Monounsaturated Introduction

A. Games with Language, or Neither A Bell Toll Nora Minc Stole.

1. In the late seventies, the French government commissioned two inspecteurs des finances to produce a study of "L'informatisation de la société." The last paragraph of Simon Nora and Alain Minc's four volume report to the French Government, The Computerization of Society [Nora78] reads:

In order to make the information society possible, it is necessary to have knowledge but also to have time. The reciprocal learning process (apprentissage) of disciplines and aspirations takes place slowly: it operates through the generations, by transforming cultural patterns—families, universities, media, and so on. Data processing (l'informatique) has falsely crystallized our concerns. They rise again, more general and stronger, at the end of this analysis. Will the urgency and scope of the constraints to which French society will be subjected grant it the time required for this vital learning process (cet apprentissage vital)?(141)

2. "Data processing (l'informatique) has falsely crystallized our concerns." Such temperate optimism is rare in the wide-eyed world of social diagnoses treating the "computerization of society." Nora and Minc's conclusion to their report condenses the concerns of philosophers in the language of policy and decision. Above all it is not computers that occupies their report, but the circulation of information and its relationship to the authority of French national government [1]. They know the slow movement of learning, the pace of deliberated progress, and ask if there is danger in the non-synchrony of "data processing" and the necessary apprenticeship of life. Machines crystallize our concerns, blind us to the "vital" issues of "constraints", "disciplines" and "aspirations." Information must be socialized.

3. Information is a disseminated word, however, bereft of the specificity that Nora and Minc demand of it. Learning and knowledge require it, but cannot distinguish it. It is not just information that is necessary, but information and a means of communicating it to where it needs to be, so that the right decisions can be made. Telecommunications are needed. To capture this dual necessity required for the vital learning process to proceed, Nora and Minc neologize:

4. Telematics (la télématique) is its contribution: informatics plus telecommunications. This linguistic nationalism is quite deliberate. The word l'informatique itself hearkens back to an earlier story and a conjugation of l'information and l'automatique, and the English translation insists on a new substitution for this temporarily gauche word: data processing [2].

5. But this single neologism is not alone, especially in the world of telecommunications and computers: the report cycles through minicomputers, microcomputers, modems, telecopiers, 'paracomupter equipment', facsimile transmission, "laser optical systems," the 'Transmic system, and all manner of such terms. The authors play on ordinateur and ordannateur, computer and director.

6. The prominence of this linguistic issue, in fact, is strong enough that at the beginning of Daniel Bell's introduction to the book he devotes the first paragraph to his own fascination with this fascination, redoubled with an irresistable and signature prediction: "The word télématique, a French neologism coined by Simon Nora and Alain Minc—or, in its Englished version, telematics—may soon spread in our language, as it already has in France."(vii) But Bell disavows even faster than he can English, denying us this spread: "But telematics (or télématique, I prefer the French for Euphony)..."(ix).

7. His supposed resistance to this English clumsiness is weak, however, as he then parades out compunications, a forgotten word from Harvard that claims neither euphony nor acknowledges the rules of Greco-Roman neologic. Bell throws down the gauntlet: "Which word will prevail is a matter of linguistic convenience;*"(vii)[3].

8. It is clear that 'linguistic convenience' (is this American, or Latin convenience? a question of pronouncability, or a question of accuracy?) favored neither of these terms, perhaps much to the dismay of Bell's friend at Harvard. Though in France, la télématique; continues to designate what it was intended to: the conjugation of information and telecommunications.

9. Bell's introduction to Nora and Minc's report is an excellent place to start an investigation of the relationship between language and the technologies of information and communication. His perorations on technology and society are troubled by a submerged and complicated structure of relations between "ordinary" language, programming language, information, communication, convention and standards, speech and presence, and technology and writing. The task at hand is less to articulate the philosophical genealogy or structure of these things, or to critique Bell's introductions, than to explain how certain empirical questions about technology and any social theory of computing in the late twentieth century requires an attentiveness to this spectrum of language and technology— and how they can be discovered almost everywhere, in the mundane details of language.

