Elena Parmiggiani
email: parmiggi@idi.ntnu.no

Eric Monteiro
email: eric.monteiro@idi.ntnu.no

Thomas Østerlie
email: thomas.osterlie@samfunn.ntnu.no

Synthetic Situations in the Internet of Things

Keywords: Synthetic situation, performativity, algorithmic phenomena, Internet of Things

The proliferation of distributed digital technologies in contemporary enterprise challenges the understanding of situated action. This paper revisits this notion in the era of Big Data and the Internet of Things. Drawing upon longitudinal studies within the offshore oil and gas industry, we empirically expand upon Knorr Cetina's "synthetic situation" to encompass data-intensive work where people are not co-located with the physical objects and phenomena around which work is organized. By highlighting the performative nature of synthetic situations in the Internet of Things -where phenomena are algorithmically enacted through digital technologies -we elaborate upon the original formulation of synthetic situations by demonstrating that (i) algorithmic phenomena constitute the phenomena under inquiry, rather than standing in for physical referents; (ii) noise is irreducible in algorithmic phenomena; (iii) synthetic situations are productive rather than reductive. Finally, we draw brief methodological implications by proposing to focus on the material enactment of data in practice.

Introduction

Few notions in social informatics have been as cherished and influential as that of "situated action" [START_REF] Suchman | Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human-Machine Communication[END_REF]. The notion of situated action underscores the inherent contingencies of how work practices, very much including use of technology, unfold. The notion has been crucial in debunking deterministic influences [START_REF] Orlikowski | Using Technology and Constituting Structures: A Practice Lens for Studying Technology in Organizations[END_REF]. That action is situated is accordingly firmly established. What remains unclear, however, is where, how, and when the situation influences action. What, exactly, is a "situation"? This question is increasingly pressing as modern work practices are growing more information-saturated and dependent on interconnected and interacting heterogeneous information and communication technologies (ICTs) -such as networks of remote sensors, gadgets, and artefacts -going under the banner of the Internet of Things (IoT), generating vast amounts of quantified datasets (Big Data) [START_REF] Agarwal | Editorial -Big Data, Data Science, and Analytics: The Opportunity and Challenge for IS Research[END_REF]. The increased prominence of mediated information (sensor data, images, visualizations, algorithm calculations) transforms the conditions for work [START_REF] Lycett | Datafication": Making Sense of (Big) Data in a Complex World[END_REF], particularly in data-saturated settings such as the oil and gas industry [START_REF] Monteiro | Living in a Sociomaterial World[END_REF]. Focusing on how situated actions are shaped through distributed, interacting, and remote technologies, implies a shift of analytical focus towards performativity, namely on the way assemblages of tools, concepts, and expectations that we use in order to act on and conceive of objects also shape a situation [START_REF] Barad | Posthumanist Performativity: Towards an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter[END_REF].

The purpose of this paper is therefore to discuss the qualifier "situated" in "situated action". More specifically, we analyse and discuss the performativity of the material aspects of the "situation" in modern, technology-saturated settings. We engage with a stream of research which has debated the under-specification of what goes into the "situation" [START_REF] Knorr Cetina | The Synthetic Situation: Interactionism for a Global World[END_REF][START_REF] Pollock | Post Local Forms of Repair: The (Extended) Situation of Virtualised Technical Support[END_REF], notably critiquing the understanding of "situation" as overly physical, i.e. too closely tied to the local, physical site [START_REF] Kallinikos | Farewell to Constructivism: Technology and Context-Embedded Action[END_REF][START_REF] Williams | Research Commentary -Moving Beyond the Single Site Implementation Study: How (and Why) We Should Study the Biography of Packaged Enterprise Solutions[END_REF]. In particular, we build upon Knorr Cetina's notion of synthetic situation, originally developed to theorize situations where people find themselves in one another's presence without needing to be physically colocated [START_REF] Knorr Cetina | The Synthetic Situation: Interactionism for a Global World[END_REF]. We extend upon her work to also encompass situations where people are not co-located with the physical phenomena their work is organized around, i.e. synthetic situations in the Internet of Things.

