling it a "science?" Giving the matter some thought, I realized that this was probably a reflection of an obsession with science that went back (at least) as far as Frederick Winslow Taylor's effort to approach management "scientifically." Taylor's intense quantitative analysis of manufacturing processes cast a dark shadow over the nature of work for most of the twentieth century, but we never seem to be able to get out from under that shadow. What was comedy in Cheaper by the Dozen has become dark farce as die-hard Taylorists reflect the behavior of the small boy with a hammer to whom everything looks like a nail. Since Taylorism already exacted a devastating blow on the management of public education, there should be no surprise that there are those who now wish to apply its "scientific" approach to a broader range of services. Unfortunately, this is a nightmare from which we are unlikely to awaken as long as we remain under the spell of what Isaiah Berlin has called the "three unquestioned dogmas" of Western civilization. Taylorism is as much a faith as any other religious fundamentalism and can impose just as much distortion upon our view of the "real world."

November 26, 2006: Tristan "+" Isolde

As may have been observed in the past, I do not mind talking about how seriously I take my Wagner (particularly this season at the San Francisco Opera, where they mounted the Los Angeles production with Hockney sets and, as usual, the Chronicle got it all wrong and the performance was riveting from beginning to end). So I was more than a little skeptical when I saw the posters and newspaper adds for a film calling itself Tristan + Isolde, which seemed to make it clear that any contribution from Wagner would be, at best, irrelevant. Nevertheless, when Cinemax decided to run the film, my wife and I figured we would give it a try. (It's a lot easier to bail on a cable broadcast than a visit to a movie theater.) As a matter of fact, we jumped the gun when we saw that it was available through the Comcast On Demand feature prior to its first airing. Like acts2120, whose review appeared on the IMDB page, we were more than pleasantly surprised.

Nevertheless, I can see why this movie left San Francisco almost as soon as it arrived (and probably did not even arrive in many other cities). Even if this is one of the most highly-charged stories of sex and violence (not to mention one of the earliest), it is hard to imagine any telling of the tale "making it" as a "teen flick;" and teens constitute the market the dominates the logic of film distribution, if not conception and production. Most important is that this particular telling is not that all transparent. As a matter of fact, its greatest appeal may be to Wagner-lovers for the way in which it fills out the back-story. We see how Tristan came to be part of Marke's household, and we learn about Isolde's betrothal to Morholt. We also see the blood-and-guts (and lots of dirt) battle where Tristan slays Morholt and is wounded so badly that he is taken for dead. Like that of any dead hero, his body is placed on a boat and floated out to sea. It then washes up on the Irish coast and the story goes pretty much the way Isolde tells it in the first act of the Wagner opera (with one interesting exception, which is that it is Isolde who gives a false name, calling herself Bragnae, rather than Tristan).

Another problem involves sorting out the characters. Since most of the performers are pretty unfamiliar, it is too easy to confuse Morhold with Kurseval, which is a pretty drastic confusion! Also, Marke ages by cutting his hair almost to the skull, making him hard to recognize when we move from the scene in which he adopts the child Tristan to the time in which most of the story takes place. On the other hand Rufus Sewell portrays a Marke who is far from over the hill and could have been an excellent match for Isolde.

By the way there are no magic potions here. Isolde is an herbalist (and, interestingly enough, so is Morholt). Her passion for Tristan is a natural one, and in this telling she keeps it pent up far longer than Wagner's Isolde did. (Well, "pent up" was probably not in Wagner's working vocabulary!) The result is that her first serious tryst with Tristan makes for the sort of earth-moving encounter that the legend wants it to be.

Finally (and this may be the real reason why this movie had no chance of grabbing the teen market), there is a certain "meta-level" to the way in which the legend is told. It is as much a reflection on a familiar tale as it is a telling of that tale. Since the teen market does not go to the movies to reflect, my guess is that the studio bean-counters knew from the start that this was a losing prospect.