10. So we let Bell continue: "what is clear is that the term expresses a new reality, an innovation that has the possibility of transforming society in the way that railroads and electricity did in the nineteenth century."(vii) Newness and transformation must be captured by new terms. If, as the report explicitly suggests, the "computerization of society" must be directed if France is to control her fate, such new words are essential, even if linguistic convenience or the dandyish, idiosyncratic preference of American social prognosticators for French euphony dictates them. Or perhaps, precisely because of it: Bell notes that the threat to the French nation comes primarily from an "American domination of telecommunications and computers" that has been, according to him, evaporating in the 1970's. Nora and Minc note a "set of power relationships that give [telecommunications] the upper hand" [4]. The French invent euphonic words to defend themselves from crass unpronouncable acronyms like IBM, while American Social Theorists blandly disavow this imperialism as America's own crisis of defense.

11. Later, Bell acknowledges that the impact of this report on French public life, was due in part to the word: "(There was also—and this should not be minimized—the impact a new concept or new idea can have when it is expressed in a bold new word.)" Bold new words, whether forgotten or italicized by Americans, are not just the special province of a threatened nation that insists on filtering them as a defense against imperialism, they can affect public life within as well.

12. While American academics might prefer French euphony as a sign of culture, the French anxieties over it concern more political and economic issues of centralization, standardization, and linguistic purity. American common sense, of course, has never trucked with such French squeamishness, preferring a discourse of the obvious when it comes to words, Bell continues: "Behind the term is an instrument and a concept. The instrument is the computer; the concept, information" (vii). Case closed— fancy-sounding words for obvious concepts are just French arrogance. The instrument and the concept hide behind the term, so the term does not represent, so much as block reality. However, even common-sensical Bell, who tells it like it is, worries that the vagueness of the terms 'information' and 'communication' might confuse and therefore cites science advisor Lewis Branscomb to explain:

The two terms— information and communication— are often blurred when they are tossed about loosely, but it is important to make the distinction if one is to look at what may happen in the upcoming years. Communicating, from an engineering point of view, means simply moving electronic traffic from one place to another. It matters little if the signal represents random noise or a Shakespeare sonnet. When information is available in machine-readable form it can be both processed and communicated. Processing permits meaningful manipulation of the contents of the electronic traffic, thus enhancing its value.

13. It appears that 'information' here is defined as 'that which can be processed' while communication is explained in terms of movement. Of course, it is hard to know because in the footnote to this passage, Bell admits "(I have rearranged Mr. Branscomb's paragraph to emphasize the relevant point.) (viii)." Bell has thus processed Branscomb to make a relevant point (but which relevant point?) more emphatic. Has he increased its value? What is the nature of the value of information, and how does processing it increase it? One would imagine that if Bell had said "I have rearranged Mr. Shakespeare's sonnet to emphasize the relevant point," there would be outcry. Value, in this instance is far more complicated than the obviousness of "an instrument" and "a concept". And certainly, the concepts information and communication are no clearer, having been processed in the service of increasing "value" for a relevant point long since forgotten. What is important here is the decision to rearrange the paragraph, and the implicit conventions that suggested to Bell that this was a legitimate thing to do. Rearranging Shakespeare's sonnets is something only Shakespeare scholars and postmodern poets do. Rearranging Lewis Branscomb is something anyone can do. Why? It will serve well to remember this example in the context of a discussion of the modifiability of software (Chapter K), because it concerns a decision between the technical and the non-technical that is made according to a convention in a certain context of time and place to program a new context.

14. So now we find ourselves juggling several words that hide ("behind the word") (new) instruments and (new) concepts. More than that, the specific words hiding here threaten to double our confusion, because they are the highly fraught words that today organize our notions of words and concepts: information and communication. These are the primitives of Shannon-Theory, straight out of Bell Labs and American cryptology— not the bold new words of a French Nation Defending Herself. Again, Bell tries directness: "The 'computerization of society' will shape, allow, facilitate, determine—which verb will be the operative one depends upon our consciousness and public policy—an extraordinary transformation, perhaps even greater in its impact than the industrial revolution of the previous century,"(x).

