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Anthropological Relocations and the Limits of Design

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Anthropological Relocations and the Limits of Design AN40-FrontMatter ARI 23 August 2011 7:33 by 98.235.160.95 on 03/29/12. For personal use only. Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2011.40:1-18. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org AN40CH01-Suchman ARI 7 September 2011 8:48 Anthropological Relocations and the Limits of Design Lucy Suchman Department of Sociology, Lancaster University, Lancaster, LA1 4YT, United Kingdom; email: [email protected] Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2011. 40:1–18 Keywords First published online as a Review in Advance on innovation, knowledge politics, reflexive organization, technoscapes June 29, 2011 Abstract by 98.235.160.95 on 03/29/12. For personal use only. The Annual Review of Anthropology is online at anthro.annualreviews.org This article takes as a touchstone the concept of location as it has been This article’s doi: articulated through anthropology’s reflections on its history and posi- 10.1146/annurev.anthro.041608.105640 tioning as a field, and in relation to shifting engagements with contem- Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2011.40:1-18. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org Copyright c 2011 by Annual Reviews. porary technoscientific, political, and ethical problems. A second touch- All rights reserved stone is one specific anthropological relocation—that is, into worlds of 0084-6570/11/1021-0001$20.00 professional technology design. With figures of location and design in play, I describe some perspicuous moments that proved both generative and problematic in my own experience of establishing terms of engage- ment between anthropology and design. Though design has been con- sidered recently as a model for anthropology’s future, I argue instead that it is best positioned as a problematic object for an anthropology of the contemporary. In writing about design’s limits, my argument is that, like anthropology, design needs to acknowledge the specificities of its place, to locate itself as one (albeit multiple) figure and practice of transformation. 1 AN40CH01-Suchman ARI 7 September 2011 8:48 INTRODUCTION through the figuring of five “scapes” (which he designates as ethno, media, techno, finance, and “The future arrives sooner here.” Driving ideo), meant to articulate multiple geographies my car down Hillview Avenue in Palo Alto, “constituted by the historically situated imag- California, one evening around 1995, I hear inations of persons and groups spread around this assertion on U.S. National Public Radio, the globe” (p. 33). The value of the trope of spoken by a Silicon Valley technologist who is scape for Appadurai is its orientation to dis- being interviewed. It elicits a by-now-familiar junctures as much as continuities within and response—I have inhabited the Valley by this among these mappings so that they interact and time for 15 years—a bodily resistance to be- intersect in multiple and specific ways (see also ing hailed into this claim to the vanguard, with Barry 2001, p. 37). And writing of “techniques its attendant mandate to enact the future that for the production of locality” (Appadurai 1997, others will subsequently live. p. 182), Appadurai emphasizes that the local is These words constitute a place—a “here”— not the ground for cultural analysis but the fig- that comprises part of my problematic. They ure, not already given but constituted in and position the speaker in an identifiable territory, through practices such as the statement with indexically referencing the interviewee’s loca- which I began. tion as the Silicon Valley and in turn, of course, Postcolonial scholarship has taught us that performing the existence of that place once centers and margins are multiple and relative, again through this naming of it. And in their and futures can be enacted only in what Tsing positing of a singular, universal future, they re- (2005) names “the sticky materiality of practi- iterate, as well, a past in the form of a diffusionist cal encounters ...the makeshift links across dis- model of change. Described by Fabian (1983) tance and difference that shape global futures— in Time and the Other as a form of temporal and ensure their uncertain status” (pp. 1–2). distancing, this “involves placing chronologi- These encounters happen within circulatory cally contemporary and spatially distant peo- systems characterized by specific moments of ples along a temporal trajectory, such that the place-making and transversal movement, pro- record of humanity across the globe is progres- cesses that we are just beginning to articulate sively ordered in historical time” (p. 13). The in ways other than through the simple tropes kind of spatial and temporal distancing enacted of local knowledge or global flows. Locally en- in a statement such as this is also, in this sense, acted effects are made to travel less through by 98.235.160.95 on 03/29/12. For personal use only. a colonizing move. easy flows than through messy translations and, We can read this statement as reproducing as Tsing observes, those who claim to be in the neocolonial geographies of center and pe- touch with the universal are notoriously bad at riphery, and temporalities of technological de- seeing the limits and exclusions of their own Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2011.40:1-18. