Going Live: Towards an Amphibious Sociology

Introduction: a frog's eye view

The preliminary call for papers for this Special Issue outlined a manifesto for ‘live’ methods. It described its aims in relation to the construction of ‘a laboratory for the practice of a sociological imagination’: ‘The aim is to make social research responsive to social life, to bring it alive’. A live sociology was described as ‘operating with mobile and volatile notions of space, experiment, mapping and a keen eye to how methods embedded in specific instruments offer up new ways for thinking of intervention’. This paper seeks to contribute to this project, but it starts by outlining some of the historical circumstances in which ‘liveness’ emerges. ¹

To do this, let me introduce in outline Orit Halpern's account of the historical relationship between communication science, neuro-science and design emerging in the second half of the 20th century (Halpern, forthcoming). Halpern starts her discussion by quoting extracts from ‘What the frog's eye tells the frog's brain’, an article by a group of cybernetically informed neuro-scientists describing their study of an isolatd optic nerve of a frog: ‘A frog hunts on land by vision. He escapes enemies mainly by seeing them…. The frog does not seem to see or, at any rate, is not concerned with the detail of stationary parts of the world around him. He will starve to death surrounded by food if it is not moving’ (Lettvin et al., 1959: 230). Halpern draws special attention to two features of this account: ‘the mobility of vision and the capacity of vision to act (or hunt)’. ² The title of the piece suggests, she says, an eye autonomously speaking to the brain: an eye capable of cognition. Informed by theories of information, the authors of the article claim that their innovation is to model vision in terms of communication and feedback, refusing to treat it as a series of discrete separate mechanisms (a causal chain of stimulus-response behaviour), imagining instead a continuous sensing built as a communication channel emerging from the relationship between that being seen and the seer. Halpern says:

Her argument is that the emerging post-war neuro-sciences did not understand the image as a representation being received by the eye, transmitted through nerves and then translated upon arrival in the brain, but rather redefined vision as encompassing the entire relationship structuring the act of seeing. In this redefinition, ontology and epistemology were collapsed into each other in an approach that focused on method, process and feedback. In this collapse, the act of processing information and the act of analysing it became the same, and the possibility emerged that this decontextualized seeing process could be rebuilt in other locations. Halpern's analysis thus signals the importance of changes in how the relations between sensing and knowing were reconfigured in the second half of the 20th century by highlighting transformations in the workings of both representation and temporality, and the changes in relations between epistemology and ontology that ensued. Indeed, she also suggests that these transformations, linked as they were to issues of autonomy and survival, need to be understood in relation to contemporary concerns with security, information and biopolitics. It is these transformations, I suggest, that underpin the current interest in live methods.

To explore this claim a bit further, consider how vision was being ‘rebuilt’ in other locations in this period. Take, for example, television. As William Uricchio observes, ‘The idea of the medium, invoked in terms like “television” and the German word for television, “Fernsehen,” was about the extension of vision in real time’ (2005: 232). Similarly, Samuel Weber observes that while the word itself literally describes the transport of vision, something other than the transport or transmission of the image of a fixed object is involved. He says,

In this view, television is organized not as the transport of images but as an active channel of communication; the objects of television – programmes, series, advertisements, trailers and so on – emerge in a ‘built’ organization of vision through the coordination of method, process and feedback. This is famously described by Raymond Williams as ‘The replacement of a programme series of timed sequential units by a flow series of differently related units in which the timing, though real, is undeclared, and in which the real internal organization is something other than the declared organization’ (1974: 87).

