Some typos and perhaps improvable lines in the "Inquiry into MOE" book

Since I have read the "Inquiry to the MOE" book carefully , I send some points that seem to me typos or that they could be written better (I have put many questionmarks to my copy of the book in these points)

Συζητωντας για τη Φυσικη

Συζητησα με δυο κοριτστια του Δημοτικου  ενα απο τα θεματα Φυσικής στις εξετάσεις των πρωτοετων.

Thinking once more on the structure of the general system of modes

Ολυμπιακοί αγώνες: Ρυθμική γυμναστική

Οι Παλαιστίνιοι σε υπεράσπιση του πλουσιου παρελθόντος τους

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/05/annexing-archaeology-unesco-israel-160519051718915.html

In the running for UNESCO status are two historic monasteries, Mar Saba and Cremisan, near Bethlehem; the important Roman archaeological site of Sebastiya; a section of the River Jordan where Jesus is believed to have been baptised; the Old City of Hebron, where Jewish settlers have installed themselves with help from the Israeli army; and Mount Gerizim, outside Nablus, where a small community of Samaritans resides.

Η Λαβρα του Αγιου Σαββα https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mar_Saba
http://www.middleeasteye.net/in-depth/features/fight-beit-jala-monastery-land-and-history-over-palestinian-christians-1152469636

Reset Modernity! and Mezirow's theory of transformative learning

Another way to look on the change that AIME and Reset Modernity! push for, one that gives more attention to individual agency, is Mezirow's theory of transformative learning (a quite respected theory in adult leraning)
For example in Mezirow, J. (2009). (An overview on transformative learning. In K. Illeris (Ed.), Contemporary theories of learning: Learning theorists… In Their Own Words, vol. 90.) Mezirow proposed a sequence of steps that to a certain degree describe the path of transformative learning

• a disorienting dilemma; (this is amply represented in Reset Modernity!)
• self-examination with feelings of fear, anger, guilt, or shame; (It does not seem to me that there is much support for that. It seems to me that the palet of emotions in Reset Modernity! is limited)
• a critical assessment of assumptions; (Again this probably is represented quite well in Reset Modernity!)
• recognition that one’s discontent and the process of transformation are shared;(the f2f interaction and possibly the tweeter may help but I wander how come we don't see mentioned the king of Web2.0: facebook)
• exploration of options for new roles, relationships, and action; (it is not clear if any support is provided for this. A funny thought: Political parties and political movements could have check points where they would propose their own agendas of going beyond modernity) 
• planning a course of action;(is there anything in this direction?)
• acquiring knowledge and skills for implementing one’s plans; (where from? Apart from starting to question the modern condition what sources of knowledge and skills are proposed to the participants of Rest Modernity! ?)
• provisional trying of new roles; (this is out of what reset modernity! could offer)
• building competence and self-confidence in new roles and relationships; and
• a reintegration into one’s life on the basis of conditions dictated by one’s new perspective.” (same remarks for the last two)

Reset Modernity! , Change Laboratories and a reading of the field book

I will try to understand "Reset Modernity!" (http://zkm.de/en/event/2016/04/globale-reset-modernity)  and what I get to be its scaffolding (its scaffolding towards being transformative experience) by comparing it with Change Laboratories and the approach of Expansive Learning (as I understand it)


There are three parts.

1. In the first part I express what I think is relevant from expansive learning and Change Laboratories for "Reset Modernity!". 
2. In the second part I will see "Reset Modernity!" from the point of view of "double stimulation". What kinds of first and second order stimuli I see.
3. In the third part I will write my comments on the Reset Modernity! fieldbook 

My "bibliography"
Cultural historical activity theory: http://www.helsinki.fi/cradle/chat.htm
The activity system: http://www.helsinki.fi/cradle/activitysystem.htm

Engestrom's EARLI 2015, Keynote lecture in Limassol  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5UgBw_4SpP4
Engestrom Interview (Part1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCumH6Q4XKc  , Part 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZgiH_xnwo9E)

