5.1 Problems of subjectivity 1
The South system is designed to guide readers through an initial process of subjective evaluation in order to generate appropriate content, both factual and fictional, about the South Bank area of South London. The processes deployed in this evaluation are the result of research into psychometric techniques but also of research into critical thinking around the very notion of obtaining an objective, categorical and stable assessment of an individual’s personality. My research indicates that all of these terms and indeed, all of these practices are problematic, but my research also indicates that there is a call for an alternative form of investigation into subjectivity and subjectivising processes. The philosopher Rosi Braidotti (2002) is energetic in her call for ‘more innovative and creative energy in thinking about the structures of subjectivity at a time in history when social, economic, cultural and symbolic regimes of representation are changing very fast ‘(Braidotti, 2002 : 73). But Braidotti also asks, is the ‘model of scientific rationality a suitable frame of reference to express the new subjectivity? Is the model of artistic creativity any better? How does it act upon the social imaginary? Will mythos or logos prove to be a better ally in the big leap across the post-modern void?’ (173). It is interesting to note that a writer who so keenly identifies the dangers of either/or thinking should create, albeit rhetorically, an opposition between scientists and artists, as if art can represent everyone anymore than science can. Writers such as Braidotti, (2002) Alcoff (1993) and Hollway (1984, 1989) have cogently argued that Western notions of the subject
have been predicated upon universalising and damaging sets of dualisms, and in doing so these dualisms have shaped almost every aspect of Western culture, establishing entrenched, polarised forms, of knowledge production. Foremost in the oppositions established by a Western conception of the subject are the separations between body and mind and between the individual and their society.
The Cartesian Cogito
My initial research into subjectivity pinpointed the centrality of the Cartesian Cogito in Western conceptions of the subject and of dualistic modes of thought. The Cogito is characterised as a unitary, rational and cerebral subject. Feminist epistemologists such as Alcoff and Potter (1993) and Grosz (1994) emphasise the historical identification of the Cogito with masculinity, and by implication with a polarised construction that frames the feminine as irrational and corporeal. My practice aims to connect the problematic constructions of the subject I have identified to computational structures and conventions, in particular to some of the assumptions embedded within orthodox conceptions of interactivity and agency. These assumptions are also relevant to many computational works that generate and reformulate various types of narrative, in particular to works that make claims for the democratisation of writing, identified by Mateas and Sengers (2003) as works in which the computer is framed as a value free or neutral conduit for ‘utopian navigation’ (162).
The notion of neutrality is embedded in the empirical, positivist47
subject who emerged from the paradigm of the Cartesian Cogito. Such a subject is someone for whom the senses activate a solipsistic, singular ability to detect universal truths. The absence of this ability is framed as a systemic failure, such as the state of being female, non-white or in some other way excluded from access to a received conception of rationality. If this appears to be an extreme characterisation of Western notions of the subject it is important to remember that this idea of the
subject is a limited conception. Such a construction was also used to justify disenfranchising and enslaving subjects due to their perceived inability to reason. Within living memory British women were denied the vote on the grounds of this incapacity, indeed in Switzerland women did not get the right to vote until 1971; two conservative half-cantons, Appenzell Ausserrhoden and Appenzell Innerrhoden did not grant women the right to vote until 1989 and 1990, the argument being that the constitutional reference to citizens did not include women. Whether a person is characterised as a citizen or a subject my point is that these are not neutral or natural categories but historically and politically motivated constructions that have the same provenance as the supposedly objective or value free empirical scientific subject or knower.
These constricted notions of the subject have informed scientific practice at many levels, and, as Alison Adam (1990) writes, this includes the field of Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science. The so called ‘view-from-nowhere’ identified by Thomas Nagel (1986) is predicated upon universal subjects, described by Adam as ‘the archetypal knowers, authors of scientific research are supposed to be anonymous. The individual is always abstract and it is held that this makes no difference to the quality of the research’ (77). But, as Adam points out, this is based on an idealised construction of the knower: ‘these “subjects” are interchangeable only across a narrow range of implicit group membership. And the group in question is the dominant social group in Western Capitalist societies: propertied, educated, white men’ (77).
The misleading presumption of neutrality is a core theme of feminist epistemologies. These presumptions have obscured the wholly located and subject-specific nature of scientific practices. Writers such as Susan Hekman (1990), Evelyn Fox-Keller (1985), Alison Adam (1998), Alcoff and Potter (1993), Code and Harding (1993) have written at length about how, in Code’s words ‘such beliefs derive from conceptions of detached and faceless cognitive agency that mask the variability of the experiences and practices from which knowledge is constructed’ (Alcoff and Potter: 26). This is not to argue for a relativist epistemology (described by Harding as ‘anathema to any
scientific project’ (61)) but to argue for the appropriateness of looking at new means of thinking about subjectivity and, by extension, subjectifying processes.
Interdependencies between subjectivity, epistemology and interactivity are central to my practice, and to the writing that accompanies my research, but the issues and conflicts, and more importantly, the alternatives identified by writers such as Braidotti (2002), Hollway and Henriques et al (1984) uncover further difficulties which I will explore in this chapter, such as why, for example, certain facets of a subject appear to be immutable or resistant to change, and why companies and large organisations such as the army continue to use psychometric methodologies founded upon Western paradigms of the unitary subject.
