Talking about changes of scale

1.       In Pg 402 we are urged “ to treat the large as a fragile, instrumental extension of the small”

To anybody trained in the Natural sciences this reminds emerging phenomena, especially emerging phenomena related to small rules that lead to unexpected global behaviors (like a traffic jam or event in an ant colony).  However in these cases one tends to start from an individual (indeed there is a question of the kind: “what is the starting point, the small entity based on which changes of scale will show up)

Now the Individual, as we usually tend to use this term, is not the intended starting point here:

• “The individual is dispersed into mutually incompatible scripts”
• “The individual “Peter” is infinitely divisible, despite its etymology, into hundreds of “Peters” whose spatial, temporal, and actantial continuity is not assured by any isotopy “ (though I did not understand well the meaning of isotopy)”
• “The individual is an overly unified aggregate”

So the starting point is different, probably some kind of elementary script.

If I am to follow the little I know from Physics we have qualitatively different paths that we could follow towards expressing  changes of size (which I think is the same as “relative scaling” in the book). One way is the one mentioned above ( in accordance to the way the emergence of traffic jams is explained using simple rules for simple agents)

However there is another way to speak about changes in aggregation which in my understanding is closer to expressions like the following (pg 404):

“If there is something “enlarging” , it is that a new being is circulating, as original in its genre as the political cycle [POL], which makes it possible to make anything it grasps change size [POL. ORG]”

This other way has to do with how new properties are described when we speak about quantum phenomena. So there are for example some atoms but their combining is expressed not through a piling up of scripts but through a differential equation that has to be solved and gives solutions with novel properties. Or if one wants something more elaborate one can thing of the coordination of electrons in BCS theory which, according to Anderson  showed that “our familiar electrons were no longer little particles but unquestionably were quanta of a quantum field”

If electrons can aggregate in such elaborate ways one could think that “scripts” might also aggregate in very elaborate ways to form “projects” and that the way presented in the book is limited by the mathematical depth of the author.

My point here is NOT a proposal for a different formalism: rejecting the view of little computer programs piling up one upon another and prefer some kind of differential equations.  

I think that things here go both ways. A better understanding of how size emerges in organizations may also interact with our understanding of physical aggregations. 

Indeed when I first read the phrase:

“If there is something “enlarging” , it is that a new being is circulating, as original in its genre as the political cycle [POL], which makes it possible to make anything it grasps change size [POL. ORG]”

I thought that perhaps this could work as an electron’s view of what it feels like to be under the spell of a wavefunction with its Hamiltonean (the latter feels  like the “instrumentation” that allows for great changes in scale)

What I say is that in both cases it may help to move under the guidance of stronger mathematical inutitions.

In both cases what I think is missing is a better understanding of the mathematics that are involved and of the way they function. People working in science studies usually (I think) turn towards embodied cognition of the Nunez Lackoff type (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where_Mathematics_Comes_From)  but in my opinion they need also to study people like Corfield, Rodin and Lawvere who have thought quite deeply on the meaning of mathematics.

Indeed the [ORG] chapter in the MOE book involves a lot of Geometrical intuitions like the birth of “borders, frontiers, mandates, limits, walls, ends” in pg 397-398

2.       In the MOE there is a certain allergy towards changing levels

I have tried to understand why this is so especially for the [ORG] chapter. It seems to me that Latour accepts that we, the readers of his book, register large scale entities and represent them in our discussions and explanations.

For example some people organize consumers according to their preferences into clusters. They then design marketing strategies that target them (and perhaps in this way make these clusters even more stable).

One may say: the cluster is really local. It is the result of a local analysis using a statistics program and then it is discussed and decisions are taken to follow this or that policy. Everything is local.

BUT nothing guarantees in advance that these decisions will be successful. Nothing guarantees in advance that the construct that was made through the statistical analysis will be successful in practice for other uses.  Suppose it is. How are we to interpret this “meeting with success”? And what if the same cluster shows other “properties” that are also useful to other policies? Does this not start resembling to “reaching out to distant entities”? (like building a [REF] chain to a star nebula?)

Is it peculiar if we start feeling we grasp an “emerging entity” which has a kind of “objective existence”? 

Moreover I may feel the influence of this entity on me (because these consumers are really pushing industrial production in particular ways and I feel the consequence of that). Is this not like a meeting with a “being” “from a different level”?

I can see three counter arguments:

1.       Maybe  I really feel myself too as an emergent entity (so me and the cluster of consumers are made of “similar stuff”- no different level) . But there is a difference here. I have a first hand experience of some kind of conscious unity of myself (which is tempered by psychological and other knowledge) but  through personal experience (trained by AIME) I can perceive an organization as an agglomeration of scripts.  I do not just perceive myself as many “Vassilis’s” (like the many Peters in the book).

 If I treat my sense of unity as an illusion why am I different from the bifurcationist who treats secondary qualities as illusions?

2.       Research wise: not speaking about separate levels and focusing on the level of scripts keeps a clearer conceptual flow, it helps the thinking work . Although under certain circumstances it could be useful to reify the emerging entities,  it can ossify and become “foundational”

3.      Speaking about different levels could lead to a distorted construction of subjectivity. Aside from the aggregation of scripts there is also theoretical work with respect to organizations. It can be useful. But if it is caught in a category mistake then I (the researcher) am the One who contemplates reality (the ORGANIZATION)  from above and  the other(the simple worker) is powerless and crashed by his  inability to perceive his  situation.  We are both “possessed” by individuality (jn a [MET] way) and in a special enslaving relation with the idol of “Organization