Engeström, Y., Rantavuori, J., & Kerosuo, H. (2013). Expansive learning in a library: Actions, cycles and deviations from instructional intentions. Vocations and Learning, 6(1), 81-106.
Engeström, Y., Kajamaa, A., & Nummijoki, J. (2015). Double stimulation in everyday work: Critical encounters between home care workers and their elderly clients. Learning, Culture and Social Interaction, 4, 48-61.
Sannino, A., & Laitinen, A. (2015). Double stimulation in the waiting experiment: Testing a Vygotskian model of the emergence of volitional action.Learning, Culture and Social Interaction, 4, 4-18.
Sannino, A. (2015). The principle of double stimulation: A path to volitional action. Learning, Culture and Social Interaction, 6, 1-15.
Engeström, Y. (2009). Wildfire activities: New patterns of mobility and learning.International Journal of Mobile and Blended Learning (IJMBL), 1(2), 1-18.
Haapasaari, A., Engeström, Y., & Kerosuo, H. (2014). The emergence of learners’ transformative agency in a Change Laboratory intervention. Journal of Education and Work, 1-31.

Part1:

I will start from this talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5UgBw_4SpP4 of Engestrom in Limassol. Engestrom speaks about Expansive Learning which seems to me to be the kind of learning that is demanded from the participants in Reset Modernity! (and the reades of the "Inquiry into the modes of existence" book and the co-inquirers in the AIME project http://modesofexistence.org/)
In this kind of learning the participants deliberately go for a change in the Activity System they participate in.
In the case of Reset Modernity! I think that the Activity System we are talking about is the one that produces orientation in modern life, particularly in the direction of Globalization. So perhaps the obejct in the initial activity system (before the influence of Reset Modernity! sets in) is the Land that is transformed into a Globe. This is indeed the initial "image" with which the field book starts the travel of making Earth present.

At 11:25 in the talk Engestrom speaks about "transformative negotiation" as the way to bring to life innovations (according to local needs). In the case of Reset Modernity! there is an innovation but itself is unknown (As Latour says, it is not clear where we will land). Nobody can have good claim that they know what this innovation must be.

This is a first point on which there is a similarity with the claims in Reset Modernity! (where in a sense humans and non humans are called to participate in transformative negotiation) but a disimilarity with the practices in Reset Modernity! as they come from the field book.  There are workstations ( they are mentioned in a7, B3, C9, D4, E3, F7 in the fieldbook)    and a visitor can discuss but the situation seems very asymmetrical between the organizers and the visitors.  It sounds as if the members of the organizing team present in the work stations (if I get it right) are like “human – instruments” which will be maximally affected  (they are maximally changed, perhaps they carry their change to the principal investigator who works like the mother-bee).  But then the visitors leave with not much further support (the tweeter support http://modesofexistence.org/reset-modernity-hashtags/ seems to me not strong enough)

Engestrom puts special attention on critical encounters and on material anchors. 

• critical encounters are interactional situations that engender conflicts of motives. They are expected to be crucial in expansive learning. "A conflict of motives is generally also an inner conflict of each subject". It is also the starting point of the emergence of volitional actions.
• The discussion on material anchores reminded me strongly of the discussion in the Modes of Existence book about how scritps can get innertia by their "collaboration" with materials. It seems to me like a similar concept. What is interesting though is that Engestrom connects these material anchors with the process of double stimulation (a Vigotskian concept that seems very interesting and that in recent work of Engestrom and Sannino is related with the imergence of volition. See Sannino 2015) 

In double stimulation learning is brought forth through the existence of a primary stimulous (often direct conflict, a disturbing situation) but then a second, neutral stimulous, comes and works as an aide, a tool that the learning person uses to transform the disturbing situation and determine a new object for the activity. 
This line of thought leads to the question: Do we see in Reset Modernity! this process of double stimulation that could really support visitors into transformative learning or do we just see first order stimuli? And if we see second order stimuli how good are they and is there further structure that could be put in place and support expansive learning?
(the comparison with change laboratories can be worked much more but I think  Haapasaari et al 2014 helps a lot)

Part 2: 

My best effort by reading the field book (http://zkm.de/media/file/en/2016-zkm-reset-modernity-fieldbook_e.pdf)_