15. Such a profound transition seems to demand less neurosis about the choice of verbs, especially from one so cavalier about rearranging other people's verbs. Perhaps this uncontrollability of language indicates more than simply the openness of the future. It is not the transition itself that is in question, but how authoritatively "the computerization of society" operates this transition. Why this incessant advance and retreat from concept into word, from the force of "bold new words" on the French consciousness to the determination of verbs by "our consciousness and public policy"? How are things behind words? Whence this force of impact on consciousness if determined first by consciousness? What does "communication" communicate? What information does "information" contain?

16. (Parenthesis: So fight euphony with parenthetical french euphony, and call on another bold new word: la grammatologie. If we are to believe Derrida and Heidegger, all of western philosophy is an exhaustion of the metaphysics of presence, a metaphysics, for Derrida, based on a notion of self-presence, full speech present to self. Hearing myself speak is the basis of consciousness, and the locus of truth is the interior of consciousness and the production of speech. My "consciousness" that supposedly determines my verbs, according to Bell, is in fact reversed— conscious only in as much as I can hear myself verb. The relation of non-phonetic writing to phonetic writing to the entire range of thinking about means and ends, tools and tasks, in short, the entire concept of technè, will be contained in an understanding of la télématique as medium. Or software plus network— and I will coin no words— as medium. The fact that software is now routinely merged or confused with service (conceived as something singular, non-tangible and non-transferable, but measurable and valuable), is precisely why I understand Derrida's assertions about the generalization of language, in particular, the generalizations of 'writing' to be relevant here. )

17. The diagnoses of "the information age" or the "computerization of society" have not yet focused on the practice and experience of this transformation, but only on the incessant search for it's proper name (information age, communication age, third wave, post-this, post-that et. al.). For those who don't write (software), for those who manage, organize, or otherwise try to "carry out the computerization of society," the force of language is contained in its power to direct and to order. Knowing the name of something, is half the struggle. [5] Owning the name is the other half. Buzzwords and hype are such names— and their coinage and use (one should say "mention" to maintain the philosophical distinction) prove that they in fact contain nothing except performative force. They are 'order-words' [6]. My sense in experiencing the mention of these words, is that despite the immense amount of data (sometimes referred to as 'crap') that will have been produced by them and around them, their force is inaccessible to a simple reading. They must be met head-on, triangulated, researched-experienced— in order to use hype, as opposed to simply mentioning it, it is necessary to go through it.

18. Buzzwords are eminently situated, local in very constrained way (though not simply geographical) force is always relative, and it makes sense that these words make no sense out of context. When the force of buzz becomes clear, it suddenly appears that it borders on both ordinary language and scientific, specialized discourse. This, to me, is a remarkable mystery. Knowing buzz is good, but owning it is better. Trademark, branding, copyright and patent are all legal modes of owning the language that does things. In this the connection between the social ordering force of hype, the technical ordering force of software and the legal ordering force of trademark and copyright should be intuitively clear, if not 'literally' obvious [7].

19. This set of programmed languages, represented by software/code, buzzword, and trademark, all partake of the descriptive and performative function of ordinary language. The difference consists in the regimes of convention that surround them as attempts to fix their force and meaning: to eradicate ambiguity or to make decisions. When literary theorist Paul de Man discusses the undecidability of language, he refers to the radical absence of conventions that would guarantee the meaning of words. In poetry, for de Man, this fact is the central meditation of the poet: the meaning of conventions, or more accurately, their endless proliferation and the possibility of their absence. This may not seem surprising, but rather a renewed reason for the continued search for the right conventions, the right standards, and the right laws. Recursion should issue warning here, however, because it there is still no manner of specifying absolutely, the standard that will decide all other standards without deciding on that standard.