Weber further argues that television does not simply bring existing spaces into relation with each other, but makes a new kind of space, in which the identity (of subjects and objects) is no longer defined in relation to unity. ³ This is because television confounds the points of reference that allow the subject's determination of a single unity, of what is near and what is far, what is connected and what is disconnected. In their place, it organizes an active surface of coordinatization. (Tele)vision is here a channel, endowed with capacities to act, to see, in a space that is not given, but is brought into existence continuously and simultaneously with the objects it ‘sees’ or produces. Indeed, it is the continual remaking of relations in a surface of coordinatization – that is, the undeclared but ‘real, internal organization’ of which Williams speaks – that produces television's distinctive spatio-temporal characteristic, namely, ‘live-ness’ (Williams, 1974 and many others). ⁴ Of course, the liveness of television does not only mean simultaneity of broadcast and event, though it can mean that; it also refers to the simulation of a shared present, created in processes of method, process and feedback. It thus has multiple modes and genres, including ‘live’ or event broadcasting, reality TV, and ‘breaking’ news, alongside the programmed simultaneity of collective viewing, and an aesthetics of immediacy and co-presence.

And television is not the only medium that has a space or surface of cognition, calculation and communication that may be described in terms of liveness. To give only one of many obvious contemporary examples, in April 2009, two researchers from Google research published a paper titled ‘Predicting the present with Google Trends’ (Varian and Choi, 2009). Varian and Choi argue that Google Trends data, based on query indices, may be used to estimate the ‘current’ level of economic activity in given industries, including for example, ‘Motor vehicles and parts and New Housing Starts’. They indicate that a possible use of such data is to identify ‘turning points in the data’. ‘Simple autoregressive models do remarkably well in extrapolating smooth trends; however, by their very nature, it is difficult for such models to describe cases where the direction changes. Perhaps Google Trends data can help in such cases’. In March 2010 two web scientists from HP's Palo Alto lab published a paper showing how the chatter on Twitter could be used to forecast box-office revenue for movies. They analysed 2.89 million tweets by 1.3 million users referring to 24 different movies released over a period of three months. They discovered that the rate at which movie tweets are generated could be used to build an effective model for predicting box-office revenue. They also found that predictions derived in this way are ‘consistently more accurate than those produced by … Hollywood Stock Exchange, the gold standard in the industry’ (Asur and Huberman, 2009). Since these reports emerged, a variety of other agencies and individuals – for example, Asda Pulse of the Nation – have begun to develop real-time web-based analytics as a way of understanding ‘current activity’ or the present, as we used to call it. ⁵

The mediation of sociology

One implication of this brief and incomplete account of the rise of ‘liveness’ is that a reconsideration of the significance of mediation is necessary for sociology. Most fundamentally, it suggests that it is important for sociology to take seriously the notion of media as the environment in which the liveness (or not) of its methods now takes place. This might include drawing on the writings of Peter Sloterdijk (2009) among others. Sloterdijk argues that a technical relation to the media is emerging from the last century with increasing clarity. Writing with bravura, he describes the first use of poison gas in warfare as the event that marks ‘the introduction of the environment into the battle between adversaries’ (2009: 13). Now, he suggests, it is in relation to an environment – not in terms of point to point communication – that not only war, but also business and politics are conducted. He observes: ‘Shakespeare prophetically articulated the principle of this relation to the environment in Shylock's line: “You take my life/When you take the means whereby I live”’ (2009: 14).

As the example of poison gas suggests, in Sloterdijk's view, the term medium refers not only to television and other media of communication, but also to the physical mediums of air, water and earth, as well as calculative infrastructures such as the gridding of time and space, the proliferation of registers, filing and listing systems, the making and remaking of categories, the identification of populations or multitudes, the transformation of urban space, ⁶ and the invention of logistics (Thrift, 2004). As numerous commentators have observed, software is now so substantially integrated into the dynamics of contemporary culture and society that it is routinely involved in the reformulation of processes, ideas, institutions and cultural objects. Such developments contribute to what Sloterdijk describes as air-conditioning, or the creation of atmospheres, the making active or operational of the ‘environment’, powered by abstractions, calculations and extensions of movement, of tracking, tracing and tagging, of reiteration, looping and folding. For Nigel Thrift (2004), this is the creation not of a space of movement but a movement-space, a dynamic or live space that is the product of artificial, paratextual forces, which form a new calculative background, a pre-personal, post-social substrate of correlations, encounters and unconsidered anticipations, in which the partial actualization of superpositions bring new ‘awhereness’ into the world.