1st order stimuli
(A1, A2, A3, A4  their juxtaposition), A4 (as far as I can guess from the description in the field book), A5
B1, B2, B6
C1, C2, C3, C4, C5 C6 C10
D1, D2, D3 D7
E1
F1, F2, F3, F4, F6

2nd order stimuli
Perhaps A6, A8, A9, A10, A11, A12, 
Perhaps B4, B5
Perhaps C7 C8 C11
Perhaps D5, D6, D8
Perhaps E2 E4 (training field for detecting difference of tone)
Perhaps F5,


I classified these a 2nd order becuase they seemed to me to be more disturbingly artistic (not in the sense of moving us to consider an issue but in the sense of calling forth, of generating in us a potency, a sense that they provoke generative work to come forth)

On the other hand there seems to me that there is not much concrete. improvable, artifact support. The only one I can find is a sequence of diagrams (I've put them together)

which although it looks as a seed for thinking, still one wanders what one would change in them, how can progress, progress made by the participants themselves, the visitors, be depicted ON them

Part 3:

This is a rereading of the fieldbook (http://zkm.de/media/file/en/2016-zkm-reset-modernity-fieldbook_e.pdf) of Reset Modernity!



The field book gives me the following sense at its start:
-We have a navigation problem. Signals that confuse us relative to where we should go to. The “march of modernity” seems to have stoped working well towards our orientation.
-We need sensors that need to be calibrated and we need to be able to interpret the data they give us. (This reminds me of the following in Engestrom 2009 pg 10 “Adrian Cussins (1992) suggests that the foundational mechanism for cognition, concept formation and learningis exploratory movement in space –whether physical, mental, discursive,or virtual.”   )
-Moreover we humans die and new humans have to take over a very problematic inheritance

I think that it is assumed that in this effort to re-orient there will develop a “taste of where “we” want to go”.  This has to do with motivation, something that I think in the companion project AIME is dealt with [ATT] (the mode of “mobilization”) but also through an identification of will with existence (it sounds to me that each existent exist through passages and “wills” this existence- its will is also realized as existence). Anyway this is my impression
In activity theory how motives are born, how volition comes to be is a main issue and has been examined (for example Haapasaari et al and Sannino 2015)

Procedure A:  Relocalizing the Global
Building trails, setting up a “world” , becoming competent in navigating in this world (and thus “Having a Globe available”)  is hard construction work. 

However relocalizing the Global brings,people like me, in front of the following question: Are we in somebody’s presence or are we in possession of the Globe (thanks to knowledge)?   (Cooren)
If it is possible for some people to construct “maps of reality” and for us to learn to identify with features of these maps so that there is a direct link between our navigation and the map, why not forget mediations, why not leave them for the plumbers of reality (scientists) and keep the power of minimizing “bads” and increasing “goods” for our self?
Global is a way to decompose reality into separate views where the calculation of desire and horror can be done separately and recomposably. The cost is “meeting”. We stop meeting others (of all kinds).
To deny this Globe is to deny our separate standing, therefore to start again being more actively connected. 
There still is  a “whole” though! We feel it. What is it?

“When we think we are outdoors, or in nature, what sphere are we really enclosed by?
What is the sphere we select to be enclosed by?

At this point I feel uncertain about the Globe. Globe is not that attractive any more

Procedure B: Without the world or within?

Where are “we”? “we” have been staged. We learned to think the “house of ourself” made by walls of “windows” that separate a “me” from a “that”. 
Andrian Walker draws a “revealed hand” and “opened-up” hand that could be his. Or we can think of a brain surgery where the surgeon asks the patient to detect aphasia https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQ3_IXuhZxQ

 This is presented at the end of this section of the field book

but I think this is more of the previous stage (a whole that is not Global, that is not linearly decomposable). 

There is another questionmark that can be situated either above the plane or below the plane: The drawing here is a window and there I see myself looking etc etc. 

But who is looking. I am thinking: the whole activity system is "looking"

So one could change the drawing. One can imagine the triangle of activity theory comming vertically out of the plane that is defined by Land-Globe. Land - Globe symbolizes the tension in the old object. Then the questionmark in the previous image is the changed object, the outcome.