20. Empirically, in the complicated world of institutions, laws, governments, constitutions, networks, there is also an endless proliferation of conventions, from technical standards to regulations, to rules, to customs, to laws. Information and communication are not immune from this problem, on the contrary, they are the very model of standardization in the modern era. However, there is no 'aporia' of the poet, no "undecidability" of language, no crisis of representation. Quite the opposite: decisions are made constantly, all day long, in constant succession, sometimes without the mediation of any individuals at all. In fact, decisions are all that matter in most cases, and often there need not even be a justification, only a prompt and firm decision. Justifications, when needed, are available anywhere, even if the search for them paralyzes. The world seems somehow to be at peace with the notion that there is no ultimate authority for those decisions. But who gets to make decisions? Whose responsibility is guaranteeing the just-ness of these innumerable daily decisions?

B. Language Games, or Lyotard: The Emperor's New Clothes and Able Sabel spins a Fable.

21. In a roundabout way, it is the question above that cues the last page of another report, more familiar to American audiences, commissioned the Quebecois government, Jean-François Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, [Lyotard84] it reads:

We are finally in a position to understand how the computerization of society affects this problematic. It could be the "dream" instrument for controlling and regulating the market system, extended to include knowledge itself and governed exclusively by the performativity principle. In that case, it would inevitably involve the use of terror. But it could also aid groups discussing metaprescriptives by supplying them with the information they usually lack for making knowledgeable decisions. The line to follow for computerization to take the second of these paths is, in principle, quite simple: give the public free access to the memory and data banks. Language games would then be games of perfect information at any given moment. But they would also be non-zero sum games, and by virtue of that fact discussion would never risk fixating in a position of minimax equilibrium because it had exhausted its stakes. For the stakes would be knowledge (or information, if you will), and the reserve of knowledge—language's reserve of possible utterances—is inexhaustible. This sketches the outline of a politics that would respect both the desire for justice and the desire for the unknown. (67)

22. Lyotard's theory of games and differends will depend on a sharp distinction of knowledge from what he calls performativity— the efficiency of a world system of capitalism and its legitimation. The game of science, and its "postmodern" mode of legitimacy is that of "paralogy." Paralogy exists in the postmodern science of Rene Thom, Stenger and Prigogine, Benoit Mandlebrot and others associated with Chaos theory, and "complexity theory" and represents a mode of legitimation (an appeal to an authority that decides the undecidable) that is based on 'dissensus.' Lyotard stumbles on this absolutism (indeed, it is the subject of a whole other book, the Differend) because it is forced into a kind of arbitrary separation from other games. Despite the fact that Lyotard is fully aware of the embeddedness of science within society (especially within the "grand narratives" of legitimation of the University and the state: 'speculation' and 'emancipation' {see sections 8, 9 10}), knowledge is inconsistently distinguished from information. While the focus on rules, especially the rules of legitimation by paralogy, is apposite, the stark separation of knowledge from its vulgar uses and abuses in the market, in society, or in actually existing computers will ultimately frustrate the simple assertion that we open the data and memory banks.

23. Compare this with the constant assertion of the Free Software Foundation (FSF), that "information wants to be free." The FSF frees information daily, and wages a war against the ownership of information. Lyotard worries that IBM could put all the information in satellites and restrict access to it, even to governments! (Of course, this happens all the time today, though none of the information is actually in the satellites, per se). But what is essential to this gap is not the pure problem of legitimation by paralogy, but the deliberate programming of a legal regime of property rights. The FSF realizes this all too well (see section K) and it is the creation of a license like the General Public License, which uses contract law to prevent information from ever becoming property, which represents at once an example of Lyotard's moves in a language game, and the legitimate adherence to an existing system. FSF and their nemesis opensource.org both argue that 'openness' itself should be what legitimates a convention, a standard, a piece of software, and that that openness should be based on its workability, not some reference to an authority outside of itself. But "openness", like "paraology" in each specific case will depend on another convention. Very quickly, we return to the question that began this section: if someone must decide, who and how? Lyotard is cynical on this point. This "syndrome" of contemporary society "necessitates a serious revision." Once again, "for brevity's sake," Lyotard reduces the problem: "suffice it to say that functions of regulation and reproduction, are being and will be further withdrawn from administrators and entrusted to machines. Increasingly, the central question is becoming who will have access to the information these machines must have in storage to guarantee that the right decisions are made.(14)" The simplicity cracks up here. A series of predictions start flowing, to which I oppose some empirical nuggets:

"Access to data is and will continue to be, the prerogative of experts of all stripes."