Such awhereness, I suggest, is one response to the condition of liveness, a condition that is consequent on the socio-technical mediation of ‘life’. But, more than this, the argument I am proposing here suggests that liveness is itself but one specific form of the mediation of life. ⁷ To describe the nature of this specificity and its implications for methods I need now to delve further into the social organization of liveness, and in particular the role of indices or indicators. ⁸ The suggestion I want to put forward is that the realm of the indexical is being vastly extended through the development of diverse, iterative and automatic information processing systems, supported by many different kinds of sensory memory systems (Thrift, 2008). In short, the expanded role of the indexical is what informs the particular form of life – liveness – currently being brought into existence.

Liveness

To develop this argument it is helpful to consider the understanding of indices put forward by C. S. Peirce (1931–35). For Peirce, indices are one of a three-part typology of signs – the others being icons and symbols; they use some physical or existential continuity with their objects to direct attention to that object. This capacity draws on the two components that are necessarily part of any act of signifying for Peirce: the sign-object relation and the sign-interpretant relation. The indexical act of signifying, he says, consists of a sign that signifies its object by using some physical or existential continuity (this is the sign-object relation), and generates a further sign to signify that object (this is, the sign-interpretant relation). It is thus what he calls a two-place relation. That the interpretant need not be a person but can be another sign is obviously significant in relation to the proliferation of the automated systems mentioned above, ⁹ and the possibility of an extended role for indices in inter-linking diverse systems, but what is also important is that, in the dynamic spaces of liveness, indexical continuity need no longer operate only extensively (in terms of nearness or farness) but may also take place intensively, that is, in the n-place relations of auto-spatialization. ¹⁰

Consider what is involved here by way of a discussion of the relations between indices and symbols. A number of writers, from a range of different disciplines, have proposed that the importance of symbolic culture across societies arises because symbols allow humans to ignore most of a vast web of word-object and object-object indexical associations by using the short-cut of symbol-symbol relations to make and mark a specific associative path. Symbols, in this view, are powerful because of their virtual character, because they are shared, and because – in systems such as language – they are exterior to the individual human mind (Lenoir, 2008). They are also powerful because of their capacity to introduce movement – or life – into culture, through their use in metaphors. So for example in his analysis of symbols that ‘stand for themselves’ Roy Wagner (1986) understands metaphor as a fundamental trope, and posits that metaphor is one of the principal sources of, not liveness, but liveliness, in any and all cultures.

For Wagner, liveliness is a consequence of the ways in which metaphor is formed not by indicating things, or by referencing them, but by setting pointers or reference points in relation with one another in such a way that the relation is innovative upon the original order of reference:

The metaphor as self-referential coordinate (symbols that stand for themselves in the phrase that Wagner uses as the title of the book) introduces relativity within coordinate systems, and within culture; metaphorical expressions within a symbolic culture are relative to, innovative upon, and ambiguous with regard to one another. A culture founded upon these relations is, Wagner says, lively.

The suggestion here, however, is that while the ‘life-likeness’ of culture is not new, the emergence of liveness (rather than or as well as liveliness) is a consequence of a shift in how the tropic relations of culture described by Wagner are made, unmade and remade in relations between symbols and indices, including in the methods of social (and natural) science. The use of indices in social and natural scientific methods has of course historically been supported in various ways, by complex sets of social relations and technologies, often enabling their objects – scientific facts – to travel great distances in stable form (Latour, 1987). Indeed, such support has been what made objectivity in natural and social science possible, as numerous historians and sociologists have made clear. But, to speak in very general terms, it has typically required the use of indices in ways that enabled them to make references in relation to objects as if they were indifferent to those objects. The mobility or liveness of today's indices, in contrast, is precisely to do with the development of an active or technical relation to a dynamic environment as described by Sloterdijk. In this relation, the usefulness of one of the most important capacities of indices – to point, to indicate ‘here’ – a usefulness for making culture that has been limited by the stabilized fixity of the coordinates of the relations they have been used to enact, is being expanded as liveness by the introduction of dynamic feedback loops.