The combination of the activity triangle with the AIME-terminology brings forth other interesting visual aids too. One can think the activity system performing in time and bringing forth trails. Which brought in my mind the image of a Turing machine and I imagined the activity system as the head of the Turing machine

Or, since trails make peculiar quilts one may think of activity systems like enzymes and DNAs and RNAs as trails

But this is more of a game as I put it. (I speak too loosely). The interesting thing is how do we produce artifacts that can support the transformative work.


Procedure C : Share responsibility: Farewell to the sublime.

In my opinion, the question here is: What is the future of modelling? 
So we are entering the realm of TOOLS. 
How can we model when the system shakes when we model it? It used to be a feature of the quantum regime but now it is the feature of our life in Earth (Anthropocene)

I move (with my consumer habits for example), millions like me move, and the "Whole" trembles. 
The sublime is grandiose but also conquered. The giant is conquered but it can still kick violently. There is the thrill of being next to the danger. The bull fighter.This whole is violent. It can kick.

But its power is also coming from us. We realize that we are mirrored in this violence. It turns our action back to us like an Aikido master. We are mirrored horizontaly to this that seemed alien.
“How do we react today when faced with examplesn ot of nature’s immensity but of the immensity of human industry?” Our tools tend to be huge, though we are small. We move huge entities in order to produce the means for small ends.

We can force this huge body to tattoo itself! We can make the large obey our small actions, we can make the distant obey our close actions. Out tools alter the “solidity” of our world.

We are also next to huge “tools of monitoring”. The world is so big and interdependent that part of our tools are just there so that we don’t loose track.
Our tools make the world shake and we depend on our tools so that we don’t feel totally unconnected to reality.

Procedure D: From lands to disputed territories

DIVISION OF LABOR. 
Complex systems of interdependence. Humans and non-humans together.
Critical zones as stabilized centers. 
Borders that divide labor.  What about the chartography of resources. What about tools needed to detect the flow of what we care for? New roles appear and demand to be respected if we are to manage to orient ourselves

(But what about the past? What abour keeping our (moderns') dominant position? What about translating our current dominant position in a new dominant position in what is coming? )
Old minds asking to be carried by new territories.
New territories – new regimes of body governance (ascetic governance?).  A connection is built between the Earth and the body. Governing the earth- governing the body.

Is a territory something we depend on it in order to subsist?
What happens when due to our action the solid earth moves under the feet of our brothers? When the role of non-humans change and they stop holding the weight they used to? The division of labor has made us responsible for “holding the earth”!!!
If some move the earth we stand on to push  forward their concerns, how are “we” going to navigate? Are we responsible for the ability of other people to navigate in this world?

Inside the critical zone it is the relations among the elements that make it shrink here and expand there like a living body. It may even turn here and there. But they still want to keep intact their property rights!

Rich people may contemplate. Contemplating may be a fool’s play for the rest of us. We are born in debt or forced to clumsy movements that lead to debt. Bounded by chains of complicatedness and complexity and subdued by rhetorical and physical power.

Soil is the living skin of the earth. What kind of soil for the new earth? Simbiosis with soil. Soil as a servant that mast not be maltreated. The basic health. 

What are the territories we go for? Why does Latour search for an entity? What is the division of labor we go for? The procession (li? In Konfucianism)


Procedure E: Secular at last
COMMUNITIES.
 Religion and Politics building communities. 
“a new baseline exists that could be used as a yardstick to measure spiritual ambitions and
new material attachments – a new foundation, still unrecognizable, down below.

Procedure F: Innovation not Hype

We have a relation with artifacts 
“they never enter into the world as objects but always as projects” 
They have a history, they are full of conflict, they overflow with unintended consequences, they zigzag into the world.

Taking care of techniques

Techniques are expected to help us “detect” Earth, produce new kinds of relations with maps so that we experience new “territories” that we will care defending and that can envelope valuable identities.

“How can we love our techniques, really love them?”
Is this not like asking how can techniques alter our bodies? Become parts of our bodies so that we and them become “one flesh”? 
To me it sounds like too much. Not a move of love towards technologies but a despondency to love people. 

Because there is denied a traditional trajectory that decomposes the body, that sanctifies the body, that makes the body a project (as with the ascetics). 
To me all this is about RULES AND NORMS. Mastering innovation, robots as companion species.