24. (Parenthesis: Consider a discussion with Sean Doyle about hiding data on the internet. The internet, intimately connected with the institutions of science that produce data, tools for manipulating data, and organizing and presenting data, now finds itself an immense sea of information. Some of the data is not scientific data (such as medical information, or business statistics), but could be very useful for understanding patterns. In most cases there is no utility in hiding such data; in other cases, Sean suggests there are people who are trying to come up with ways of scrubbing the data so that data can be made public, used in experiments and clinical trials without endangering privacy concerns. Such "access" will either be radically open, or will obey the provisional justifications of a system of reputation that might be incompatible with the hierarchical system of decision makers that Lyotard imagines. Or consider what bioinformatics proponents suggest: what people will pay for and where power rests is not so much in exclusive access to information, but in "first crack" at the data. The time horizon might be sufficient for people to force a decision, to get ahead, to fall behind, to catch up, to produce something that can then be called proprietary. In this instance, a drug or a gene. This all important term "term" as in "term of credit" is what Lyotard fails to include when he impies that the ownership of information is forever. It connects the differing-deferring of Derrida with the simple fact of the temporality of both knowing and owning. When owning can be conceived of as contract, then it is not power, in Lyotard's sense, but just one more move in his language game. Pace FSF.)

"The ruling class is and will continue to be a class of decision makers." (14)

25. (Parenthesis: Consider the power struggle in medicine over "order entry"-- the decision about what tests or images to order, in order to make a decision about a patient's state. The power to make that first decision is increasingly being controlled not by a restriction of information, but by a simple interdiction: too expensive. Because the tests are ordered to provide a basis for liability protection as much as for actual access to 'knowledge' this curtailment is a first question of risk sharing between the doctor and the manager (a struggle not so much over the decision as the responsibility for the decision). Only second does it become a question of a game of "perfect information," to use the language of Lyotard. The "decision maker" is a figure that haunts the whole of The Postmodern Condition, and it is the 'arrogance' of the decision maker which would presumably be held to account for the ills of society. Consider the function again of 'buzzwords' and the control that managers wield based on the proper and improper use of buzzwords. In every case, decisions are made according to a naïve realist assumption that these words have things, when in fact they function only as a haphazardly circumscribed set of signifiers whose mention in specific contexts is primarily a form of justification for a decision that is made based on either a strictly calculable set of criteria, when accounting makes the decision, or a strictly incalculable criteria, when the manager makes the decision based on "intuition" or "experience." The division between marketing and sales and the management of production has historically let this kind of 'hype' circulate as epiphenomenal to the product. This is of course complicated by the existence of 'decision analysis' techniques which allow for things like intuition, experience and belief to be given a probabalistic weight and thus made calculable).

26. Lyotard's firm simplicity in stating such predictions may be exactly what prevents him from giving an answer other than the call for postmodern dissensus based on paralogic legitimations. Cynicism aside, and despite the 213 footnotes, The Postmodern Condition forgoes the specificity of political economy in favor of a narrative that would justify— if not legitimate— his conclusions. Even at the end of the report, when programmatic statements fly and ponderous words run behind them, there is a sense that The Postmodern Condition, in all its simplifications, has made a breakthrough:

We must thus arrive at an idea and practice of justice that is not linked to that of consensus. A recognition of the heteromorphous nature of language games is a first step in that direction... The second step is the principle that any consensus on the rules defining a game and the moves playable within it must be local, in other words, agreed on by its present players and subject to eventual cancellation. The orientation then favors a multiplicity of finite meta-arguments, by which I mean argumentation that concerns metaprescriptives and is limited in space and time (66).

