<S> ⌿ X: Adorno’s notion of non-identity and digital re-presentation of (companion) products
Looking at the role of digital media in shaping our connection with everyday things — our companion objects.
Note: this story is part 1 of 2. Part 2 is “App for ‘friending’ companion objects”.
At the outset, the somewhat cryptic title of this post demands a bit of elaboration, which I will come back to in the section below on the “signifier as a reduce/enhance operator”.
To begin, using a distilled Bourdieusian (“sociological”) self-description, I would easily be labelled as a ’fuzzy’ non-techie type who’s ‘habitus’ is grounded in the field of liberal arts and social science, as opposed to that of the ‘techie’ conceit, stereotypically grounded in science, technology, engineering and math (Hartley 2017). I am acutely aware, then, that my ‘freewheeling’ appropriation of computer programming annotations in the title may induce cringe-like emotions in any hacker devotee, steeped in the art and science of software engineering.
Indeed, please feel free totake issue with and critique this content in the comment sections below.
Software and semiotics: making ways of seeing, knowing, and doing
As Stanford University’s Symbolic Systems program underscores, computer science, and programming in particular, is about representation — symbols, semiotics, semantics, and linguistics — and representations can solve problems. Herbert A. Simon:
“solving a problem simply means representing it so as to make the solution transparent.” (Simon 1996, 1969 see also Conn and McLean 2019)
As my PhD supervisor Matthew Fuller writes about software, and the symbolic systems they rely on and perpetuate:
“software constructs ways of seeing, knowing, and doing in the world that at once contain a model of that part of the world it ostensibly pertains to and that also shape it every time it is used” (Fuller 2003:19)
For instance, the ubiquitous barcode — also known as universal product code (UPC) which consists of 12 digits stored in some computer-based system (as zeros and ones according to ASCII or Unicode) — provides a bridge between the digital and the physical world, and it’s a fulcrum of today’s supply chain infrastructure.
The UPC is helpful in that it provides a simple way for a computer to see and know something, and just enough, about a complex empirical object [footnote 1].
Yet, it still seems that most household objects are analogue, without embedded code or computational capacities and they’re only partially represented with twelve-digit barcodes or skeuomorphic images online. Indeed, ‘the very most that can be said with confidence about the thing is that it eludes capture by the concept, that there is always a “nonidentity” between it and any representation’ (Bennett 2010:48).
By drawing on Theodor Adorno’s concept of nonidentity — meaning, that which is not identified by its re-presentation — we’re reminded that “things” or “objects” are more than what we can put into words or any other communicative/representational format.
In a similar vein, Bruno Latour has made the point that there can be no ‘representation without re-presentation, without any provisional assertions […], without any complicated machinery of assembly, delegation […] negotiation and conclusion.’ (Latour, 2005: 26).
In short, sensing and sense-making is always mediated through some kind of device. To quote anthropologist Marilyn Strathern: “it matters what ideas [or things] one uses to think other ideas [or things] with” (Strathern in Haraway 2004:202).
We can always seek to minimise the difference, or delta, between an object and it’s digital re-presentation, but there will probably always be some degree of nonidentity between the physical world and the digital objects we deploy as its re-presentation or its digital twin.
That is not to suggest that any act of re-presentation is futile or that representations don’t matter — they do. As Simon argued: representations (can) make problems tractable by pruning a messy reality to render solutions or remedies visible.
Representations such as names and symbols matter — indeed, we need only look at the online ads industrial complex to consider the point made. That’s why we sometimes wish that names or symbols have a different or no meaning. William Shakespeare made this point when he questioned the meaning of names in Romeo and Juliet. In this play, Juliet wonders why her family’s name should create a rift between her (Juliet of Capulet) and Romeo of Montague, and disallow their love and relationship:
“O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo? … What’s in a name? That which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet.”
Would a rose not remain ‘a rose’, if it had a different name? Sure, it probably would, but other things, such as family names, or names and logos for a family of products such as Apple, Nike or LEGO bricks, are not easily detached from the meanings and social relations they have shaped and vice versa — hence the emergence of that elusive intangible asset called ‘brand value’, which is tied to the more easily quantified quality of brand recognition.
In a similar vein, and very much echoing Simon, science studies scholar Joseph Rouse describes the role of symbols or “simulacra” in scientific practices as transforming and prescribing
“available opportunities for acting, [and] what it is intelligible to do [with ‘things’] […] by materially enabling some activities and obstructing others” (1999).
Following this line of thinking, I think it’s fitting to recognise Jean Baudrillard’s insistence that the ubiquity of modern media makes the signifier as important, if not more important than the signified, because the signifier shapes how we engage with things. This idea also dovetails Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle: “The spectacle is a social relation between people [and things …] mediated by an accumulation of images” (Debord 1967).
More specifically, as I have written elsewhere, I think Kate O’Riordan has summarised the importance of the signifier in today’s media landscape eloquently:
“as the mediation of objects become more important in deciding the reality of things […] The underlying political question is about the constitution of things […] how and why some things come into the orbit of attention, investment and care, while others are shut out” (2017)
Here O’Riordan points out that mediation (i.e. digital re-presentation) plays a key role in shaping how things are known and dealt with. Whether it’s regarding vital infrastructure assets and critical repair and maintenance decisions, or something more mundane like an Apple watch and whether or not to purchase a new one on Amazon or a used version on eBay.
Inspired by O’Riordan and others, I started thinking about how digital signifiers or “simulacra” shape our understanding of objects in everyday life, and available opportunities for acting with them.