Evaluation practices
I have focused so far on one particularly pervasive notion of the subject, the empirical subject who is able to detect truths through sensory input. This subject personifies the idealised scientific observer who is neutral and trans-historical. But I do not want to give the impression that this idea of a subject has been uncritically accepted. The conception of the subject is contentious and has been the focus of many conflicting theories. Philosophers such as Nietzsche and Spinoza challenged Cartesian philosophy. Nietzsche (188748
), rejected the presumption of humanist agency and rational intent, and Spinoza’s (1677) Monism was a direct attack upon Cartesian mind-body dualism49
. Likewise the processes of subjective evaluation developed from the nineteenth century onwards are the source of ongoing ethical and pragmatic disagreement. By and large I have chosen to work with, and critique dominant conceptions of the subject and the subjectifying practices that have emerged from those notions.
My own work asks many of the core questions that personality psychologists hope to answer through assessment methodologies. Finding answers to these questions is also useful, if not crucial, for any writer trying to build a conventional dramatic characterisation. The core questions embedded in my software and writing consist of the following:
• What are a person’s most important characteristics? • How do they adapt to specific situations?
• What drives that person? What do they want?
• What are their goals and how do they fulfil them?
• What things does a person try to avoid and how do they try to accomplish such avoidance?
• How do they cope with difficulties?
• What is their overarching sense of their life’s meaning (if any)?
In creating a system to ask these questions I have been influenced by my involvement in predominantly commercial forms of subjective evaluation through intermittent work as a market research interviewer over a seventeen-year period. This work very often involved quantitative forms of subjective assessment. My own practice is aware of the conflicting and problematic issues at the core of subjective evaluations and personality psychology; it deploys evaluative methodologies with a view to generating critical engagement. But why, I ask myself, despite the clear limitations of these practices and in light of a growing body of opposition to fixed notions of the subject, did my various employers continue to use these techniques, and perhaps more puzzling, why did their clients continue to pay for this research?
Wendy Hollway (1984) asks a similar question of occupational assessment:
Does it work? The question immediately begs two others. First, what is ‘it’? Second, what constitutes ‘working’? In answer to the first question, it can be recognised more readily that psychological assessment is not a homogeneous
body of knowledge when we see it as a production in various diverse sites.
(Hollway, 1984: 27).
Hollway frames the conception of the individual within occupational assessment as a ‘social technology enabling the administration and regulation of employees’ (28). Within institutional assessment practices it is naïve in her terms to look for a straight forward ‘progress towards truth’ (27). Hollway emphasises the historical motivation within what was then called occupational psychology, to aid organisations with ‘the complex problems of maximizing profitability’ (29). It is important to note the connections between personal psychology and commercial interests, and in my work, to make overt the connections between psychological assessment methodologies and market research practices.
Repertory grids and ‘Man the Scientist’
An assessment practice that I have explored and indeed, deployed throughout my work has been George A. Kelly’s Personal Construct Repertory Test (1955), multiple examples of Kelly’s grids can be found in the first half of the South book. These grids involve the exhaustive formulation of bi-polar constructs from which hypotheses can be tested. Constructs are obtained through a systematic process in which triads are examined in order to select the two that are somehow similar and a third that is different. The source material for these processes may be, for example, significant people and places. Exhaustive construct elicitation is designed to reveal patterns of experiential categorization or cognitive styles; these may be singular or inter- subjective. This type of personality assessment has been held up as a somewhat heterodox form of evaluation, foremost because Personal Construct Psychology does not incorporate notions of personality traits, developmental stages or unconscious motivations. The person being evaluated constructs their own sets of hypotheses with the aid of an experimenter or psychologist/counsellor. As such it may be
Test of Personality (1990), Cattell’s Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire (1945) or Hans Eysenck’s Big Three Supertraits (1947), which are all predicated on more or less monolithic notions of personality traits such as extraversion-introversion, neuroticism and psychoticism. However, despite its seemingly unorthodox approach, Personal Construct Psychology does fit within an orthodox humanist tradition, framing its subjects as rational and innately able to identify and test hypotheses. In 1955 George Kelly wrote: ‘The aspirations of the scientist are essentially the aspirations of all men’ (Kelly 1955: 43). Kelly’s approach is a precursor to cognitive theories of personality, in which an individual’s social-cognitive style or adaptation is the key to assessing their individual psychology. It is an approach that is close to the information processing paradigms critiqued by Hayles (1999), Haraway (1991) and Barad (2007).
In framing ‘all men’ as tantamount to the idealised figure of ‘the scientist’ it is important to ask what types of knowledge and what types of men, or indeed what types of people this statement rejects. Secondly, it is important to remember, as Henriques states (Henriques et al, 1984), that Personal Construct Theory does not take account of the Experimenter Effect, in which the experimenter’s own feelings, attitudes or expectations effect the outcome, nor does it take any account of the irrational, seemingly self-defeating actions of certain individuals. Personal Construct Theory ignores inconvenient or messy variables that hint at a less than rational subject. Most significantly, Personal Construct Theory is based on a conception of the rational and unitary individual, who may be influenced by social forces or social contexts, but is nevertheless distinct and separate from their society.
I have explained how my work is concerned with investigating conceptions of subjectivity and subjectifying processes within the context of a system for generating both factual and fictional writing. My deployment of these methodologies is consciously problematic, as I will demonstrate in the final section of this chapter, I have used these techniques in a way that destabilises their core assumptions and seeks to reframe subjectifying practices as performative, situated and processual. The next section looks at the implications of working with new ideas around the knowing
subject. These ideas challenge the notion of the Cartesian cogito who is implacably separate from his society. In questioning scientifically orthodox ideas of who and what a subject is, the idea of the object is also examined, including the way in which subject-object boundaries are constructed or perceived in the conception of interactivity.