In the middle

What implications does this account of the role of indices have for the doing of methods in the social sciences? ¹¹ Perhaps the most important is that methods need no longer be implemented as if from what is sometimes described as a bird's eye view (that is from above or outside that which is seen), but, rather, with a frog's eye, that is, in or as the work of a medium, or, in medias res. ¹² Importantly, this shift – towards what I call an amphibious sociology – involves a very particular understanding of middle. In a discussion of the work of Walter Benjamin, Peter Fenves argues that a ‘pure middle’ would be one whose middle-ness is no longer defined with respect to determinable end points; rather it is an infinite and infinitely divisible space. As in Weber's discussion of the simultaneity of television, in which unity is destroyed, Fenves claims that,

Clearly, this is an abstract understanding of middle, but the introduction of the principles of such abstraction into social life by way of active indices and the work of mediation is precisely what is of interest here.

Indeed, I want to suggest that a fantasy pure middle of infinite divisibility may be seen as one of the animating dynamics of contemporary mediation. Such a claim may make more sense if a Luhmannian understanding of mediation as, not a unity, but the operation of the difference of medium/form is used (Luhmann, 1992). So, for example, Elena Esposito (2004) draws on Luhmann's formulation as follows: ‘on both sides of the distinction medium/form there are elements that in the medium are coupled loosely, and are coupled more tightly in the form – like, for instance, grains of sand in a beach that have no connection to one another and therefore are fit to receive the form left by a footprint or like light rays making objects visible’. In short, following Luhmann she is suggesting that if a medium is understood not as a unity but as the difference medium/form, then the organization of that difference in terms of, for example, the functions of search and retrieve, will enable the tracks of some forms of life to be made visible and not others.

These divisible or ‘distributive’ middles of mediation may be contrasted with the middles of representation, such as the representative measures of central tendencies that are well established in social science (eg mean, mode, median etc) as well as measures of spread (eg range, standard deviation etc). ¹³ In contrast to such centralizing measures, in an amphibious sociology, with a frog's eye view, there can be no single centre but only a middle, or rather many middles to be worked in, worked up and worked out. In these middles, in the work of distributive middles or mediation, the absoluteness of the distinction between data and analysis is called into doubt. Indeed, the suggestion being made here is that this distinction was previously upheld only through a carefully established (but also usually taken-for-granted) use of the index and the stabilizing, centralizing statistical techniques of representativeness. In such uses, the capacity of the index to individualize was fixed, located in a particular place and time, in order that it could provide the fixed coordinates in relation to which the centre, depth and liveliness of a whole or unified culture could be established. In the dynamic spaces of liveness, however, indices can – and are – being put to new uses founded on the manipulation of the capacity for dynamic, two-way signifying relations to make distributive middles, that is, to continually make available the possibility of changing relations between an individualized entity and the population, history, context or environment of which it is a part.

In these uses, data are shifting indicators, indices of actualization, of a process of individuation, the isolation or divisibility of some specific thing. They are forward as well as backward looking, markers of the multiple composite durations – simultaneity, immediacy, real-time, the contemporary – that comprise liveness. As such, they may be seen to contribute to a rather different version of structuralism to that described by, for example, Levi-Strauss (1973 [1955]), for whom generative structural transformation is driven by ahistorical relational differentiation. In the dynamic spaces brought to life in the activity of indices as described here, transformations are, by contrast, historically generated in the sense that the relational principles of differentiation (of medium/form) may themselves change as circuits or channels, rather than as structures.

