The un/making of forms
Formographic inquiries into practice, accountability, and infra-critique
International workshop with public lecture organized by Ingmar Lippert (IT University Copenhagen), Ann-Kristin Kühnen (Technical University of Dresden) and Susann Wagenknecht (Technical University of Dresden)
Think of formal sociology (Simmel 1958) and of forms, formats, formalities, formation, uniformity, information, informatics, platforms, transformations, and performances. The form is a decisive constituent of ‘modern’ worlds. However, modernity’s formalism is eroding, and social theory has put renewed emphasis on the implicit and informal (Reckwitz 2003). At the same time, theories of practice have reframed the problem of social order, of re- and alter-ordering, as a problem not of compliance but of form. As Giddens notes: “The true locus of the ‘problem of order’ [… is in …] how continuity of form is achieved in the day-to-day conduct of social activity” (Giddens 1979: 216). The challenge, then, is to recognize the informal, the creative, the uncertain and its critical tensions “without dismissing the role of formal means” (Thévenot 2001: 406). To address this challenge, we argue, the analysis of forms in practice should receive renewed attention.
In order to inquire into forms, their becomings, their appropriation and contestation, we propose formography---the detailed study of forms in (and of) practice, an approach that draws upon ethnographic observation and works with analytic perspectives from fields such as sociology, social theory, anthropology, and STS. We examine how forms are fabricated and performed, and how they support, erode, or energize one another. Forms are multiple and relational. They gain shape in relation to one another and can manage hold diverse practices together (Star & Griesemer 1989). When forms inform practices, they are being 'formed' at the same time (Scheffer 2013). Through intricate arrangements, some forms reach temporary closure---such as the coin that is sealed from two sides to prevent the manipulation of its value (Hutter 1993), locking both materiality and meaning.
As formality is made and unmade (Smart et al. 2017), forms help organize far-flung coordination and gain salience as prerequisite of accountability. They furnish the yardsticks of critique. With this workshop, we draw attention to the situated relation of form and critique that emerges from the ever changing tangle of practice. We suggest exploring "infra-critiques"---critiques 'from within' shifting forms of life (Verran 2014, Jaeggi 2018). Analyses of critique 'from within' emphasize the multiplicity and limitations of formal assessment. They help examining how in/form/alities boost and marginalize different modes of benchmarking and evaluation, denunciation and appraisal, determination and indetermination (Boltanski & Thévenot 1999). Requirements for specific in/form/ation, e.g., can feed authoritative regimes of control while effectively undermining accountability and attenuating critique (Lippert 2018). Against this backdrop, we are interested in formographic inquiries that problematize the enactment of form as a fixed, detached point of reference.
Public lecture
Rachel Douglas-Jones (ITU Copenhagen): On Form: Bureaucracy, Ethics and Aesthetics
virtual public lecture @TUD, September 1, 2021, 5-7pm
The public lecture will be hosted on zoom. To receive a zoom link,
please register by August 31, 2021, via:
Abstract: What can attention to form do for ethnographic research into bureaucratic regimes? Drawing on ten years of research with ethics committees and ethics NGOs across the Asia-Pacific region, as they seek to ‘build capacity’ in ethical review, I explore why thinking with form is generative for scholars of bureaucracy and the everyday. While my enquiries are predominantly concerned with knowledge forms, the materialization of bureaucratic form is present and proximate. Working through moments of negotiation and closure, I am interested particularly in two questions of the politics of form: First, how do some knowledge forms come to be considered appropriate, persuasive and desirable? Second, how can a focus on form produce an aesthetic supportive of certain displacements of content? As ethics committee members strive to improve, convene and present themselves to auditors in my ethnography, a broader question emerges:
how does form participate in global regimes of accountability?