Therefore (possibly in a forced way) I see in the procedures of Reseting Modernity! the presence of elements of activity systems and I think that this may be a way to support the visitor further.

Reset Modernity! , AIME-talk and double stimulation

I think that behind both AIME (http://modesofexistence.org/) and Rest Modernity! (http://zkm.de/en/event/2016/04/globale-reset-modernity) there is a sense of conflict of motives in the moderns.

On the one hand moderns really do have very good intentions and they feel that these intentions have really affected in a positive way the whole planet. They do want to move along this path
On the other hand they see that there are very dagerous patterns unfolding (environmentally, geostrategically) and they Know that action has to be taken but the do not want to loose the "good" things: their exceptional place in the world (everybody has to pass through them and their institutions), their having the upper hand, their standard of living (they think how ridiculous they would be if helping others become better they would end beggars in the others' beautiful homes).
So there is a conflict of motives.

The conflict of motives brings in mind the concept of double stimulation in learning and in particular recent work that presents double stimulation not as a teaching process but as a way for volitional action to come through. Here I use the following work related to Cradle (http://www.helsinki.fi/cradle/) Sannino, A. (2015). The principle of double stimulation: A path to volitional action. Learning, Culture and Social Interaction, 6, 1-15.

What is double stimulation:
1. "Themethod of double stimulation serves tomake visible internal and unobservable psychological processes (Van der Veer, 2001,2008). Triggered by an initial problematic situation or first stimulus, a second stimulus is an artifact that has become a sign, i.e., a traceable link between the outside world and inner psychological functioning. The use of second stimuli makes therefore accessible processes which remain hidden when external resources are not mobilized. In this sense double stimulation is a method of objectification of inner psychological processes."
2. However double stimulation is also a principle related to the emergence of volitional action in humans  ("double stimulation as a mechanismof will formation and thus as a key to all higher mental functions“) "Behind the play of stimuli–responses what really occurred was active intervention of man in the situation, his active role, his behavior which consisted in introducing new stimuli. And this is exactly what comprises the newprinciple, the new unique relation between behavior and stimulation…The unique activity of the man directed toward mastery of his own behavior…It was manwho beforehand determined the role and function of the stimulus which in itself could not determine behavior.”" (this is from Vigotsky, mentioned in Sannino's article)
3."the conflict of motives [is] a defining component of double stimulation"

From this point of view one can consider the whole performative language proposed in the "Inquiry into the Modes of Existence" and in AIME as an example of a second order stimuli. It is a neutral tool that is introduced into the conflict and helps change the object of the activity

The previous object of the activity was probably: What policy are we to follow?
The new object is more like: what is the patrimony we want to protect and how will we negotiate in a common world?

Now the "new speak" proposed by AIME is not the only 2nd order stimuli that can be added. One might say that internationalized market based educational talk is also a 2nd order stimuli aiming towards changing "who is "us", who are to be counted as the salt of the earth". This educational talk speaks about skills of the 21st century and methods that are conductive to them. This is neutral to the initial conflict of motives. But aren't those who will master the 21st century skills constituting a "new Israel", no matter in what country they may be found? So is this not another way for the object of the activity to change?

Personally I find the second way not interesting and the way suggested by AIME sounds to me way more spiritually valuable.

(I want also to add that I think that strong conflicts of motives are present also to traditionalists in various semi-modern countries and to "converted - moderns" in the same semi-modern countries)

Not having attended the Reset Modernity! exhibition I wander:

• Is the "modes of existence talk" proposed by AIME used as a 2nd order stimuli for the participants in it? 
• What is the activity system (http://www.helsinki.fi/cradle/activitysystem.htm) that is the issue here? 
• Is there sufficient scaffolding so that Reset Modernity! be part of an effort to change the activity system that really changes lives (rather than talk about lives only)? 
• How does the strategy used in Reset Modernity! to effect change  compare with strategies like Change Laboratories (http://www.helsinki.fi/cradle/Change%20laboratory.html)? 

Psychology in AIME and in Activity theory, the work in Cradle and transformative agency in "Reset Modernity!"

