Evelyn Ruppert

Reassembling Social Science Methods: the challenge of digital devices

The aim of the article is to intervene in debates about the digital and, in particular, framings that imagine the digital in terms of epochal shifts or as redefining life. Instead, drawing on recent developments in digital methods, we explore the lively, productive and performative qualities of the digital by attending to the specificities of digital devices and how they interact, and sometimes compete, with older devices and their capacity to mobilize and materialize social and other relations. In doing so, our aim is to explore the implications of digital devices and data for reassembling social science methods or what we call the social science apparatuses that assemble digital devices and data to ‘know’ the social and other relations. Building on recent work at CRESC on the social life of methods, we recommend a genealogical approach that is alive to the ways in which digital devices are simultaneously shaped by social worlds, and can in turn become agents that shape those worlds. This calls for attending to the specificities of digital devices themselves, how they are varied and composed of diverse socio-technical arrangements, and are enrolled in the creation of new knowledge spaces, institutions and actors. Rather than exploring what large-scale changes can be revealed and understood through the digital, we argue for explorations of how digital devices themselves are materially implicated in the production and performance of contemporary sociality. To that end we offer the following nine propositions about the implications of digital data and devices and argue that these demand rethinking the theoretical assumptions of social science methods: transactional actors; heterogeneity; visualization; continuous time; whole populations; granularity; expertise; mobile and mobilizing; and non-coherence.

Population Objects: Interpassive Subjects

While Foucault described population as the object of biopower he did not investigate the practices that make it possible to know population. Rather, he tended to overemphasize it as an object on which power can act. However, population is not an object awaiting discovery, but is represented and enacted by specific devices such as censuses and what I call population metrics. The latter enact populations by assembling different categories and measurements of subjects (biographical, biometric and transactional) in myriad ways to identify and measure the performance of populations. I account for both the object and subject by thinking about how devices consist of agencements; that is, specific arrangements of humans and technologies whose mediations and interactions not only enact populations but also produce subjects. I suggest that population metrics render subjects interpassive whereby other beings or objects take up the role and act in place of the subject.

Rethinking Empirical Social Sciences

I consider some arguments of social science and humanities researchers about the challenge that big data presents for social science methods. What they suggest is that social scientists need to engage with big data rather than retreat into internal debates about its meaning and implications. Instead, understanding big data requires and provides an opportunity for the interdisciplinary development of methods that innovatively, critically and reflexively engage with new forms of data. Unlike data and methods that social scientists have typically worked with in the past, big data calls for skills and approaches that cut across disciplines. Drawing on work in science and technology studies and understandings of the ‘the social life of methods’, I argue that this is in part due to the fragmentation and redistribution of expertise, knowledge and methods that new data sources engender, including their incipient relations to government and industry and entanglements with social worlds.

Rights to Public Space: Regulatory Reconfigurations of Liberty

I define how public space is constituted not by real property but by a regime made up of regulatory practices. What is at issue in assertions about the decline of public space is that this regulatory regime is reconfiguring liberty—that is, rights to public space—through a change in the conception of the public, of who and what belong as part of the public. By way of a case study (the redevelopment of the corner of Yonge and Dundas Streets in Toronto), I argue that liberty is defined by a multiplicity of practices (e.g., laws, regulations, urban design, surveillance, policing) that are oriented to a particular conception of the public, and which seek to guide the conduct of agents. This suggests that if our concern is to expand the political and social uses of public space then we need to turn our attention away from resources, spaces, and goods and toward how the regulatory regime configures liberty and in turn the possibilities that public space can be taken and made.

THE SOCIAL LIFE OF METHODS: Devices

The collection focuses on ‘the device’ to explore how methods for knowing and handling the world have their own social life or even triple social life: how they are shaped by the social;work to format social relations; but also how they are used opportunistically by social actors in the systematic pursuit of political, economic and cultural advantage.

The moral economy of cities: shaping good citizens

What makes a good city? This question has long preoccupied groups interested and involved in the making and remaking of city spaces. In The Moral Economy of Cities, Evelyn S. Ruppert contends that the vision of the ‘good city’ embraced by professionals in the business of city making recognizes the interests of a dominant public, namely middle class consumers, office workers, tourists, and families. This vision stigmatizes certain members of the public like street youth, panhandlers, discount- and low-income shoppers, and the language used to extol the virtues of the good city inherently moralizes social conduct in the city. Using the redevelopment of the Yonge-Dundas intersection in downtown Toronto in the mid-1990s as a case study, Ruppert examines the language of planners, urban designers, architects, and marketing analysts to reveal the extent to which moralization legitimizes these professions in the public eye and buttresses the very projects they produce. Ruppert’s conclusion that economic practices are not free from moral investment encourages the considerable task of re-examining the implications of city planning and development worldwide.