We draw upon empirical insights from two studies within the offshore oil and gas industry, a reality where work is conducted by necessity in the midst of a "datafication" [START_REF] Lycett | Datafication": Making Sense of (Big) Data in a Complex World[END_REF]. That is, how situated action is laid out and constituted through the material aspects of (sometimes faulty) sensors, data streams, measurement devices, and heterogeneous on-screen representations.

We contribute towards current debates on conceptualizing digital technologies in contemporary work and organizing [START_REF] Orlikowski | Sociomateriality: Challenging the Separation of Technology, Work and Organization[END_REF]. While the majority of the notions of situation in the literature are shaped by empirical settings that vary in terms of distribution, our notion of situation also varies in terms of material configuration. A performative rather than representational approach is a defining feature of the programme on materiality in Information Systems (IS) aiming to understand the ways in which people and technologies, their properties and boundaries, are enacted and reenacted in practice [START_REF] Cecez-Kecmanovic | The Sociomateriality of Information Systems: Current Status, Future Directions[END_REF]. Our contribution therefore offers a way of exploring how material reality is performed in action through the arrangements for knowing about these phenomena, and how these arrangements are made to endure across space and time [START_REF] Orlikowski | Sociomateriality: Challenging the Separation of Technology, Work and Organization[END_REF][START_REF] Cecez-Kecmanovic | The Sociomateriality of Information Systems: Current Status, Future Directions[END_REF].

Theory

(Re-)conceptualizing Situated Action

The fundamental, compelling insight of situated action is that action is not determined by design or constraints. Action is contingent, based on local circumstances and resources. As Suchman [START_REF] Suchman | Human-Machine Reconfigurations: Plans and Situated Actions[END_REF] expresses in revision to her 1987 book:

[A]ll activity, even the most analytic, is fundamentally concrete and embodied […] however planned, purposeful actions are inevitably situated actions. By situated actions I mean simply actions taken in the context of the particular, concrete circumstances. (pp. 25-26)

Thus there is a radical indeterminacy of action that effectively undermines overly structural accounts. Viewed in this way, action is situated. Where unclarity, disagreement, and debate start, is when it comes to detailing our understanding of the meaning of Suchman's "context of the particular, concrete circumstance" [START_REF] Suchman | Human-Machine Reconfigurations: Plans and Situated Actions[END_REF] (p. 26). Several criticisms have been levelled at this idea, in the recent literature. An important strand of critique is that Suchman's "particular, concrete circumstance" suggests an overly physical, space-time bounded meaning of the situation. 1When for instance Orlikowski [START_REF] Orlikowski | Using Technology and Constituting Structures: A Practice Lens for Studying Technology in Organizations[END_REF] points out that "every encounter with technology is temporally and contextually provisional, and thus there is, in every use, always the possibility of a different structure being enacted" (p. 412), Kallinikos [START_REF] Kallinikos | Farewell to Constructivism: Technology and Context-Embedded Action[END_REF] argues that this forefronts the "here and now" of the users' encounters in front of a computer screen. A space-and-time conflated understanding of "situation" marginalizes to the level of nonexistence historical and institutional precursors as: the activities that take place at the human-technology interface cover but a limited area of a wider system of instrumental relations, sustained by a huge network of technical, organization, and social arrangements that render the functionality and contextual enactment of a specific technology possible. [START_REF] Kallinikos | Farewell to Constructivism: Technology and Context-Embedded Action[END_REF] (p. 237)

Similarly, but with attention to potential biases associated with ethnographic methods, Williams and Pollock [START_REF] Williams | Research Commentary -Moving Beyond the Single Site Implementation Study: How (and Why) We Should Study the Biography of Packaged Enterprise Solutions[END_REF] identify a "localist sentiment", i.e. a tendency to conceptualize the "situation" as the physical and local site of investigation. In an effort to go beyond "localist" understandings of "situation" that do not fit modern work and organizing, Pollock et al. [START_REF] Pollock | Post Local Forms of Repair: The (Extended) Situation of Virtualised Technical Support[END_REF] propose the notion of an "extended situation", where aspects once seen as central to localist analysis (co-location, proximity, etc.) are no longer the primary organizing features of [distributed work] as others begin to emerge, but also to show how the "where" of this form of work is now mediated by technology. [START_REF] Pollock | Post Local Forms of Repair: The (Extended) Situation of Virtualised Technical Support[END_REF] (p. 255) Monteiro and Rolland [START_REF] Monteiro | Trans-situated Use of Integrated Information Systems[END_REF] address how dependencies and similarities between distributed work practices emerge. The discretion of situated action is not unbounded -as Orlikowski [START_REF] Orlikowski | Using Technology and Constituting Structures: A Practice Lens for Studying Technology in Organizations[END_REF] makes clear, "[s]aying that use is situated and not confined to predefined options does not mean that it is totally open to any and all possibilities" (p. 409). Acknowledging this, Monteiro and Rolland [START_REF] Monteiro | Trans-situated Use of Integrated Information Systems[END_REF] point out that this leaves unaccounted the emergence of standardized (in the sense of similar but not identical) work practices, which they coin "trans-situated".