This last problem has been sticking in my mind now that I have read Daniel Mendelsohn's New York Review piece on Marie Antoinette. It almost seemed as if Mendelsohn was taking Coppola to task for not being reflective enough about her familiar subject. However, since Coppola is no stranger to that "Hollywood logic," you have to wonder how much she deserves to be Mendelsohn's target, even if it is her name on the credits. I have no trouble imagining that most of the things Mendelsohn disliked most about the film were actually committee decisions, where the bean-counters had the strongest voices, in which case it may be better to wait to see if a "director's cut" version ever gets released on DVD.

November 25, 2006: Imams on a Plane

Today's Chronicle ran a follow-up to the story of the six Muslim scholars who were removed from a US Airways flight from Minneapolis to Phoenix. One of the imams was from Bakersfield; and yesterday, shortly after noon, Associated Press ran a story about his arrival at his final destination. The bottom line was that it took him 27 hours to get there, and one of the reasons was that US Airways refused to let any of the six men board any of its flights. I continue to read this as evidence of the culture of fear we have created. I know from my own experience how fear can breed anger (on both sides of the coin); so I have been particularly depressed by this particular item and the way things have been proceeding.

November 24, 2006: New Advances in Embryonic Photography

When the National Geographic Society is not indulging in right-wing politics (which turned me away from them in my student days), they can do some really wonderful things. My wife and one of my closest colleagues were both addicted to the Pete's Pond webcam when it was active. Now they have become the platform for the release of some of the most sophisticated (color) photographs of embryos that we have yet seen. This has attracted a fair amount of Web buzz, but I fell that Spiegel Online provided one of the better combinations of reporting and photography. While "commonplace book" entries have traditionally been photographs, today I feel obliged to include what I feel was one of the most striking images from the Spiegel site.

November 23, 2006: Tracking Down a Source

It began when I found the following quote attributed to Plotinus:

Τό γάρ ϊχνος τόυ άμόρφου μορφή

I had two problems:

1. I wanted to track down the translation
2. I wanted specific source information

The Perseus online Greek dictionary helped me with the first. Once I got from ϊχνος to "trace," I was able to home in on a translation of the phrase: "Form is only the trace of that which has no form." I also had a specific location in the Enneads: VI, 7, 33. The only problem was that the phrase was not in my copy! It was only after a Google Book Search led me to Plotinus Or the Simplicity of Vision, by Pierre Hadot, that I was able to track the source to a specific line. I then discovered that, while my copy had the same translator that was cited for the phrase (MacKenna), that copy was a newer translation. In the new edition the phrase came out as: "Shape is an impress from the unshaped." I do not think I could have solved this problem with Google, but it was still a tough fight!

November 21, 2006 (2): The Hazardous Digital Highway

Today's E-Commerce Times includes an article by Christine Laue of the Omaha World-Herald explaining that iPods are becoming as big a road hazard as cell phones due to the increasing number of motorists wearing ear buds. Maybe it is time for us to take stock of what is really going on, whether it is on the sidewalks or the highways. What cell phones and music players have in common is how convenient they make it for their users to detach from reality (and, given its connotation in the drug world, the noun "user" seems more appropriate than ever). This, of course, goes hand-in-glove with the related attraction (addiction?) to virtual social environments, such as Second Life. Where this all points is to a "community" of individuals who cannot take their reality any more, whether it is too much traffic, pedestrians trying to cross the street where they want to make a turn, or just too many people in any setting. We have now provided these individuals with a means to "turn off" reality, just as Chance (with his television addiction) tried to do in Being There (a subtly ironic title for anyone who has read Heidegger). People who drive under such an "influence" are as dangerous (if not more so) than those who drive under the influence of alcohol or drugs. Do we have to wait for another incarnation of MADD before anyone does anything about this; and, if we go after the "dealers" where drugs are involved, should we not consider doing the same with these technologies?

November 21, 2006 (1): The Culture of Fear

The real story behind the incident at UCLA's Powell Library is the way in which it demonstrated how successful those in power have been at turning American society into a culture of fear. Anyone considering denying this proposition should consider a breaking story from Associated Press concerning the removal of six Muslim scholars from a US Airways flight from Minneapolis to Phoenix. Here is how Associated Press reported the grounds for the removal:

A passenger raised concerns about the imams — three of whom said their normal evening prayers in the airport terminal before boarding the Phoenix-bound plane, according to one — through a note passed to a flight attendant, according to Andrea Rader, a spokeswoman for US Airways.

