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! 

Thinkin on [POL]

1.       “If the moderns have something to be proud of, it is that they have been capable of extracting this contrast against all the evidence supplied by other regimes of truth”

"Modes of Existence" (MOE) and Activity Theory (AT)

I am used to the following distinction. In a situation I can consider a 1st person viewpoint (and dive deep into my intuition and feelings) or I can consider a 3rd person point of view, where I distance myself and perhaps see myself in the dealings of others.

I think that the way of dealing with reality (both inner and external in everyday parlance - a distinction that is not that solid either for the "Modes of Existence" (http://modesofexistence.org/) or for "Activity theory"(http://www.edu.helsinki.fi/activity/pages/chatanddwr/chat/, http://www.edu.helsinki.fi/activity/pages/chatanddwr/activitysystem/) proposed in MOE is a more refined way to deal with the 1st person viewpoint while the way of dealing with reality that is proposed by Activity Theory is a more refined way to deal with the 3rd person point of view. Or perhaps I should say, using an analogy from Physics, that the "1st person- 3rd person" viewpoints is a coordinate system that is now "rotated" or could be exchanged by the coordinate system "MOE- AT"

Why do I say that MOE seems a much more evolved way to deal with the 1st order viewpoint? Because it speaks about values, continually it asks us to "turn inwardly", as I feel it,  to assess what would corespond to common sense, MOE feels like a call for a "perceptual education" (Une education perceptionale - like "L'education sentimentale"), for a different sensibility in how we "take in" reality and actually "are formed by" this reality (which passes through us). When I am called to understand the elements of the Pivot Table (pg 488 in the book), I do not think that I am asked to model reality by sitting outside of a frame, outside a window panel,  and looking to the trajectories (really a necklace made by hiatuses that have been jumped over) that will be whirling like spaggeti in front of my eyes. I feel that I am asked to retake the whole flow of experience, as somebody who is participant, who cannot lift himself outside and this "personal enlightenement" will help me identify with the actors of the situation in a very different way and allow me to describe the whole situation in a different way. So  as far as I understand the empiricism of Latour's anthropology is the lever through which "inner and outer experience" (in everyday parlance ) are put in a better fit. But the heavy lifting seems to me to be going first in what used to be "inner experience".

How can we deal in MOE with learning and development?  There is [MET], but [MET] feels more like a power source. There is [REF] but can a mictrogenetic account of learning and development be put under [REF]? I doubt it. 

Activity theory (as I understand it) is a way to argue, to communicate about how we come to be, It is an effort to come in terms with how consciousness comes forth: real culturally mediated consciousness. It is a way to introduce TIME (real change), without time being the servant of [REF]'s conception of time. 

Activity theory is constantly reminding us that we are thinking and acting in the presence of others and with the help of others, in a community (something that is so absent in the image of the solitary anthropologist in the MOE book, though somehow corrected in the workings of the AIME community)

MOE gives a sense of freedom, the freedom that comes together with the feelings of understanding and been possibly understood in a world that is not "alien". AT is an alternative to a mechanistic point of view when it come to accounting for change, a different way to come in terms with dynamics.

There is another reason that makes me think the AT is a needed balance to MOE. I have the sense that in AIME, in Reset Modernity! (http://modesofexistence.org/field-book/) , even in the recent article (http://mil.sagepub.com/content/early/2016/04/19/0305829816640608.abstract) , learning does not have its proper recognition. As if the activity system nature of the situations themselves (reading and beeing influeced by the MOE book and the AIME community, participating and beeing "politicized" through participation in Reset Modernity!, rethinking Sovereignity) is not recognized, at the expense of the effectiveness of these projects.

One can also try to find some places in the AT triangle where certain modes would fit preferentially. So I made a try. [LAW] is used as a stabilizer. In activity theory the "object" is in a process of transformation through the workings of the activity system. (something similar perhaps to passing a hiatus in MOE) . Moreover the changing object costitutes the motive of the activity. So I've put in the pseudo-oject side modes like [MET] but also modes that express (in my view) motives (feeling a secure ground, listening to a "calling")

Bibliography:

I found useful

For MOE/ AIME, apart from the above mentioned site, I found very helpful in understanding the tone of the whole book this: 

Hämäläinen, N., & Lehtonen, T. K. (2016). Latour's empirical metaphysics.Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory, 1-18.