Anticipating Failure: Transparency Devices and their Effects

The article explores the politics of making worlds legible, transparent and actionable through devices that governments and international organisations mobilise in the quest to achieve moral certainty about their activities and decisions. Through an analysis of three distinct examples, we examine the effects of such attempts to open things up in the name of the public good: the performance metrics that are part of the UK governments ‘Transparency Agenda’; ‘conflict mapping’ as part of Kyrgyzstans internationally sponsored programmes of Preventive Development; and the procedures of Perus National System of Public Investment (SNIP) through which public investments are regulated. We explore these three as instances of what we call ‘transparency devices’. It is to past moral failures – of wrongdoing, conflict or corruption – that these devices react and consequently it is the anticipation of future moral failings towards which they are then oriented. Each device does so by establishing matters of fact as moral certainties through technical settlements carried out in ‘public’. But in their enactment of social realities, such devices are also generative of what we call collateral effects and affects. First, technical settlements require establishing what is to be included/excluded but such stabilisations are only fleeting, always and already partial, and provisional. As such rather than alleviating uncertainty they come to amplify it. Furthermore, while they can be understood as neoliberal techniques of producing active, rational witnessing subjects who take responsibility for ensuring moral futures, they are also generative of affective dispositions of suspicion and hypervigilance; fostering subjects with a greater awareness of that which is yet to be revealed. We suggest that they should not be considered weaknesses, but rather that uncertainty and hypervigilant responsibilised subjects call for the continuation of more of the same and thus are a source of the very authority and legitimacy of transparency devices.

'I Is; Therefore I Am': The Census as Practice of Double Identification

I examine practices of modern census making with a specific focus on Canadian censuses of population from 1911-1951. My analysis builds on the work of two recent and related streams of research in the social sciences. One draws from Foucaults writings on biopower and post-Foucauldian governmentality studies. It examines the census as a political technology that produces a specific knowledge or political arithmetic (statistics) of the population, so that its forces and strengths can be acted upon by various state authorities. The census is thus understood as a field for the administration of the state. The other focuses on how censuses are socially constructed, on the ‘making’ of censuses as opposed to the ‘taking’ of censuses and the use of census data as ‘evidence’. These studies document how the interests and political influence of various actors shape census making. The census is thus understood as a particular way of defining, collecting and organising social observations about individuals and not a simple reflection of an empirically existing reality. While the two streams of research have usefully challenged the facticity of census data, they have tended to reinforce a division between the real and the constructed. For if census data is not ‘real’ but a particular construction then what exactly does it represent? I contend that censuses are part of myriad identification practices that have come to produce subjects who are able to recognise and identify themselves in relation to the categories constructed and circulated by the census. It is through processes of double identification (state-citizen) that census categories come into existence, become facts and can then in turn not only be measured, analysed and assembled (objectification) but also be identified with (subjectification). The presence of such double identification makes an ostensible division between facticity and representation artificial.

Becoming Peoples: “Counting Heads in Northern Wilds”

While the census is sometimes understood to be an objectifying practice that constructs and makes up a population, in this paper I am concerned with how it is necessary to produce census subjects in order to construct population. By drawing on formulations by Latour, Deleuze and Law, I conceive of census taking as a practice performed by heterogeneous socio-technical arrangements of actors – humans, paper forms, categories, concepts, definitions, topography, geography – whose mediations, interactions and encounters produce census subjects. It is through the relays and interactions between varying and never fixed technological, natural and cultural actors that census taking is performed. I analyse these arrangements as constituting agencements, which focuses our attention on how agency and action are configured by and contingent upon the socio-technical arrangements that make them up. Agencements assume different socio-technical configurations and thus construct different social realities and populations that cannot be captured in a single account. The argument is advanced through an account of the taking of what was declared the first ‘scientific’ enumeration of ‘Indians’ and ‘Eskimos,’ the Aboriginal inhabitants of the Canadian Far North in 1911. I argue that the agencements were not able to bring forth the subjectivities necessary to construct population in the Far North. Not able to find subjects then, census taking could not produce nor construct a population in the Far North and the practice of census taking ended up creating a record of a census ‘other’ – an indeterminate multitude that could not identify and could not be identified as part of the population.

Modes of Knowing: Resources from the Baroque

How might we think differently? This book is an attempt to respond to this question. Its contributors are all interested in non-standard modes of knowing. They are all more or less uneasy with the restrictions or the agendas implied by academic modes of knowing, and they have chosen to do this by working with, through, or against one important Western alternative – that of the baroque. Why the baroque? One answer is that the baroque made space for and fostered many forms of otherness. It involved knowing things differently, extravagantly, excessively, and in materially heterogeneous ways, and it apprehended that which is other and could not be caught in a cognitive or symbolic net. It also involved knowing in ways that did not gather into a single point, and knew itself to be performative. A part of a great Western division between rationalist and non-rationalist modes of knowing, the baroque is therefore a possible resource for creating ways of knowing differently, a storehouse of possible alternative techniques. To say this is not to say that it is the right mode of knowing. The book’s authors do not seek to create a ‘baroque social science’ whatever that might be, but instead work in a range of ways to explore how drawing on the ‘resources of the baroque’ can help us to think differently.