Accounting for pervasive computing. (Features).

THESIS

This essay analyzes the practical and discursive constructions of "accounting" interfaces for mobile and pervasive computation. Attentive to Pierre Bourdleu's theory of the Habitus, it critiques those interface systems as differential "structures of durable dispositions of action." (1) Emergent pervasive software systems, whether hand-held or environmentally embedded, both displace and relocate the interface between embodied social actors and the "linguistic" technologies with which those actors construct systems of meaningful interaction. "Software" needs to be understood simultaneously as language and as architecture, as both habit (cognitive, corporeal) and habitat (environmental, embedded). "Interface" needs to be understood as both the textual condensations that operate computational choice (the screen interface), and the conversion or transposition of embodied action into a technology of software. The differences between interfaces can be mapped according to different qualities of the private and the pu blic, and according to different modes of transposition (or "transcoding") between embodied and virtual layers of action.

The discourse of accounting organizes the subject position of the user as a specific agent of naming, categorizing, exchanging and compiling. As a control text that helps guide activity in the production of practical space, accounting interfaces create circuits between embodied economic activity, the management of that activity according to software, and the production of self as a manifestation of that personal computational management. Accounting software concretizes those habitual categorizations and process-related valuations of experience into interactive confession-narratives that allow for a more general understanding of the social construction of self through software interfaces.

HABITUS

Habitus is understood as "the systems of durable, transposable dispositions that structure." (2) Aaron Cicourel defines it as, "a self-regulating system of generative principles whose durable existence produces practices that are the outcome of both an objective structure of social relations and the particularity of the individual phenomenological experience in and of that structure." (3) That phenomenology names the experience of being embodied in a navigable, meaningful world. The forms taken by Habitus are the categories of possibility afforded by a particular form of embodiment. Human technologies form the horizon of worldly experience: we experience the world through them, and we reflect upon that experience. Habitus is itself that mode of embodiment.

Etymologically, Habitus is related to both "habit" and "habitat." Habitat is the artifactual residue of specific, habitual actions over time, grooves worn into the surface of the environment over multiple durations, and, simultaneously, bodily habits that are the subjective reflection of environment onto self. These processes, habituation and habitation, coordinate each other. They form a kind of circuit whereby habit informs habitat as the artifactual residue of its performative repetition, and also whereby habitat stabilizes the stage and condition for those very habitual repetitions. (4)

The concept of Habitus is employed by Bourdieu to convert the limits of both phenomenological and existentialist perspectives, as well as structuralist and historical-materialist interpretations, into a general instrument of sociological investigation. Central to this conversion is the common nexus of the "body," understood as both a repository of historical construction, manifested as disposition, and as an agent in the limit-conditions of those constructions. Categorization of the life-world is a manifest function of this active embodiment. But this categorization does not form itself in the more purely mental voice of cognitive psychology, but rather in the performative instrumentality of social life, and the competition over the production, definition, valuation and expenditure of various modes of capital (social, economic, cultural) as each themselves are functions of differential embodiment.

SOFTWARE AS HABIT

Software condenses embodied habits of thought and action into economic systems of cognitive hierarchies. As "language" software both inscribes and describes social action, and as technology one enunciates those systems of cognitive hierarchy as the medium of social action. As a structure of disposable inhabitation, software affords a reproducible form of habit, inhabitation and practice. Some contemporary software, designed specifically for the fabrication and maintenance of "self," as technologies of its accountability, are materializations of computational subjectivization. As for any other sort of Habitus, access to sites of reproduction is the architectonic capital with which habitat becomes habit. Software acumen is access to the dispositions of practice it embodies, i.e. access to frames and institutions of reproduction and capital-formation in the digital economy. Software, as the operant life-world technology in the network society, structures in its image the construction of individual identity. (5) Software becomes not only a variable in the differential display of Habitus; it becomes a grammar for the generation of doxa, of the conditions of the game itself. Software not only cleaves a new sort of class distinction deep into a new sort of social space, it also reorganizes in its own image the terrain on which capital is produced.