A criticsim from an anthropologists point of view:

Berliner, D., Legrain, L., & Port, M. (2013). Bruno Latour and the anthropology of the moderns. Social Anthropology, 21(4), 435-447.

For AT, I found very helpful apart from the above mentioned site the article:

Engeström, Y. (2014). Activity theory and learning at work (pp. 67-96). Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden.

and the following criticism:

Bakhurst, D. (2009). Reflections on activity theory. Educational Review, 61(2), 197-210.

"Latour's Empirical Metaphysics"

I read this article
Hämäläinen, N., & Lehtonen, T. K. (2016). Latour's empirical metaphysics. Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory, 1-18.

in which I liked a lot the picture it gives of Latour's work. It presents Latour entering in media res, in the turmoil of life. He does not come to model life, to look it from outside, or to provide us with superior knowledge. I think he does not also come to give us "the furniture of reality". Indeed it seems to me  that "the furniture of reality" pushes us towards a very visual metaphore, while Latour's approach gives emphasis in communicating, in relating (in passing through others while both we and them are formed by these passings). Existents articulate themselves through other existents.

So all of us, humans and non humans are there working, going around our buisness, in an agora where the private and the public are not distinct (or at least they are open to various reconstructions) and Latour & Co comes as one more participant, worried about the state of our dealings, of the way we compose this common world and putting forward ways of "emotionally rich talk", of "value rich talk", of performative talk that should mingle with practices, changed by practices and bring forth life.

Finally this is what came to my mind (https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Proverbs+1)

Proverbs 1:20 -

20 Out in the open wisdom calls aloud,
    she raises her voice in the public square;
21 on top of the wall[d] she cries out,
    at the city gate she makes her speech:

22 “How long will you who are simple love your simple ways?
    How long will mockers delight in mockery
    and fools hate knowledge?
23 Repent at my rebuke!
    Then I will pour out my thoughts to you,
    I will make known to you my teachings.
24 But since you refuse to listen when I call
    and no one pays attention when I stretch out my hand,
25 since you disregard all my advice
    and do not accept my rebuke,
26 I in turn will laugh when disaster strikes you;
    I will mock when calamity overtakes you—
27 when calamity overtakes you like a storm,
    when disaster sweeps over you like a whirlwind,
    when distress and trouble overwhelm you.

28 “Then they will call to me but I will not answer;
    they will look for me but will not find me,
29 since they hated knowledge
    and did not choose to fear the Lord.
30 Since they would not accept my advice
    and spurned my rebuke,
31 they will eat the fruit of their ways
    and be filled with the fruit of their schemes.
32 For the waywardness of the simple will kill them,
    and the complacency of fools will destroy them;
33 but whoever listens to me will live in safety
    and be at ease, without fear of harm.”

[POL] or the work of the historian?

Reading the following in [POL] (pg341)

"For, finally, what form of life can bring off the following feat? Start
with a multitude that does not know what it wants but that is suffering
and complaining; obtain, by a series of radical transformations, a unified
representation of that multitude; then, by a dizzying translation/
betrayal, invent a version of its pain and grievances from whole cloth;
make it a unified version that will be repeated by certain voices, which in
turn—the return trip is as least as astonishing as the trip out—will bring it
back to the multitude in the form of requirements imposed, orders given,
laws passed; requirements, orders, and laws that are now exchanged,
translated, transposed, transformed, opposed by the multitude in such
diverse ways that they produce a new commotion: complaints defining
new grievances, reviving and spelling out new indignation, new consent,
new opinions."

I thought: this is the description of the world of the historian or the world of the person who has to make a description.  If the multitude is the multitude of documents and the historian or "descriptor" the medium through which they express themselves in unison and then obey the interpretation that rules the day.
Then new documents come about animated by new concerns and perhpas the cycle starts again.

Thinking on [HAB]

This is what I get out of reading [HAB]