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org velopment, that in the mid-1990s underwrote knowledge practices (p. 8). Postcolonial forms the Silicon Valley’s figuration as central to the of future-making, it follows, require geogra- future of everywhere. Escobar (1994) proposes phies that have less certain centers (Redfield the term “technoscape” to reference the ways 2002, p. 794). One contribution to the project in which discourses and practices generated by of relocating future-making, then, is an anthro- and around information and communications pology of those places presently enacted as cen- technologies comprise a kind of landscape to be ters of innovation that illuminate the provincial inhabited. Like other maps, depictions of the contingencies and uncertainties of their own fu- technoscape are not simply aids to navigation tures, as well as the situated practices required through an already-existing terrain, but propo- to sustain their reproduction as central. sitions for a geography within which relevant The first touchstone for my article is this subjects and objects might claim their place. concept of location, as it has been articulated in Appadurai (1997) develops this trope further the context of anthropology’s reflections on its 2 Suchman AN40CH01-Suchman ARI 7 September 2011 8:48 history and positioning as a field and in relation United States since the mid-twentieth century to shifting engagements with contemporary and with what effects. However suggestive, we technoscientific, political, and ethical problems cannot mobilize the trope of design without (see, for example, Clifford & Marcus 1986, attending to that history and its legacies. Strathern 1995, Gupta & Ferguson 1997, Ong Among the latter, I argue, is a conception of & Collier 2005). A second touchstone is one design method that has, until recently, gone specific anthropological relocation in which I largely uncontested and that systematically have been directly implicated: into worlds of obscures the questions that anthropology professional technology design. Considered might find central to a consideration of what recently as a model for anthropology’s future constitutes transformative change and how it (Rabinow et al. 2008), I argue instead that happens. Thinking about design as method design and innovation are best positioned as directs our attention to what Law (2004) has problematic objects for an anthropology of named design’s “hinterlands”; that is, that on the contemporary. I share an interest in ways which method relies, but which necessarily of theorizing change, breaks, ruptures, and overflows its frame (see also Callon 1998). the new that do not rely on singular origins, This is another sense of limits that I seek. definite moments of invention, or trajectories Method (as ethnomethodology has extensively of progressive development. And I share as demonstrated) presupposes an open horizon well a commitment to an anthropology that of competencies and contingencies on which works across disciplinary boundaries within the its efficacies depend, but which it can never academy and allies with relevant practitioners fully specify (Garfinkel & Sacks 1970). These in other locations. At the same time, I believe observations alert us to the ways in which that we need less a reinvented anthropology conventional design methods are (necessarily) as (or for) design than a critical anthropology silent on matters that anthropology would be of design. The latter requires, among other interested in articulating. And they suggest the things, ethnographic projects that articulate sense of the limits that I seek, putting profes- the cultural imaginaries and micropolitics that sional design in its place in ways that could help delineate design’s promises and practices. us to think through its history and possibilities With figures of location and design in in a more critical and generative way. play, I offer what I hope are some perspicuous moments, encounters that proved both gen- by 98.235.160.95 on 03/29/12. For personal use only. erative and problematic in my own experience RELOCATIONS of establishing terms of engagement between My thinking about these questions draws from anthropology and design. I reflect on what an archive of memories and documentary insights these anthropological relocations materials assembled during my 20-year tenure Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2011.40:1-18. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org might offer regarding what I am calling here (from 1979 to 1999) at Xerox’s Palo Alto Re- the limits of design. In writing about design’s search Center (PARC). At its founding in 1970, limits, my intention is not to diminish the PARC represented an investment in making value of projects aimed at thinking through technology futures. Deliberately placed far rearrangements and transformations that could from Xerox’s corporate headquarters in Con- address pressing problems or explore untried necticut, the story goes, the research center was possibilities.
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