The Council on Islamic-American Relations has called for an investigation, and I hope they get a good one. As is the case with the UCLA story, we are in no position to judge the merits of this case on the basis of what the media feed us. Nevertheless, I am sure it will not be long before the Internet is flooded with expressions of mass indignation on both sides of the story.

November 19, 2006: Rush to Judgement?

Last Tuesday night an Iranian UCLA senior, Mostafa Tabatabainejad, declined to show his identification to UCLA police officers when requested to do so after 11 PM in Powell Library. According to his attorney, Stephen Yagman, and as reported by the Los Angeles Times, he "declined because he thought he was being singled out because of his Middle Eastern appearance." The Times continued the account as follows:

The lawyer said Tabatabainejad eventually decided to leave the library but when an officer refused the student's request to take his hand off him, the student fell limp to the floor, again to avoid participating in what he considered a case of racial profiling. After police started firing the Taser, Tabatabainejad tried to "get the beating, the use of brutal force, to stop by shouting and causing people to watch. Generally, police don't want to do their dirties in front of a lot of witnesses."

He said Tabatabainejad was hit by the Taser five times and suffered "moderate to severe contusions" on his right side.

The Web page for this story, filed the following Friday after Tabatabainejad had retained Yagman's services, also included a link to a YouTube site with "video evidence" of the incident. This site has attracted considerable attention and provides links to several supposed "on the spot" recordings, one of which is also available on Truthdig. As of this morning, this particularly video has been viewed 344,777 times and accrued 2976 comments. The comment count at Truthdig is only up to 46 but is more "on topic" than the YouTube comments (such as "Worst camerawork I've ever seen, even for a citizen journalist..."). However, it is because I agree with this particular comment that I put those scare quotes around the word "evidence." At the end of the day, there is far more audio than video here; so one can assume that, should this matter ever come to trial, there will be justifiable debate over whether it would be legally admissible as evidence. (For that matter I can imagine the judge asking which members of the panel from which a jury was selected have seen any of the YouTube videos.)

The Truthdig comments exhibit an extremely passionate reaction to the incident. From my vantage point in the grand scheme of history, I was almost immediately reminded of when the National Guard fired on protesting student at Kent State and the rhetorically passionate photograph taken of the consequences. In the wake of yesterday's musical reflections, I was also reminded of when and why Coltrane composed "Alabama." However, it is important to remember that rhetoric is not logic (and, for that matter, that legal decisions are not necessarily made on the basis of either logic or rhetoric). Therefore, in the wake of all this passion, I feel a need to reproduce my own contribute to the Truthdig comments:

About ten years ago there was a case in Northern California involving environmental protesters getting pepper-sprayed by the police. My wife decided to give the students in her class the project of trying to interview as many of the parties involved in this incident as they could. Sure enough: both sides explained the motives for their actions clearly and sympathetically. What did the kids learn? Be very careful when the media try to get you to take sides when you do not know all the facts! Ten years ago this kind of dispute could have been settled by a good impartial judge. Today I’m not so sure ...

What I do know for sure is that there is more to this story than will ever be resolved by YouTube videos or Truthdig comments. The lesson this time around is that there is a fine line between creating forums for public discourse and muddying the waters of due process of law. I have the greatest sympathy for any judge who will have to deal with Mr. Yagman.