The cultural and social legitimacy of any sort of continuous exercise of power is dependent upon its ability to restructure the techniques of the social field into its own terms and shape, and upon its ability to reproduce itself formally and institutionally. The social field in which, and over which, Habitus organizes modes of capital is one not simply mediated by software, but most directly composed of software, built of software and of "soft" interactions. The production of the software-enabled Habitus is In turn, reinforced by the production of Habitus-enabled soft spaces. The acquisition and application of software-related skills is a crucial social strategy in the network society. Software acumen, considered broadly, does not only define the practical means with which to work and communicate in a software-based economy. Because of its importance in the definition and acquisition of economic capital in that economy, it also serves to redefine the quality and character of social and symbolic capital in ge neral. Software produces the conditions of material space in its own image.

SOFTWARE AS HABITAT

Software, as both language and technology, is not only a device-language with which we act upon space, it is also itself a material architecture. As surely as any other architectural reality, software is a lively, embedded feature of the social world. Glowing screens co-populate our homes and workplaces, fiber and copper wires traverse and materialize trade routes, and through those routes, software powers multiple species of capital. Increasingly, it is impossible to imagine architectural or urban design projects without considering built space as an infrastructure for software-mediated activity, and without a foregrounding of software as a primary stage on which habitation will play out.

The "interface" has emerged as perhaps the dominant material discourse of action across multiple global cultures. Interfaces generalize and condense the utility of physical features and affordances of the life-world. Considered as nodes along the trajectory of a given day, modulating interfaces narrate everyday life. The practice of everyday life requires the navigation of a complex geography of interfaces. The scenario of the day involves a complex mapping of the distributed spread of interface. interfaces animate most of our important social technologies; they are concentrated in automobiles, on television screens, on telephones, on PDA's, video game consoles, on desktop computers, on cash registers, on ATM's, on portable music players, on remote controls, etc.

Interfaces are central to the programmatic logics of space. Specific interfaces are utilized in specific architectonic conditions: "Offices" are not just where certain kinds of socio-economic activity takes place, they are more specifically where certain software and material interfaces are activated; "living rooms" are not just where other kinds of culture take place, they are, likewise, more specifically where certain software and material interfaces are activated. The same interface specificity differentiates the inhabitation of public banking terminals, automobile interiors, retail purchasing registers, etc. Software and the interfaces that make software into social technologies frame the practice and personality of everyday space, and these modulations of interface discourses are crucial to practical urban and architectural design in the network society.

MOBILE COMPUTING AND AUGMENTED ARCHITECTURE

Mobile computing and augmented architecture are two interrelated modes of pervasive computation. Both are dependent upon different modes of user-data interfaces, and accordingly produce different discourses of self-accounting, as well as attendant subject-positions.

The PDA (Personal Data Assistant) is the iconic device of mobile computation. Representative products run the Palm OS or Pocket PC applications, but others, like the RIM Blackberry, are based less on the model of the handheld computer and geared more toward wireless email functions. Some newer devices integrate cell phone, handheld computer and wireless email into, as of today, rather bulky all-in-ones. Mobile computation should be understood not just as a technique for making data portable, but as a unique, socially complex system for the ritualistic, performative and emotional mediation of personal and public spaces. Mobile computation does not just link individuals and groups; it is also a technology for the production of social agencies and new modes of cultural organization. It demands difficult and contentious new definitions of private and public, of connection and dislocation. Mobile computing devices allow users to interpret the world, and accordingly input new data to their portable "personal data s tack." Users are able to judge events as they happen by making reference to that stack, and to anticipate or organize upcoming events. Portable software allows for individual users to construct personal control-texts that assist in their mastery of the field conditions of the life-world. It accordingly constructs self-identities in the practical image of those control-texts and that mastery. They do not simply enable the conditions of communication; they also produce the structure of that very enabling. (6) The interface organizes the world for the user of mobile computation.