Cradle is a Center in the University of Helsinki (http://www.helsinki.fi/cradle/) which I think produces very interesting work based on the development of activity theory and related to Expansive learning in various organizations.

I find some similarity in the stance they take relative to a psychology of the King-Subject (if I am allowed to call it so) and the similarly hostile stance that is present in Latour's "Inquiry into the modes of existence book" and AIME (http://modesofexistence.org/).

So in Haapasaari, A., Engeström, Y., & Kerosuo, H. (2014). The emergence of learners’ transformative agency in a Change Laboratory intervention. Journal of Education and Work, 1-31. 
the authors contrast their proposal of the concept of "transforamtive agency" to "individually focused psychological approaches...As Deci and Ryan (1995, 35) define it, ‘the term human agency refers to those motivated behaviours that emanate from one’s integrated self’"

There is similarity here with the mode of [MET] , a psycho-genetic mode (among other things if I get it right) who comes "from the outside" to support the gradual making of a psyche (in the further process of building gradually subjectivity through the presence of many modes- not in the sense of us looking upon such a creating like looking to a 3-D printer , but in the sense of being able to communicatively participate to a swarm of significant activity) 

The authors of the article  further claim "Transformative agency differs from conventional notions of agency in
that it stems from encounters with and examination of disturbances, conflicts and contradictions in the collective activity.". In this claim I hear resonance with the trails presented in AIME. The concepts of pseudo-subjects and pseudo -objects , their [ATT] trails, the image conveyed in the MOE book pg 410 ("We see that economics is very ill equipped to follow the thread of experience. It had taken the individual as its basis and had endowed it
with innate rationality!....What do we find in its place? Quivering little beings wandering around groping in the dark while waiting to receive something from the passage of scripts: sometimes fragments of projects, sometimes allocations of preferences, sometimes suggested roles, sometimes quittances.") all these sujest to me the presence of "sister aproaches" to our lives. ( Similarly in the above mentioned article "Agency appears in actions, and it develops in historically shaped collective activity systems, tightly connected to the motives and contradictions contained within them.")


Transformative agency provides a way to understand what is going on in AIME and Reset Modernity! (http://zkm.de/en/event/2016/04/globale-reset-modernity). 

"An individual’s transformative agency can be understood as breaking away from a given frame of action and taking of initiatives to transform it...Agency cannot thus be defined only as a primary characteristic of an individual, but it develops in collective interaction over time (Engeström 2007b)."

However once applied on Reset Modernity! one may ask how the different expressions of transformative agency mentinoed in the article find their way to practice: (WANRING: I have not attended the exhibition. I judge based on the field book  http://zkm.de/media/file/en/2016-zkm-reset-modernity-fieldbook_e.pdf)

• Resistence (opportunity to register and discuss resistence to the very idea of reseting modernity?) , 
• Criticising the current way the moderns navigate themselves (this finds its way in Reset Modernity in quite a strong way), 
• Explicating new posibilities or potentials to the activity, expression of the old "good practices" (I think this was done better in MOE and AIME where the positive sides of modernity were more prominent. In Reset Modernity I find  many questions but not as many fecund starting points in the old activity)
• Envisioning new patterns or models in the activity.(for the general visitor I think this is left open in Reset Modernity!. There is probably an one day contact with the event but then the general visitor just leaves with the experiences and the field book schemas and perhaps can read some comments through twitter http://modesofexistence.org/reset-modernity-hashtags/. It does not sound very strong scaffolding for the general visitor. Maybe things are different for selected audiences https://twitter.com/AIMEproject/status/732204378761928705  . And there is also this "power distance" (?) between the organizers (who are in the workshops and "collect" experiences and changes) and the visitors who flow in and out)
• Committing to actions (I do not know if this is present at all. In a sense this is a political dimension that is always present in MOE and AIME and Modes of Existence! but I feel that it does not have much support here. I wander: no current political movement is sensitive to a call for reseting modernity? )
• Taking actions (Although actions related to the reseting modernity exhibition might be taken by the participants there is no structure to support sharing such actions. A you tube channel perhaps? A facebook group? )

So the notion of transformative agency is a tool to think on the transformative potential of Reseting Modernity!