Thus, the empirical and theoretical understanding of the "situated" needs to be problematized in light of the increasing technology mediation in modern work. Knorr Cetina [START_REF] Knorr Cetina | The Synthetic Situation: Interactionism for a Global World[END_REF] showcases that the work practices of financial traders are situated with reference to both the individual trading floors and, simultaneously, the technology that facilitates interaction between the different trading floors. She proposes the notion of a "synthetic situation" to conceptualize how a "situation" emerges and is constituted by computerbased projections. In studying the shift in the organization of financial trading from physically co-located to distributed and electronically mediated, she defines synthetic situations as translocal "environments that are augmented and temporalized by (fully or partially) scoped components" [START_REF] Knorr Cetina | The Synthetic Situation: Interactionism for a Global World[END_REF] (p. 69). The concept of synthetic situation therefore underlines how representations on the screen (numbers, graphs, charts) are constitutive elements of the situation of the traders, functioning like a "scoping system", i.e. "an arrangement of hardware, software, and human feeds that together function like a scope" to observe, project, and augment a given reality [START_REF] Knorr Cetina | The Synthetic Situation: Interactionism for a Global World[END_REF] (p. 64). They are as "real" as physical and social circumstances, but enable traders to reach beyond the physical setting and, in so doing, constitute a reality by stitching together all the aspects that might be relevant to the interaction [START_REF] Knorr Cetina | The Synthetic Situation: Interactionism for a Global World[END_REF]. The discourse on sociomateriality has recently expanded Knorr Cetina's work by further conceptualizing how the materiality underlying technical and social connections enacts synthetic situations in practice -and therefore aspects of relevance, accountability, and division of labour [START_REF] Orlikowski | Sociomateriality: Challenging the Separation of Technology, Work and Organization[END_REF].

In summary, a prominent aspect of the under-specification of the "situation" is the importance of technological mediation (distribution, representations). The role of technological mediation enacted by scoping systems needs to be recast as the intertwining (alternatively: entanglement, mutually constitutive, reciprocal relationship) of the social and the technical (or, more broadly, the material). Despite repeated calls to eliminate the dichotomy between the social and the material [START_REF] Orlikowski | Sociomateriality: Challenging the Separation of Technology, Work and Organization[END_REF], however, "the social almost always seems to take precedence, the material merely affording some social/human intention" [START_REF] Cecez-Kecmanovic | The Sociomateriality of Information Systems: Current Status, Future Directions[END_REF] (p. 816). The slogan "matter matters" [START_REF] Barad | Posthumanist Performativity: Towards an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter[END_REF] is sometimes exactly that, a slogan. As a result, the detailing of how -not only that -materiality matters (viz. its performativity) in modern work settings requires further analysis.

Situating Action in the Internet of Things

Information-saturated "synthetic situations" are not merely representations of sensorbased and otherwise mediated information; they are re-presented. There is an active appropriation and sense-making that goes beyond the passive imaginary of ICT "mediated" information. In contrast with the understanding of ICT mediation that downplays to the level of non-existence the transformative aspects involved in re-presenting, a focus on materiality as performative recognizes that modern "organizations are increasingly depending on such open-ended phenomena as large-scale data capture and dynamic algorithmic evaluation of online activity" [START_REF] Orlikowski | Exploring Material-Discursive Practices[END_REF] (p. 7). Accordingly, this paper is concerned with situations where encoded, digital objects by necessity play a central role because of the distribution or inaccessibility of the objects of interest (subsea resources, reservoirs, wells) hence difficulty of relying on temporally and spatially bounded work practices. The unfolding of situated action in such settings extends across technological arrangements comprising heterogeneous interconnected remote instrumentation such as sensors, tools, gadgets, and measurement devices (i.e. IoT) generating potentially vast amounts of diverse or "big" data. What the nature of these data heaps entails for work, social, or private life is at the centre of a growing body of research [START_REF] Agarwal | Editorial -Big Data, Data Science, and Analytics: The Opportunity and Challenge for IS Research[END_REF], but the literature has mostly focused on the implications of Big Data for business [START_REF] Constantiou | New Games, New Rules: Big Data and the Changing Context of Strategy[END_REF].