Corollary to the outfitting of users-in-motion with personal computational devices is the embedding of software into the physical habitats that surround those users, a concept that may be understood by several related terms: augmented space, pervasive computing, reflexive architecture, embedded software, augmented architecture, etc. Some visions for such a world of augmented architecture describe scenarios in which nearly every object or surface is both computationally intelligent and/or interactively addressable. (7) This convergence of artificial intelligence and artifactual environmental design is commonly understood in relation to either "smart building" initiatives, which employ action-sensitive computers to assist in security and comfort, or in stylized infotainment experiments, such as the reflexive screening systems developed for Prada by IDEO and Rem Koolhaas's Office of Metropolitan Architecture. (8) Several media artist/architects such as Elizabeth Oilier + Ricardo Scofidio, Christian Moeller, Lars Spuybruck, George Legrady and Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, for example, have each created amazing temporary spaces that point toward an affective physical data-space as a potentially general-include architectural condition. More mundane, but more widespread uses of augmented architecture include factory automation; road-sensing automobiles (and automobile-sensing roads); unobtrusive security and surveillance systems; and augmented vision for diagnostic and repair workers on highly complex machinery such as aircraft.

In such projects, "architecture" is being redefined as the dynamic integration of embodied and informational spaces. But the integration of architectural design and interface design remains an uneasy collaboration. (9) Integrating what happens inside the glowing rectangles that co-populate social space with us, and what happens outside of them into a focused, functional program for a truly hybrid space remains an elusive goal. The practical coordination of both design logics involves the elaboration of highly complex negotiations of the private and the public, manifested on the ground in real social exchange. The success of software as habitat is dependent on the success of software as habit, and it is not the data per se that allows for regular, doxic social action. For software to be habit, it is the interface. And as such, it is the interface that both accounts far and allows for the significant accounting of those actions. (10)

CONTEMPORARY AND ALTERNATIVE ACCOUNTING INTERFACES

Conventional Graphical User Interfaces (GUI) are, but do not have to be, materializations of procedural, referential and instrumental cognitivism. That instrumentalism takes the form of an obsessive economism. Consider Pocket Quicken, the personal accounting package. Pocket Quicken is the most widely used personal accounting software for PDA's. It is a mobile/handheld version of Intuit's market defining title for fixed-desktop computing, Quicken. With Pocket Quicken the individual becomes an auto-incorporation as the discourses of organizational accounting are transposed onto the intimate spaces of everyday life. Not only is every penny accounted for, but also every thought, action and expenditure is translated into the discursive codes of the cognitive self. It is a means by which one can keep track of all cultural, social, economic and symbolic capital in a conveniently quantified system of investment and accounting. The cognitive self produced by these modes of social relationship to artifactual reality re quires, like all constructions of social self, symbolic demonstrations of its limits and capacities. An interdependent genealogy is developed: as the cognitive metaphor comes to reveal itself in accounting (and in accounting software where cognitive classifications are made material as contingent possibilities of infomatic action), and as changes in the information systems of organizations place greater burdens on accounting softwares as the tools of labor where "accounting" comes to stand for organizational action in general, the "cognitivist" mode of labor comes to stand for human social action in general and "cognitivist" software for the conditions of that labor. This cognitive, accounting subjectivity moves out of the organizational field as a generalized condition of social subjectivity and a technically-enforced, reflective, confessional ethics of action and valuation.

As a technology of self, the Pocket Quicken user-experience creates a spreadsheet-narrated biographical circuit between action and inscription, which is based on a transposition of the interface-action institution of one architecture, the office, onto another, the ambient world of the mobile user. As an interface narrative, Pocket Quicken is rooted in the conventions of both the office and Office, the GUI conventions of Microsoft Office's suite of applications, the lingua franca of contemporary business. Office habituates the field of the office, condensing the particular Interaction-forms of the generic global office into both practical taxonomies and dispositions of action. The personal Internalization of those durable dispositions is a transposition of Habitus, condensed as habit into other habitats. And it is precisely the arbitrariness of those condensations (file, edit, copy, save) that habituates the office/Office hexis into an institution that is socially useful because it is familiar.