<S> ⌿ X: the signifier as a reduce/enhance operator
Now, let’s return to the cryptic title of this story. I frame the signifier “S” in the title with angle bracket symbols “< … >” to denote software programming annotations and illustrate a digital signifier used in HTML-based web applications. Here, I am referring to web applications that depend on the angle brackets to specify the beginning and end of elements that should be rendered between the opening tag (“<”) and the closing tag (“>”) in a web browser under a certain internet address, i.e. a Universal Resource Locator (URL). Further, my illustrative use of the angle brackets also aims to evoke associations to their role in some object-oriented programming languages in which they are a used to define (‘instantiate’) “objects”, that is — generally speaking — an instance of a data type encapsulated by an opening tag “<“ and a closing tag “>”. For example, a string of letters (‘characters’), or numbers (‘integers’) that form, say, the barcode (i.e., Universal Product Code, or UPC) for an Apple Watch Series 5 with the following UPC: 190199264427.
As the UPC is ubiquitous in the toolset of contemporary product distribution and retail systems, we know that the UPC can be used (if printed on some kind of packaging or label attached to the product) to signify and trace a product with computer-based inventory and sales management systems. As William Mitchell put it in his book Me++: the cyborg self and the hybrid city, objects are bound “to specific spatial and temporal settings […] by digital information [that] adds a layer of meaning to a physical [object], and the physical [object] helps to establish the meaning of the digital information (Mitchell 2003:123–24).
Further, the symbol “⌿” is borrowed from the APL programming language. “APL” is literally shorthand for “a programming language” and this particular symbol is known as “Reduce (first axis)”. The symbol serves as a practical complexity reducing operator in APL. The Reduce operator “⌿” can provide, for instance, the sum of a string of numbers if combined with the plus function (“+”). As shown on the APL Wiki website (APL Wiki 2019):
+⌿ 1 2 3 4 5 6 21
Here I use the ‘Reduce’ symbol to illustrate Adorno’s epistemological point, that is, the complexity reduction and transformation performed by concepts (epistemological tools) or digital representational signifiers for that matter (e.g., <UPC 190199264427>) that may refer to some ‘signified’ material object (e.g., an Apple Watch Series 5). Obviously, the Apple Watch does not “go into” its digital object (UPC) without leaving a remainder — some information about the watch is excluded, while a new layer of information is added. The watch is now a watch with an associated UPC, which opens up new opportunities for engaging with the object — for instance, I will now be able to track the object in transit (if a courier scans the UPC) etc.
From this perspective, the machinery of digital mediation undergirding product profiles online — such as the “media ecology” (Fuller, 2005) of images and standardised product codes surrounding an Apple Watch Series 5 — re-present an object as a commodity through the medium of digital informational formats.
These formats instantiate a stylised version of a nonhuman social entity, that is, “the product”, which exists in multiple ways; re-presented as multiple JPEGs on various marketplaces (see e.g. Figure 4 below), distributed throughout supply chains; on assembly lines; packaged aboard some transport vehicle; in some landfill site, and, hopefully, on someone’s wrist where it is known as a precious piece of a ‘material self’ — that is, a plurality of human-object/nonhuman relations.
However, the owner of the watch probably does not use a digital signifier to re-present the item in everyday life, like say, the way a social media profile or phone number is used to connect with other people (to maintain the ‘social self’ — a plurality of human-human relations). In fact, most people probably don’t use a personal digital inventory as a way of seeing, knowing, and doing their material self in everyday life. Although, this may be changing as more and more wardrobe or niche inventory apps emerge, such as: Stylebook, Whering, Save Your Wardrobe, GOAT, StockX and Kit.co, and Kallax.io.
For sure, though, most people use digital media to search online for things they want to buy, so the degree of digital human-object mediation probably starts out high (according to my own rough estimation, based on time spent interacting with digital representation of a particular object).
Then, as illustrated in figure 4 below, once we have acquired an object, we rarely interact with a digital instance of that particular object. Later, when we discard the item, we might snap a photo of it, then upload said photo to a secondhand marketplace, thereby increasing the level of digital mediation.
However, most people do not digitise and resell most of their used apparel online. Generally, then, I think it’s fair to assume that the degree of digital mediation is generally lower at the end-of-use phase (low) than at the decision and point of purchase phase (i.e. moderate). Whereas the degree of digital human-object mediation in the final end-of-use phase might actually be higher than throughout the duration of third phase during use (i.e. very low).
Notes
[1] See for instance Dodge and Kitchin’s article from 2009 on the various ways software and code change our interaction with everyday objects — their article also highlights some early hype and anticipation around how RFID technology and software would change how we interact with things:
“emerging RFID-based technologies, according to some predictions, will have a much greater effect on domestic routines inside the home. `Smart’ packaging using RFID tags will make retail products automatically readable by domestic appliances: for example, a ready meal will `tell’ a microwave how long it should be cooked for; the fridge will be able identify when food goes out of date and warn the household; and a new cashmere cardigan will instruct a washing machine how it should be washed so as not to shrink … To what degree these archetypal `smart kitchen’ scenarios based on automated reading of RFID tags become a reality remains somewhat in the future” (Dodge and Kitchin 2009:1346).
More than ten years after the publication of their article, many such fantasies or ‘sociotechnical imaginaries’ (Jasanoff and Kim 2015) have yet to become reality (outside some futuristic living labs).
See other essays about my research project and thoughts about digital media, material selfhood, and companion objects.
Understanding inventories of the material self, or object-oriented social networking
Some results from small survey: 30 out of 56 people would like a better overview of their personal possessions, 18 out of 56 don’t have an opinion about this matter.
Dunbar’s number and material self
Considering that an average European owns ~10K objects, I wonder what Dunbar’s number can teach us about human-object relations.
Objects of the material self — little monsters and/or companion objects 👾 🤿
Reid Hoffman once said that “the fabric of people is people”, and he could have added — as Jerry Seinfeld once joked — it is also (too) many things.