27. This overly theoretical programmatic conclusion nonetheless references a very local change:

This orientation corresponds to the course that the evolution of social interaction is currently taking; the temporary contract is in practice supplanting permanent institutions in the professional, emotional, sexual, cultural, family, and international domains, as well as in political affairs (emphasis mine, 66).

28. Since this is one of the few sentences in the book without a footnote, we'll have to assume that Lyotard is referring to the temporary labor contract— and that he imagines this as corresponding to a local language game with agreed upon rules and the possibility of cancellation. The labor contract, however, may not be the best example, since it has always been subject to such negotiation, whether by virtue of the employer-employee relationship (which reduced negotiation to firing and quitting) or the association with the various corporate bodies that have represented labor over the years, such as unions. However, if the contract is for the use of software, the suggestion seems ever more reasonable today given an ostensible conflict between American intellectual property law and contract law. In particular, much discussion by lawyers over the amendment of Article 2B of the Uniform Commercial Code concerns the priority of contract or copyright. Some argue that the Amendment will give contract law an expanded legitimacy that it has not had to date, over the constitutionally guaranteed rights of intellectual property. The contracts at issue are those for software of various kinds that could be designed to control a host of aspects of the users use of them. On one end of the spectrum, this amounts to a complete form of governance by the corporations that control the writing and negotiating of these contracts (and their transformation into software that controls them). On the other is the Free Software Foundation, who depend on the very same possibility to guarantee a contract in which all such abilities to control the software (or the user) are guaranteed to the user. The combination of contract and copyright law, therefore could rest on a simple legitimation by consensus (Constitutional Law and America's broken representative democracy) a legitimation by 'dissensus' (temporary contracts negotiable by all parties, such as GPL'd piece of software) or a worst case scenario of both (temporary contracts negotiable only by the party that owns the software rights— legitimated by constitutional law). The implication being that governance is not always conducted by governments [8].

29. Lyotard's solution, to paraphrase, is to abolish intellectual property guarantees: "give the public free access to the memory and data banks." If this were to ever occur, then, what Lyotard calls "games of perfect information" would be possible, and perfect information levels the playing field for the making of decisions, or so we hope.

30. I would suggest that Lyotard's is not alone in his hope, nor his insistence on the role of language as essential to this hope.

31. Coming from another perspective to reach similar conclusions, is Charles Sabel, whose familiar assessments, with Michael Piore, of flexible specialization and The Second Industrial Divide has since led him to articulate nothing less than a new American Constitution that he calls, variously, "democratic experimentalism" and "directly deliberative polyarchy." In an article called "Design, Deliberation, and Democracy: On the New Pragmatism of Firms and Public Institutions," Sabel unravels a particularly complex argument with respect to the "syndrome" diagnosed and treated by Lyotard above [9]. He begins with a discussion of the traditions of theorizing self-organizing social behavior and their relationship to institutions that he identifies with Durkheim and Hayek. Sabel overturns a distinction central to both traditions, between tacit norms and guiding rules by virtue of an empirical familiarity with new economic modes of organization that he refers to as "Learning by Monitoring." These firms (Sabel studied automotive designers) are reorganized around teams that set the pace and goal of work by reference to other teams in vertical and horizontal relationship to them.

32. Significantly for this thesis, Sabel makes the following concise but encompassing claim:

These institutions, we will see, allow articulation of a single language of practical reason in which questions regarding the performance and the coordination of particular tasks can be addressed by disciplines with similar syntax. These innovations transform general ideas about the social exploration of ambiguity originally formulated by the pragmatists by extending them to economic and, potentially, political life. They reintegrate conception and execution by transforming corporate bureaucracies founded on their distinction; they evoke as well the prospect of joining democracy and workaday activity to combine the freedom of the ancient citizen to participate directly in lawmaking, but in a state that disdained concerns of daily life, and freedom of the modern citizen to express views on every manner of activity, but in a form, that of the public opinion apt to influence the law only at a remove. (Section 1, ¶7, emphasis mine).