Alternative accounting interfaces, ones not based on the Office hexis, are organized according to different material metaphors of information, embodiment and architecture. Consider Asymptote's "Virtual New York Stock Exchange" (1999) project in which the architects constructed a sort of immersive interface-environment conceived nor around the literal and figurative metaphors of desks anti desktops, but of transversal infomatics as a unique generative spatial vocabulary. This literal "environmentalization" of information flow converts data into a dynamic sort of mechanical field in which accounting and acting (trading) involves the pushing and pulling of virtual floors, walls and floating acronyms. The descriptive, prescriptive and predictive technologies of accounting are rendered as floating in a metaphysical vortex of charts and indexes. But when all one requires from a reporting technology is a simple yes or no, interfaces like Asymptote's may be unnecessarily baroque. Accounting is after all about that p rimary binary: the bottom line, plus money or minus money, positive or negative balances.

Another alternative makes this binary logic dramatically clear, and may accordingly prove the superior accounting interface for augmented architecture. The Ambient ORB by Ambient Devices is a frosted glass ball that sits on your desk (or lap, or what-have-you) and receives information from a wireless data network and glows green or red depending on current market conditions. From Ambient Devices' marketing materials: "The ORB arrives set to track the Dow Jones Industrial Average--glowing green or red to indicate market movement up or down, or yellow when the market is calm. Just plug the ORB into any standard power outlet and it is up and running on a nationwide wireless network--no Internet connection required. The ORB can be customized to a variety of different premium information sources, such as the weather, your portfolio, or your buddies online, making your information just a glance away." (11) Here the informational content of accounting is rendered as a physical, environmental event: interface-as-furn iture. Accordingly, "accounting" transforms itself from a discourse about world events to a direct, sensory presentation of them. For augmented architecture, the interface operates less as an abstract regime of representation and more as one of located embodiment.

ACCOUNTING FOR THE INTERFACE

The practice of accounting for the world and what's in it, and of representing that practice as a matrix of valuations is ideally suited to contemporary interface conventions of mobile computing, as both a technological and a social operation. Accounting is a social technology of comprehensive nominative construction. Accounting drafts the entire world according to the general instrument of exchange value, a totalizing index of human activity in the image of monetary incomes and outcomes. Software already operates according to comparative functions applied to interchangeable values within a compositional field (the principle of the polyvalent database) of software accounts. The mobile user turns to her computer (a transcoding of physical to virtual orders of presentation) in order to account for events past (to inscribe, value and compile them), events current (to activate, interpret and act within them), and events future (to verify, map, and anticipate them). Accounting is a procedure by which the transacti ons of differently valued forms are "written," given figurative sense, materiality and systematicity through their representation. Like all regimes of figuration, accounting is a producing as well as a reporting technology. If this were not so, its usefulness would be greatly diminished. If accounting were "only accounting," then an organization could not make predictive and prescriptive changes to its functions based on this institutional retrospection, which it surely needs to do. Successful accounting retrains thought and action in its own image. (12)

Like other technologies of the self, the construction of the cognitive processing in a social agent utilizes confessional rituals of self-evaluation as a means of training its subjects to the principles of their disciplines. The social subject of accounting exceeds the confines of organizational space--or rather organizational space now exceeds itself, and extends "into the home," where, as a technology of inscription, it realizes itself as a technology of confession. just as for Catholic confession or psychoanalytic therapy, total disclosure is paramount to the accounting confession, as acts undertaken are written toward an ongoing, unfolding identity-portrait. Particular interfaces concretize the descriptive and prescriptive acts of confession, valuation and anticipation in different ways, and are differentially available, embodied social actors in motion or at rest. As such, the narrative specificity of the interface differentiates its application toward the construction of Habitus. (13)

NOTES

(1.) Pierre Bourdieu has developed the concept of Habitus over the course of several years. See especially his theoretical explications in Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge, England: Polity Press, 1977) and The Logic of Practice (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990) and key sociological applications in Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984) and Homo Academicus (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988). He discusses the role of the concept in his own work throughout Bourdieu and Loic J. D. Wacquant, For a Reflexive Sociology (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992). For another consideration of the term for the critical interpretation of spatial practice, see Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1991) pp. 238-241.