However, this emerging stream of research has also highlighted the potential of IoT and Big Data in transforming services and reshaping the means and operations through which information becomes available for decision makers in organizations [START_REF] Constantiou | New Games, New Rules: Big Data and the Changing Context of Strategy[END_REF], as they have the potential to change the very nature of inquiry. Instead of affording the testing of human-generated hypothesis, smart algorithms are capable of actively asking new questions [START_REF] Agarwal | Editorial -Big Data, Data Science, and Analytics: The Opportunity and Challenge for IS Research[END_REF], thus rendering phenomena visible and knowable in novel ways that are never neutral, but constantly change the relationship among work, knowledge, and authority [START_REF] Zuboff | In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power[END_REF]. The majority of Big Data/IoT research, however, still tends to assume the data to be dematerialized [START_REF] Lycett | Datafication": Making Sense of (Big) Data in a Complex World[END_REF], and the rhetoric associated with it conveys a technologically deterministic ideal devoid of the social [START_REF] Zuboff | Big Other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information Civilization[END_REF].

Studying the sociomaterial nature of the data in "Big Data" is fundamental to understand how new IoT-inspired technological arrangements are performative in the sense that they do not only address, but also produce new phenomena [START_REF] Boos | Controllable Accountabilities: The Internet of Things and its Challenges for Organisations[END_REF]. "Big [D]ata owes much of its distinctiveness to the mechanisms by which it is generated and the messy or trivial everydayness these mechanisms help install at the heart of the processes of data generation and use" [START_REF] Constantiou | New Games, New Rules: Big Data and the Changing Context of Strategy[END_REF] (p. 46). In other words, datasets, the technological arrangements that generate them, and the practices in which they are immersed are coconstituted. We should therefore develop sensitivity to the way different entailments of these algorithmic phenomena play out and under what conditions [START_REF] Orlikowski | Exploring Material-Discursive Practices[END_REF]. This constitutive entanglement [START_REF] Orlikowski | Sociomateriality: Challenging the Separation of Technology, Work and Organization[END_REF] has been investigated in synthetic situations where work relies almost entirely on making sense of digital datasets, due to the inherent distribution or inaccessibility of the phenomenon being studied. Østerlie and colleagues [START_REF] Østerlie | Dual Materiality and Knowing in Petroleum Production[END_REF] for instance showcase how the material phenomena happening in the well flow during oil production (e.g. faulty sensors, sand, oil flow, high pressure) and the phenomenon that is observed (e.g. sand detection) remain undifferentiated until they are materialized in the real-time data as part of everyday epistemic practices to detect sand across the material arrangements of sensors, computing equipment, and algorithms. What these studies point to is that, due to the distance from the physical referents, algorithmic phenomena are the phenomena -sometimes triggering a "lure of the virtual" where practices based on virtual models tend to overlap with practices on virtual models [START_REF] Bailey | The Lure of the Virtual[END_REF].

An interesting avenue of research thus consists of demonstrating how algorithmic phenomena play out in synthetic situations. We analyse the synthetic practices of three communities of professionals in the oil and gas offshore sector. We focus on how the re-presentations of the phenomena that they monitor are performed in non-neutral ways through the practices and routines to make sense of the materiality of their imperfect monitoring instruments and algorithms, the digital data they generate, and physical reality.