33. Not only does Sabel relate the organization of economic activity to the structure of public life via pragmatism, but he insists on the linguistic nature the bond that allows intitutions to coordinate. I insist, here, and elsewhere (chapter P), that this linguistic focus is apposite, both in the general sense of "convention" and in the much more specific sense of standards for software and networking that are the very sphere "within" which the rich exchanges in information that Sabel identifies as necessary for Learning by Monitoring take place. The connection between Lyotard and Sabel that is based on this identification of language as essential to the social bond is supplemented by another connection between them, this with respect to the empirical studies that each of them undertook. Lyotard's early work as a founding member of the group Socialisme ou Barbarie dealt with the structure of Eastern European socialist bureaucracies (as did the work of members Cornelius Castoriadis and Claude Lefort). The focus was Marxist in origin, but leads away from a focus on production and the relation of the means of production to the progress of science and technology, to a focus on the material conditions of distribution and administration and the structures of information and communication that make up a Bureaucratic system of control. The relationship of these regimes of administration to the legal regime of property rights and the status of citizens' participation could be compared to Sabel's focus on the concomitant American bureaucracy— the American regulatory state, especially in its post-New Deal form, and its relationship to the organization of firms throughout the twentieth century. The focus on the organization of communication and control and its relationship to the political life of citizens, I think, is not an accident, but results from the careful study of the mechanics of such control and the recognition that the public sphere is both affected by it and reflects on it.

34. The fact that Sabel and Lyotard make similar claims concerning the necessity of a new, modifiable, programmable mode of legitimation should not be surprising then. In Lyotard's case the reference point is 'postmodern' science, game theory and language games; twenty years later, Sabel sends us to Dewey, Mead, Peirce, and Davidson for lessons in the relation between life and language, the constancy of consciousness in the present, and the modifiability of grammar for shared purposes.

35. One way that Sabel reaches this point, as hinted above, is by attempting to resolve a difference between Durkheim and Hayek. Sabel's reading of Durkheim insists that the fundamental ordering convention of society is a moral frame, a demonstrtation of forms of life that instills in individuals implicit customs of political organization and fair exchnage that prevent moral collapse. He identifies this reading with social democracy and with the corporatist forms of organization that it values in order to provide these guarantees. In Hayek, he identifies the strongest form of the neo-liberal view of self-organizing economies, requiring only the simplest government guarantees of property and contract as explicit rules-- all else evolves (Sabel makes much more subtle distinctions and considers each of these authors in greater detail than this might suggest, but the point is still their opposition). Between these two versions of convention Sabel inserts a pragmatism of collaboration and co-monitoring that he promises will reunite conception and execution. The pragmatist insight that thought and action are co-determining, and each constantly changing in light of the other over time (associated most often with Dewey, for who it represented a theory of scientific experiment as well) is a powerfully attractive notion for a hamstrung regulatory state and a world, as Sabel puts it, full of ambiguity and unintended consequences.

36. I cannot attempt a complete reading of Sabel's proposals for a new democratic order in this introduction, and I suspect that elaborating the relationship that it holds to the technology of software and networking is a significant undertaking. Instead I would suggest that what his program implies is that the very basis of a legitimate convention is its open-ness, its accessibility to others and the possibility of it being modified in light of changed contexts. This is precisely what I attempt to explain in the context of technical standards in healthcare and the internet, in particular the appeal, dear to hackers, to precisely this kind of open-ness. I have tried to explain why this openness exists now, why in particular on the internet, and what is specific to openness in software and language, especially as it intersects with property and contract law and government regulations in America and America at large in the world. Reflecting on the variety of programmed languages that enfold all of these forms of openness, is how I intend to proceed.

Last Modified 11-Sep-99 9:20 PM ckelty@mit.edu

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