(2.) Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, p. 72.

(3.) Aaron Cicourel, "Aspects of Structural and Processural Theories of Knowledge" in Craig Calhoun, Edward LiPuma and Moishe Postone, ed., Bourdieu: Critical Perspectives (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993), pp. 89-115.

(4.) The crucial interrelation of social performance and bodily repetition has been mapped differently by Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: Sociogenic and Psytisogenic Investigations (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 2000); Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Seth in Everyday Life (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1959); and Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York: Routtedge, 1999).

(5.) The phrase "network society" and some assumptions shout its role in the construction of self-identity are derived from: The Rise of the Network Society and The Power of identity, two of Manuel Castells's volumes in his series Information Age: Economy Society, Culture (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1997).

(6.) In "On the Mobile: The Effects of Mobile Telephones on Social and Individual Life," a remarkable white paper commissioned by Motorola, Sadie Plant describes the cell phone as a medium not just of speech but of the different ritualistic, performative and emotional complexities of a global culture in emergence, one call at a time. Plant is better known for her work on the history of the Situationist International and the feminist archaeology of computer science, but here she develops a textured portrait of the multiple socio-cultural constructions of connection and communication that are rehearsed around the mobile device. See www.motorola.com/mediacenter/Industry/background/0,1083,,00.html for the PDF of this white paper. The success of Plant's project--she blending of critical sociology and corporate reconnaissance--is not without controversy. See Columbia-based performance artist, Coca Fusco's, postings to the Nettime list about Plant's commission. Fusco rightly questions the role of the intellectual as one providing research that doubles as a sort of "paid endorsement" for corporate ventures, and speaks so the necessity of critical independence for the legitimacy of research. She incorrectly, however, reads Plant's text as "pro-globalization" and "unscientific." It is clear that as the university becomes more "entrepreneurial," that hybrid-texts (or "tainted scholarship," depending on your perspective) will form a politically complicated new discourse in the Humanities, one that is simultaneously more compromised by, and more engaged with, market cultures.

(7.) IPv6 is the next-generation Internet addressing system based on a 128-bit string. This scheme would replace the current IPv4 system, which is nearly full-all possible addresses are taken. The 128-bit system would allow for roughly 10 (23) addresses per person on the planet. The vision of pervasive computing is based on making as many "objects" as possible into net-addressable components of a ubiquitous network. The architectonic horizon cleared by IPv6-addressable clothing, medicine, dwellings, etc.--begs the question as so whether or not one ever actually comes into contact with 10 (23) objects over the course of one's lifetime.

(8.) See www.ideo.com/portfolio/re.asp?x-50120.

(9.) The potential of these collaborations is well summarized by Hani Rashid's (Asymptote) phrase, "architecture-space-interface." See Rashid's article of the same title in Neil Leach, ed., Designing for the Digital World (London: Wiley and Sons, 2002), pp. 134-137. Some interface design companies, such as Imaginary Forces and Razorfish, have engaged in collaborations with architects on augmented architectural projects, and the interest in a convergence is just as strong from the architects' side of the divide. See the competition for the new Eyebeam new media museum for works by many of the studios currently most deeply engaged in the potential of augmented architecture at www.eyebeam.org/museum/arch.html.

(10.) Doxa is "unstated, taken-for-granted, assumed knowledge"--knowledge in a social and historical situation. It is made up of practices, of what is held to be given and true, as well as of belief in facts and values within a certain culture, a certain society, a certain group or a certain discipline at a certain time.