Research Setting and Methods

Our analysis draws upon our joint and individual empirical studies of petroleum professionals' work practices in monitoring operations in all productive phases of offshore oil and gas operations. Offshore operations are an extreme case of synthetic situations as petroleum professionals are increasingly separated from the physical referents of their work practices through on-going efforts to introduce real-time data transfer solutions, increased bandwidth, better instrumentation, software that facilitates remote collaboration combined with relocating key personnel from offshore to onshore facilities. The synthetic realities brought about through these arrangements introduce high degrees of uncertainty, but petroleum professionals have learnt to deal with imperfect representations of the sea and the subsurface. Our shared focus has therefore been to study the unfolding of the sociomaterial arrangements that the petroleum professionals' work practices are part of. Two longitudinal ethnographic studies provide our main empirical basis. Parmiggiani has conducted a three-year ethnography of developing approaches for realtime monitoring of marine ecosystems, and Østerlie has conducted a five-year ethnography on digitalization of the offshore petroleum industry. This is supplemented with Monteiro's sustained engagement with standardization of information systems and work practice in the petroleum industry over the past twenty years. Our research was conducted in close collaboration with petroleum companies, offering co-location with different groups of petroleum professionals as well as access to internal meetings together with workshops and seminars with technology vendors and partner companies. A central aspect of our inquiries has been to situate petroleum professionals' work in the broader landscape of technology development, adoption, and use. We therefore also asked people to trace the trajectories of past and ongoing development efforts, and their experiences and reflections about these processes. Table 1 summarizes our main sources of data. The argument pursued in this paper emerged from our collective deliberations on the empirical material and the way it relates to current debates on digitalization and virtualization. Knorr Cetina's notion of synthetic situations was useful for understanding petroleum professional's work. Like Williams and Pollock [START_REF] Williams | Research Commentary -Moving Beyond the Single Site Implementation Study: How (and Why) We Should Study the Biography of Packaged Enterprise Solutions[END_REF], however, we also found notions of situatedness problematic as they would limit the study in terms of spatial and temporal framing and of relevant actors. We therefore sought to elaborate upon situatedness by bringing in aspects of the distributed and longitudinal nature of synthetic situations. To this end, we selected three empirical vignettes that intensely manifest the aspects with which we wish to enrich the notion of synthetic situations.

Results

Monitoring the Drilling Activity

NorthOil (a pseudonym) is a Scandinavia-based oil operator, whose Online Centre for Drilling (OCD) monitors in real time all well drilling activities conducted by the service companies hired by NorthOil. The OCD is a large open space situated in NorthOil headquarters. All real-time drilling datasets delivered by the drilling companies are screened in a standardized format on two large monitors next to the main entrance to the OCD and on all engineers' desktop computers. The main goal of the OCD is to monitor the technical quality of the incoming data from all the wells drilled on behalf of NorthOil, to ensure that they respond to the parameters in the contract between NorthOil and the driller, thus guarantee a return of investment for the company. The interface of the system for an external observer largely resembles generic spreadsheet software, where the data records are marked in either green if they lie within acceptable threshold values or red if they do not.

In general, the monitoring practices of the OCD are steered through computer-based in-office projections of worldwide distributed offshore drilling activities. The underlying idea is that specialized engineers should not be out on the rig in order to get access to real-time drilling data. Apparently, then, the scope of the work practices of the OCD spans the screens projecting the drilling data as soon as they become available. Each entry on the screen, however, has to be validated by considering the on-site assessments executed by the professionals on the offshore rig, on the one hand, and the formalized contract signed with the service company, on the other. Especially when a data record is marked red or an alarm goes off, the first thing to do is to understand the source of the problem and solve it as quickly as possible to prevent accidents. Typical errors are missing data, due to, e.g. a failure of one of OCD's streaming tools, the network, the sensors, or the systems used by the service companies on the rig. Some of these errors are, however, invisible to the OCD personnel:

It could typically be that data is shifted for some reason. [If] the whole dataset … is five meters too deep, or five meters too shallow, [the OCD] wouldn't be able to notice that. Or maybe all of the values are wrong and the service companies are multiplying it by a constant and that's slightly off what it's supposed to be, and that could be due to a calibration error in the sensors. (IT advisor, NorthOil) Despite the seemingly isolated and aseptic environment in which they operate, the OCD engineers make sense of all data feeds by being constantly in telephone contact with the drilling companies:

We take the role of error searching and we are typically in dialogue with the service companies 24/7, making sure that the error is fixed. So in many cases we discover the error before the users discover it. But in some occasions we have also [called the offshore personnel], saying "We are in a critical phase, we are missing data, can you please help us error search?" (IT advisor, NorthOil) As a result, the OCD routines are fundamentally rooted in this dialogue with the remote drillers, because they are often physically co-located with the particular problem that is occurring and have thus a privileged knowledge of the characteristics of a well: It's up to the data owners out in the asset, because they know the formation, they know they are supposed to hit this [subsurface rock] layer and so forth, they are fully responsible for the … petro-physical quality of the data. And that requires a human to look at the screens and basically perform that type of checking. (IT advisor, NorthOil)

The situation of well drilling is also shaped by the specific contract that the drilling service company has signed with NorthOil. NorthOil has developed a penalty/bonus mechanism to either penalize or award service companies based on their capacity to provide trustworthy datasets. Penalties or bonuses are directly proportional to NorthOil's key performance indicators (KPIs), thus in turn to the money that a service company earns for drilling each well section.

[Our system] tells us which component is failing … And we also register downtime … there is actually a direct link between the performance, the KPIs, of the service companies, and the invoices … It gives them a strong incentive to improve their deliverables, and to develop monitoring tools themselves. (IT advisor, NorthOil)

Translating technical data quality into money invites the service companies to monitor their data feeds as efficiently as possible to prevent a loss of money. Some service companies have for instance developed history-matching techniques to understand if the data feed from the drilling activity in one point are correct with reference to the previous feed collected while drilling holes in the same formation:

And then [some drilling companies] register all [the patterns of the drilling operations conducted in the area by others], and when they start to drill they [visualize] when the current values are very close to historical pattern, and then the alarm goes off you have to inspect. (IT advisor, NorthOil)

Monitoring for New Oil

Exploring for new oil discoveries, the geology and geophysics (G&G) specialist is at work in front of his computer constructing a digital model of subsurface formations from digital data at Alpha Petroleum Company (APC, a pseudonym). For many, this is a typical example of situated action in the age of computing. The G&G specialist is physically co-located with his computer using an assortment of more or less specialized software for manipulating the data with keyboard and mouse in the here and now. The data this particular G&G specialist is working on, however, stretches far back. These are old data that have already been processed in the past to build models of subsurface geological formations without finding any oil-bearing layers. The G&G specialist is reopening the black box, seeking to discover what was not previously found in the data: geological layers containing oil. The G&G specialist looks for new oil in old data where oil has previously not been present.

Seismic is a key data type in oil and gas exploration. It is generated in complex technical arrangements interacting with the ocean and subsurface formations. A series of long strings (several hundreds of meters) with hydrophones placed at regular intervals are tugged behind a boat moving in a regularized pattern across the area being charted. At set intervals a device drives sound waves into the ocean floor. Subsurface formations reflect these sound waves in different ways, and it is the reflected waves the hydrophones pick up. Before they can be used to model the underground in search of oil-bearing layers, these sound reflection data come to be entangled with a whole array of different algorithms and work practices filtering out noise and normalizing the data.

Seismics are quite messy. In general, digital sensor data often resonate with many other phenomena than those about which the sensors are designed to generate data. The construction of digital sensors is such that they may register noise, and occurrences in the particular situation when the data are generated will therefore register in the data. With seismic data, this noise needs to be identified and then removed before the data can be used to construct a model of subsurface formations. One of the first things to be done with the data is to correct for drift in the hydrophone setup. Currents and wind can make the lines drift to the left or right, distorting the sound reception. The spacing between the lines, which is important to analysis, can also shift. All this has to be corrected. The company producing the seismic data usually does this correcting, as it requires understanding of how line drift and spacing manifest in the data. Once corrected, it is time to remove noise. There are whole sound spectra that are considered noise, and will be removed by default. Only at this stage are the data ready to be used for constructing models. Things are, of course, never this simple, and prospecting for new oil in seismic data is a constant iteration between cleaning up the data and regressing to messier data to make sense of what is at hand. So when the G&G specialist finally sits down with his or her computer to develop models, any oil-bearing geological structures that appear are very much the product of the long-winded, distributed process of generating and cleaning data.