Participants and working titles
Hendrikje Alpermann (Lausanne): Giving the form a future and the future a form: The case of the Hochhausscheiben A-E in Halle-Neustadt
Michael J. Barany (Edinburgh): Sociable Structuralism and the Imperatives of Categories
Tanja Bogusz (Kassel): Formatting the field – or: Experimental enactments of nature and society in marine social sciences
Kathrin Eitel (Frankfurt): Infrastructural Formations. Practicing Perpetuations and the Out-/Performing of the Waste Recycling Economy in Cambodia
Hanna Katharina Göbel (Hamburg): The fittings of body forms: embodied artefacts and the fabrication of the dis/abled athlete
Philipp Knopp (Vienna): Intermediary formations in the fabric of technologies
Hannes Krämer (Duisburg-Essen): Forming solutions, solving problems within (con-)temporary organizations
Jörg Potthast (Siegen): Queueing: Its rise and fall. Revisiting the public moment of a social form
Jakob Roschka (Kassel): Methods as In/Formation of Practice. Patterns of Response-Ability in the Case of Agile Software Engineering
Thomas Scheffer (Frankfurt): Preforms and Anti-Objects
Christiane Schürkmann (Mainz): (Per-)Forming 'Society': A Formographic Perspective on the German Commission on the Storage of High-Level-Radioactive-Waste
Mechthild v. Vacano (Berlin): Forms of the platform economy. Effects of digitalization in the Indonesian motorbike taxi industry
Helen Verran (Darwin): Concepts as Practices Clots: Mutable, presenced epistemic forms
The Workshop will be organized jointly by Ingmar Lippert, Ann-Kristin Kühnen and Susann Wagenknecht. Susann Wagenknecht is Junior Professor of Micro-Sociology and socio-technical interaction at the Institute of Sociology, Technical University of Dresden. Her interests concern infrastructures, algorithms, (e)valuation, and theories of practice. Ann-Kristin Kühnen is research associate at the Institute of Sociology, Technical University of Dresden. Ingmar Lippert is Associate Professor at the IT University of Copenhagen’s Technology in Practice Research Group and member of the Chair of Technoscience Studies at Brandenburg University of Technology. He published on data & number practices, environmental relations and accountability.
The workshop will take place at the Technical University Dresden, Germany, September 2-3, 2021. The workshop is designed as collective learning process, focusing on submissions that rely upon ethnographic materials to engage in the nexus of form, practice, critique, and accountability. To this end, we ask participants to circulate workshop papers (2,000w), accompanied by a digitally reproducible object (with permissions), prior to the workshop.
Email: form_ography@tu-dresden.de / You are welcome to get in touch with us also via twitter @form_ography: https://twitter.com/form_ography
References
Boltanski, Luc, and Laurent Thévenot (1999): The Sociology of Critical Capacity. European Journal of Social Theory 2(3), 359–377.
Giddens, Anthony (1979): Central Problems in Social Theory. Action, Structure and Contradiction in Social Analysis. London: Macmillan.
Hutter, Michael (1993): Die frühe Form der Münze. In: Probleme der Form, edited by Dirk Baecker, 159-179. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Jaeggi, Rahel (2018): Towards an immanent critique of forms of life. Raisons politiques 1, 13-29.
Lippert, Ingmar (2018): On Not Muddling Lunches and Flights: Narrating a Number, Qualculation, and Ontologising Troubles. Science & Technology Studies 31(4), 52-74.
Reckwitz, Andreas (2002): Toward a theory of social practices: A development in culturalist theorizing. European Journal of Social Theory 5(2), 243-263.
Scheffer, Thomas (2013): Die trans-sequentielle Analyse – und ihre formativen Objekte. In Grenzobjekte, edited by Reinhard Hörster, Stefan Köngeter, and Burkhard Müller, 89–114. Wiesbaden: Springer.
Simmel, Georg (1958): Soziologie: Untersuchungen über die Formen der Vergesellschaftung. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot.
Smart, Alan, Josephine Smart, and Filippo M. Zerilli (eds) (2017): In/formalization. ANUAC 6(2), 45-108.
Star, Susan Leigh, and James R. Griesemer (1989): Institutional ecology,translations' and boundary objects: Amateurs and professionals in Berkeley's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907-39. Social studies of science 19(3), 387-420.
Thévenot, Laurent (2001): Organized complexity: conventions of coordination and the composition of economic arrangements. European journal of social theory 4(4), 405-425.
Verran, Helen (2014): Working with those who think otherwise. Common Knowledge 20(3), 527-539.
Dieses Vorhaben wird gefördert vom Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (BMBF) und dem Freistaat Sachsen im Rahmen der Exzellenzstrategie von Bund und Ländern.