November 18, 2006: Bach as Coltrane; Coltrane as Bach

I am in the final stages of working on the B-flat (first) partita from Part I of Johann Sebastian Bach's Clavierübung. I have worked my way through all of the "French Suites" and about half of the "English;" but these really go to the next level. What I have discovered is that, while nothing (or at least almost nothing) about Bach can ever be called "routine," there is at least a bit of predictability in the English and French suites, while the movements of the partita just keep going and going into new territory, sustaining the attention over longer intervals of time (and challenging the performer to get the mind around committing the whole thing to memory). Coltrane lovers know what is going on here. The partita movements are in the same league as (or perhaps anticipate the league of) Coltrane improvisations, based on an explicit (if not always familiar) foundation and then quickly spinning away from the foundation and orbiting around it for awesomely long periods of time. Coltrane also shared with Bach the ability to take something that was very (if not too) familiar (perhaps so much so that people had grown sick of it, as in Mary Martin singing "My Favorite Things") and turn it into something that was both the same and very much other (not to mention on a much more epic scale: the quartet performance of "My Favorite Things" recorded in Paris on November 17, 1962 clocked in at almost 24 minutes). I check into some of my Coltrane background material for any mention of Bach, but I could not find anything. On the other hand Coltrane was never one for talking very much about he did. I recall seeing Stravinsky on television the night that "The Flood" was broadcast; and, after a few routine sentences, he said, "I don't want to tell you more; I just want to play you more." Trane would have understood; and my guess is that Bach would have, too.

November 11, 2006: Why I am not a Positivist

Once again, David Cole has written an excellent book review for The New York Review. The last time he came to my attention, he was writing about terrorism; this time the issue is the constitutional foundation of our legal system. The book under review is Not a Suicide Pact: The Constitution in a Time of National Emergency, by Richard Posner (pictured above as rendered, with at least two meanings intended, by David Levine). What is at stake is Posner's legal philosophy, which basically reduces judicial ruling to the mechanics of cost-benefit analysis.

While Cole does not mention it explicitly, this kind of positivism-with-a-vengeance actually recalls Bertrand Russell's internationalism, where Russell envisioned a single government for the entire globe that would resolve all disputes by invoking the machinery of an appropriately designed logical calculus. Cole does an excellent job of challenging this vision. For me the most compelling passage of his text is a quotation of a 1961 dissenting opinion by Justice John Marshall Harlan concerning the nature of due process:

Due process has not been reduced to any formula; its content cannot be determined by reference to any code. The best that can be said is that through the course of this Court's decisions it has represented the balance which our Nation, built upon postulates of respect for the liberty of the individual, has struck between that liberty and the demands of organized society. If the supplying of content to this Constitutional concept has of necessity been a rational process, it certainly has not been one where judges have felt free to roam where unguided speculation might take them. The balance of which I speak is the balance struck by this country, having regard to what history teaches are the traditions from which it developed as well as the traditions from which it broke. That tradition is a living thing. A decision of this Court which radically departs from it could not long survive, while a decision which builds on what has survived is likely to be sound. No formula could serve as a substitute, in this area, for judgment and restraint.

While the focus of Posner's book and Cole's challenge involves the relationship between the current executive and judicial branches of the Federal Government, reading about the subtleties of due process reminded of when, about five years ago, John Seely Brown enjoined me to drop everything and read Lawrence Lessig's new book, Code (dragging me to a bookstore on Maui in the process). Revisiting the index of that book, I discovered only one entry for "due process," that being in a paragraph on page 7 that reviews the protections guaranteed by the Bill of Rights. That neglect for one of the most important elements of our Constitutional process can perhaps explain the sort of position that Lessig tried to take in his book:

Government should push the architecture of the Net to facilitate its regulation, or else it will suffer what can only be described as a loss of sovereignty.

This, again, is positivism-with-a-vengeance, guided possibly by a calculus more sophisticated than one Russell could have ever imagined, but (in Harlan's language) a "formula" nonetheless. Today we may be more conscious of the judicial issues that have been arising in the way of American military adventurism. However, those issues are also likely to arise in other more mundane aspects of our lives; so we should all be aware of the cautionary arguments that Cole has articulated so excellently.

November 06, 2006: What's in the Script?

JP Rangaswami seems to be having a good time exploring the analogy between film-making and software development; and I am glad to see that one result of this exploration is the assertion that "the script is central." However, I see this as a point of departure, rather than a conclusion; and the direction in which we must depart is that of a more rigorous epistemological and ontological consideration than those emerging from JP’s efforts to develop his analogy. Most important is that, to invoke my favorite language, we need to honor the fact that a script is fundamentally a dramatistic (rather than scientistic) artifact (which entails the corollary that software development is also more dramatistic than scientistic, that being what JP really means in his related proposition that software is about stories). (Needless to say, neither filmmakers nor most parties involved in software projects, including the customers, are particularly interested in either epistemology or ontology; but we need them to keep our own thoughts in order!) As regular readers should know by now I have decided that Kenneth Burke’s pentad provides a useful grounding for both epistemology and ontology.