Indeed, this possibility is what Latour finds already described in the work of Gabriel Tarde: as Latour represents Tarde, ‘the very heart of social phenomena is quantifiable because individual monads are constantly evaluating one another in simultaneous attempts to expand and to stabilize their worlds’ (Latour, 2010: 4). Latour's conclusion is that the aim for sociology should be to:

The implication here then is that methods of liveness cannot work from or find a centre since there is no single whole in relation to which a centre might be found. Instead, live methods must be satisfied with an engagement with relations and with parts, with differentiation, and be involved in making middles, in dividing without end(s), in mingling, bundling and coming together. The objects of such methods – being live – are without unity, un-whole-some; put another way, they are partial un-divisible, distributed and distributing.

Taking part

But this formulation of live methods in terms of partiality introduces a new set of methodological concerns, those to do with objectivity and subjectivity, and the problems of the presumed circularity or self-referentiality of the circuits or channels of mediation. ¹⁴ In relation to social science, this concern is sometimes presented in terms of a contrast between reflection and reflexivity, in which reflection is an uncritical doubling of the object by the subject (or researcher), while reflexivity is an operation that involves the subject in considering the ground of the object, and the relation between subject and object. In some formulations in philosophy of social science, this contrast is formulated as a binary opposition: on the one hand, the collapse of the object-subject distinction in reflection and on the other, its reinstatement as reflexivity. In relation to live methods, there is however an alternative to be found – in the middle – that is neither the erasure of the difference between subject and object that comes from the absolute feedback of reflection (sometimes allied with narcissism) nor its absolute re-establishment as reflexivity (sometimes allied with scepticism). This alternative, middle, position is one in which, while the (critical) subject is always in relation to an (epistemic) object, this is a relation that is never stable, is always being continually re-established. ¹⁵ This might be described as a situation of perpetual animation.

This situation is crucially shaped, however, by the involvement of many actors, who are also, variously, in the middle. Of course the involvement of multiple actors in the conduct of social research is not new in itself, but there is currently an ongoing redistribution that appears to be challenging established relations between social research in the academy, business and public and everyday life. The historical importance of the links between (cultural and political) representation and (epistemological) representativeness for methods of social research have been well documented by Desorisières, who argues that the significance and efficacy of, for example, statistical information was created in a state-supported network ‘of stabilized connections, of routinized equivalences, and words to describe them…. It is precisely this language that provides the reference points and the common meaning in relation to which the actors [of the public sphere] can qualify and express their reactions’ (1998: 333). That this network is being tested by the contemporary redistribution – or mediation – of expertise and authority in methods of social research is thus not surprisingly one of the issues at stake in recent discussions of a public sociology (Burawoy, 2005; Back, 2007). ¹⁶ It is also at issue in any consideration of the potential of live methods.

The suggestion here, however, is that, rather than representativeness, it is the nature and characteristics of partiality – of the taking part, or participation – or partisanship (Latour and Weibel, 2005; Rogers and Marres, 2002) that will be the crucial issue in relation to the use of live methods. This involves not only questions of who has access to getting involved but also how that involvement or participation happens, and who is held accountable and how for what happens. At the same time the essentially recursive or automatic character of mediation is becoming more and more important. For example, while the relations between categories and scales of valuation have always been dynamic (Guyer, 2004), sociology has often sought to cleanse the data it employs of categorical instability in order to produce continuity (Uprichard, forthcoming). An alternative approach, however, may be found in the use of indices as markers of the edge between an epistemic object or thing and a dynamic space of problem-solving (Rheinberger, 1997), as epistemology and ontology are, as Halpern observes from the frog's eye view, collapsed in an approach that enables categories and scales to be mutually adjusted to a problem that itself only emerges through the continuous application of method, process and feedback.