(11.) Another alternative accounting interface to be considered is Smart Money's Market Map. Like Ambient ORB, the market is imaged according to a green/red binary. See www.smartmoney.com/marketmap. (We need this for comprehensive personal accounting.) Kasina is a consulting company that tracks and rates innovation in web-based financial management interfaces and site features. See www.kasina.com.

(12.) Anthony Hopwood makes the case that accounting systems are increasingly asked to constitute the activity of management and not just report on it, and that "different information technologies are creating the potential for continued shifts in the locus and organizational significance of the accounting craft. And, not least in significance, increasingly accounting is being examined in terms of the consequences which it actually has rather than those so which it continues so aspire." See Hopwood, "The Archaeology of Accounting Systems" in Accounting, Organizations and Society, Vol. 12, No. 3 (1987), pp. 207-234.

As "accounting" disclosures are being asked to do the work of organizing human activity, they are also now being asked by sociologists to account for themselves as regimes of structuring culture. Hopwood argues that changes in the structural Importance of information technologies have contributed to the development and expansion of the "craft" as a mode of organizational labor, where for the organization, "information...[is] in fact a direct reflection and an integral component of its system of administration and governance. But do not these changes in structure also bring changes in the formation of the organizational social "self" whose job it is to enact them? Meyer Zald, in his analysis of the evolution of budgetary rules, approaches the issue as a negotiation of spoken and unspoken convention. For him, what is interesting are the changes in the "unspoken rules" that while remaining unspoken, or never even revealed, determine changes in the sorts of managerial action that continues to claim an intransige nt "rationality" for their truths. See Zald, "The Sociology of Enterprise, Accounting and Budget Rules: Implications for Organizational Theory" in Accounting, Organizations and Society, Vol. II, No. 4/5 (1986), pp. 327-340.

Bruce G. Carruthers and Wendy Nelson Espeland also make the case that "rationality" as an organizational ethic is the contingent result of contingent rhetorical technologies of truth telling. It is not a self-revealing science, but rather highly malleable social constructions. Isis clear that the formations of truth produced by accounting discourses are powerful in the formation of organizations in their own images. But do they also produce accountants in their own image? See Bruce G. Carruthers and Wendy Nelson Espeland, "Accounting for Rationality: Double-Entry Bookkeeping and the Rhetoric of Economic Rationality" in American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 97, No (July 1991), pp. 31-69.

(13.) The essays in the "Software and Habitus" series are each ventures in the spirit of Lay Manovich's call for a critical "software studies." The ideas in "Software and Habitus" were originally developed in a seminar on contemporary organizational theory by Roger Freidland and john Mohr, but finally belong so the conversations with many people, including: Lev Manovich, Roger Freidland, John Mohr, Leonard Nevarez, Kazys Varnelis, Tim Durfee, George Yu, Adam Eeuwens, Rebeca Mendes, Bruna Mon, Sean Crowe, Peter Lunenfeld, Constance Penley, David Jensen, Daniel Jenett, Jose Caballer, Ben Davis, Josh Galban, Karen McGrane, Dan Frydman, Ed Keller, Juan Azulay, Barbara Huang, Karl Chu, Marcos Novak, Robert Nideffer, Christian Moeller, Victoria Vesna, Jason Brown, Norman Klein, Miltos Manetas, Mai Ueda, Katharine Wright, Nadine Oulrmbach, Josh Nimoy, Mark Pesce, Mayfair Yang, Lisa Parks, Christiane Robbins, Kenny Fields, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Dick Hebdige, Adam Zaretsky, Brooke Barnett, Steven Schkolne, Michael Speaks, Heman Diaz-Alonso and Marcello Picone.

* BENJAMIN H. BRATTON is principal of The Culture Industry, a member of the History/Theory faculty at SCI_Arc (The Southern California Institute of Architecture) and adjunct faculty in the Department of Design and Media Arts at the University of California, Los Angeles. He can be contacted at [e-mail].