Lest anyone think this is just a philosophical exercise in abstraction, I have now performed an initial exercise at putting it into practice. The exercise is based on what is probably now a “classic” case study in the first chapter of the Decision Support Systems text by Keen and Scott Morton. The study concerns a manufacturer of laundry equipment dealing with forecasting sales and then projecting requirements for manufacturing. This case study concerns the “real world” (albeit a bit dated) of decision-making, rather than the world of support software; so, in spite of the fact that it reflects an earlier business era, I find it a good way to focus on those stakeholders who are not fixated on things like software artifacts.

The problem can be cast in the ontological categories of Burke’s framework as follows:

* Acts (what takes place)

o Manufacturing “sells” consumer products to Marketing
o Marketing prepares sales projection
o Manufacturing prepares requirements for manufacturing and inventory
o Marketing-planning manager resolves conflicts between salesforecast and production forecast

* Scenes (situation in which it occurs)

o Negotiating parameters for sales forecast model: Marketing manager ↔ Marketing-planning manager
o Negotiating parameters for production model: Marketing-planning manager ↔ Production manager

* Agents (who)

o Profit centers

. Marketing
. Manufacturing

o Planners

. Marketing-planning manager
. Marketing (sales) manager
. Production manager

* Agencies (means or instruments)

o Sales forecast based on computer model
o Forecast of manufacturing and inventory requirements based on computer model

* Purpose (why)

o Project sales for next twelve months

o Manage production consistent with sales projection

. Work force levels
. Production schedules
. Inventory management

o Define pricing and merchandising strategies

In this framework the key problem comes down to whether or not the agencies are doing a good enough job to facilitate the resolution of conflicts between the sales forecast and the production forecast. To invoke language that JP holds so dear, this involves facilitating conversations that work, where much of the “work” has to do with aligning the agencies to the motives of the agents (in this case both individual and institutional), in order that the negotiation “scenes” are furnished with the necessary information. The punch line is that the dramatistic stance allows us to examine the nature of negotiation through the subjective lens of motivated action, rather than trying to see the world in terms of the objective numbers (whether or not they are visualized in “dashboards”) compiled by the bean counters who drive the enterprise software.

Final disclaimer: This exercise is far from cast in concrete. I just decided it was time to start trumpeting the virtues of Kenneth Burke by anchoring his stuff down to a concrete example. All sincere efforts to refine the details of the exercise will be most welcome!

November 02, 2006 (2): The Unbearable Being of Silence

Last night Peter Serkin gave a recital of the works of Toru Takemitsu preceded and followed by a single composition by J. S. Bach. Takemitsu was one of those composers who drew your attention to sounds, rather than notes. I first encountered this when I heard a recording of "The Dorian Horizon." The one chance I had to hear this work performed live, all the subtlety of the sounds was crushed into dust because UCLA had engaged a publicity photographer to shoot during the performance. Every click the camera made destroyed the mood that Takemitsu had labored to create.

Yesterday I wrote about John Cage, who did more than any other composer to try to teach us how to listen to silence. Unfortunately, too many of the people in Serkin's audience never learned this lesson. The sad truth is that there is something about silence that brings out the urge to cough or sneeze or break the silence, one way or another. Perhaps too many of us are just frightened by the absence of sound the way we are frightened by the absence of light. Nevertheless, Serkin did not do a bad job of training his audience. He he could not always keep them quiet while he was playing, his stillness at the end of each piece at least kept them from applauding until he relaxed his pose. One way or another, he was going to make his audience listen to the silence, even if it was not always the silence embedded in Takemitsu's score!

November 02, 2006 (1): Validate Your Assumtions!