To explore the dimensions of the issues at stake let me give some examples. First, to return to the case of television: a number of commentators observe that the last twenty to thirty years have seen a clear shift from broadcasting as an activity associated with the maintenance of the public sphere to narrowcasting via the organization of metadata to support adaptive agent-based mediations of individual tastes. As Uricchio puts it, there has been a transformation in ‘the viewer-television interface – and particularly the notion of flow – that has slowly transformed from programming-centered, to active audience-centered, to adaptive agent-centered’ (2005: 256). Then take the Internet. Consider, for example, the opportunities for participation offered by the social buttons, counters and access to the Open Graph provided to a user of Facebook. They enable the individual to filter the content of the web through the activities of their own ‘likes’ or recommendations and that of their contacts (Gerlitz and Helmond, unpublished paper). This is a powerful use of middles by live algorithmic methods. However, while the filter can be modified by the user to create a variety of differently scaled assemblages through the manipulation of profiles, users are only given partial – and temporary – access to the ‘likes’ they themselves generate, and there is no general ranking of content available within the platform based on Facebook's specific engagement measures such as ‘likes’. In short, the organization of participation – even when it is enabled as a dynamic process – may result in highly uneven positions of access and control to problem-setting and problem-solving.

Consider also the findings of a study of the forms of participation on the Internet that have emerged over the last ten years. In the context of observing that publics – unlike organizations – exist only when they are addressed as such, that is, that publics are temporally and discursively constituted by constant attention and circulation of discourse about specific issues (Warner, 2002), Fish et al. (2011) identify a number of salient characteristics of contemporary forms of participation. These include the findings that: participation nearly always employs both a ‘formal social enterprise’ and an ‘organized public’; the formal enterprise and public are typically engaged in some structural and temporal relationship to one another; and that forms of participation are divided up into tasks and goals, and relate to the resource that is created through participation. Such findings are significant. As they observe:

What such examples suggest is that there is more than one way of being in a middle, as well as more than one middle. Or put differently, the issue of participation is central not only to an emerging media economy of cumulative interaction (Bateson, 1987) but also to the liveness of sociology.

Stuck in the middle?

So, what are the implications for sociology of working in the middle, in medias res? Is ‘going live’ going to lead, unavoidably, to a position of compromise, of complicity with media? In some ways the argument put forward here is, yes, but only in the sense that sociology is always in medias res. In other ways, the answer is no: rather than seeing live methods in terms of a compromise between the two ends of reflection or reflexivity, or as failing in its ability to identify a centre (to be representative), the argument put forward here is that live methods must involve operating the middle or middles in the interests of parts rather than of wholes. And it is in this respect that I have put forward the notion of amphibious sociology. Etymologically, the term derives from amphi-meaning ‘both sides’ and -bios meaning ‘life’. The term was initially used for all kinds of combined natures (not quite fish, not quite reptiles), but is now used to refer to animals that live both on the land and in the water, that is, live in two media. The proposal for an amphibious sociology arises from the belief that the recognition that we live in (at least) two media will facilitate an understanding of the work of mediation, and with this, the significance of the operation of the difference medium/form for sociology.

And while there may be no law adequate to the pure middle to guide the social researcher, this does not mean that the middle is a muddle or a mess, or, of course, that it is politically neutral. Rather, as Elena Esposito (2004) says, the distinction medium/form may be applied in sociology to many different problems, including – perhaps especially – those cases ‘where one wants to show how a specific modality of contingency is produced and how it is controlled through special forms’. Amphibious sociology is put forward here as a way to insist upon the importance of recognizing that liveness is necessarily a question of specific forms of life and not others, and that it is and always has been linked to issues of autonomy, security and biopolitics from which it cannot be disentangled. It suggests that the challenge today is to learn how to take part(s), to operate the middles of liveness in such a way that the specific modality of contingency that such forms of control bring into existence are made available for many kinds of occupation, organization and association: that is, to make of liveness methods that might support more than ‘bare life’ (Agamben, 1998).