As if there have not been enough entries today, here is an entry for the commonplace book from the interview that Mohammad Khatami gave to the BBC:

Democracy is not something to get exported.

November 01, 2006 (2): Tell it Like it Is, Matt!

Once again, Rolling Stone has made its mark in quality political journalism, again thanks to the perceptive writing of Matt Taibbi! This time Matt has decided to take on "the Letterman-O'Reilly dust-up last week," where Bill O'Reilly (in Taibbi's usual colorful language) "ended up skewered and turned over the video-spit by the end of the segment, with an apple in his mouth and Sumner Redstone's massive billionaire foot wedged firmly in his ass." The point, however, is that this was the full extent of Taibbi's celebration of this event, because, at the end of the day, there really was not that much to celebrate. His point is that Letterman and others of his ilk (meaning those media "performers" who only recently have begun to reverse their position on the Iraq war) really deserve no praise for what amounts to taking forever to recognize the baldly obvious. Here are Taibbi's words again (in language that, this time, may be too colorful for some readers):

What's dangerous about what's going on right now is that an electoral defeat of the Republicans next week, and perhaps a similar defeat in a presidential race two years from now, might fool some people into thinking that the responsibility for the Iraq war can be sunk forever with George Bush and the Republican politicians who went down with his ship. But in fact the real responsibility for the Iraq war lay not with Bush but with the Lettermans, the Wolf Blitzers, the CNNs, The New York Timeses of the world -- the malleable middle of the American political establishment who three years ago made a conscious moral choice to support a military action that even a three-year-old could have seen made no fucking sense at all.

It doesn't take much courage to book the Dixie Chicks when George Bush is sitting at thirty-nine percent in the polls and carrying 3,000 American bodies on his back every time he goes outside. It doesn't take much courage for MSNBC's Countdown to do a segment ripping the "Swift-Boating of Al Gore" in May 2006, or much gumption from Newsweek's Eleanor Clift to say that many people in the media "regret" the way Gore was attacked and ridiculed in 2000. We needed those people to act in the moment, not years later, when it's politically expedient. We needed TV news to reject "swift-boating" during the actual Swift Boat controversy, not two years later; we needed ABC and NBC to stand up to Clear Channel when that whole idiotic Dixie Chicks thing was happening, not years later; we needed the networks and the major dailies to actually cover the half-million-strong protests in Washington and New York before the war, instead of burying them in inside pages or describing the numbers as "thousands" or "at least 30,000," as many news outlets did at the time; and we needed David Letterman to have his war epiphany back when taking on Bill O'Reilly might actually have cost him real market share.

This all reminds me of a lecture I heard John Cage deliver at the Philadelphia Museum of Art some time in the vicinity of 1974. On that occasion Cage chose to read an acceptance speech he delivered for some award he had recently received (which may very well be the first time he had been acknowledged with any such prestigious award). Since those of us who actually knew Cage are declining in our numbers, I have to explain that Cage was probably the closest approximation to a saint I had ever met (although, if one could call him a saint, it would have to be a Buddhist saint). The number of times I ever heard him break with his serene equanimity and voice anything like a complain could be counted on one hand. So it was quite a surprise to discover that the message of this particular lecture (and, for all I know, he delivered it while holding the award just given to him) was, "Where were you when I needed you?" Both John Cage and Merce Cunningham spent more years than any of us would wish to number on the brink of poverty, wondering where the next meal would come from, just because they wanted to be true to their ideas of how music and dance should be made. (Cage even told the story that, when Cunningham received his first serious grant award, someone asked him what he would do with the money; and Merce answered immediately, "Eat.") For all that serene equanimity, Cage could not forget persevering the poverty when finally awarded the fruits of recognition.

Nothing has changed. Attention was not paid to John Cage and Merce Cunningham when they were struggling to make their voices heard. Attention was not paid to those few to dared to speak of the folly of going to war in Iraq when the question was still being debated in the Congress. Today also happens to be the day that Nelson Mandela was capable of offering up a few kind words for P. W. Botha. When will the United States of America come to terms with the concepts of Truth and Reconciliation? When will we accept responsibility for our mistakes of neglect?