However, it is this very noise that explorationists are now turning to in their constant quest for undiscovered occurrences of oil. Seeking new oil used to be a matter of finding unexplored areas. But as most territorial areas on the Earth have been explored, oil and gas companies are starting to investigate already explored areas for occurrences of oil that escaped their initial exploration. This, however, requires a lot more than just drilling more exploration wells. Instead, oil and gas companies turn their attention away from the physical world and to the world of digital data, which is the impetuous behind the activities of the G&G specialists above.

"We have a theory", the manager in charge of APC's seismic technology development programme tells us, "a theory that we can use on a range of what has previously been regarded as noise to detect new kinds of oil-bearing formations". He is quite animated, the interview starting in mid-sentence as if picking up on a longstanding conversation. Speaking faster than we are able to follow, he comes across as a mad scientist type -like many of the other explorationists.

APC has set up a whole research programme to find ways to repurpose data noise in an effort to discover oil-bearing layers in areas that have already been explored. APC has recently discovered oil in an area that has previously been explored by other oil companies and found to be barren. The oil was found in structures deeper than previously expected to be oil-bearing. Now they have initiated a project to investigate if this particular oil-bearing structure can be found by including parts of what has previously been regarded as noise in the seismic data. To this end, they have handed the seismic raw data from this field to a company specializing in seismic interpretation to see if they are able to develop an algorithm to bring out this formation in the noise.

The particular analysis software our G&G specialist is working with has been developed as part of this programme. His ability to find oil-bearing layers in the seismic data is contingent upon a broader background of development work.

Monitoring the Marine Ecosystem

The move of offshore operations into more remote settings such as offshore South America or the Arctic region is accompanied by an increased attention on efficiently monitoring the health of the marine environment. Subsea environmental monitoring was born as a set of disconnected and long-term tasks to collect samples of the water and the marine biomass conducted by third party consultants. Currently, it is evolving towards real-time approaches integrated with other operational phases such as well drilling and petroleum production, based on networks of heterogeneous subsea sensors, cameras, and other devices. The infinite qualities of the marine environment are thus quantified into potentially large amounts of datasets that are sent onshore via fibre-optic or satellite technologies. Given the relative novelty of these approaches, uncertainty still dominates with respect to how these data can be combined and interpreted. Since the mid-2000s, NorthOil has initiated a promising real-time environmental monitoring system offshore north Scandinavia. The system consisted of a network of subsea sensors to measure water temperature, pressure, salinity, and other oceanographic parameters and a few acoustic devices to track fish and other moving resources. Given the density of cold-water coral structures in the Barents Sea, the main body of the sensor network was then connected to a 2-metre crane equipped with a subsea camera and a flash to take pictures of a nearby coral structure. As a result of the success of this solution with the company's management, in 2009 NorthOil decided to adopt the same concept to a newly acquired functioning oil production field off the coast of Brazil. The seafloor in the vicinity of the Brazilian field is densely populated by calcareous algae, and the Brazilian authorities' concern was that possible leakages caused by oil production might prevent the light from reaching these plants to enhance their photosynthetic process.

A set of sensors similar to those installed in the Barents Sea was set out to monitor the underwater environment around the operational field with the purpose of looking at possible oil leakages. The environmental experts at NorthOil soon discovered that the materiality of calcareous algae and that of the corals makes these creatures very different: completely different technological and analytical configurations were needed to perform them into an oil and gas operational context. First, whereas algae are plants, corals are animals and do not need as much light to grow, so the sensors developed to monitor their health did not take the light into account as a primary factor. In addition, the Arctic sensor network had been designed to monitor corals which can build structures of up to 20 metres. In contrast, calcareous algae are the size of a golf ball. In the Brazilian field there was therefore no need to install a satellite crane to position the camera, which could thus take pictures of the algae directly from the sea floor. The unsuitability of the sensors was accompanied by a series of unexpected electronic failures:

[W]e got a little damage on it so it registered data only for a short period, and then the batteries ran out, really a short circuit … One part of the reason was that we went out of energy, another was that the sensors did not work as they should have then, so there was a deal of problems with corrosion and short circuits because the environment in [Brazil] is extremely corrosive. We had not taken that into account. (Environmental advisor, NorthOil)

The situation in Brazil was thus heavily shaped by its natural characteristics; the Brazilian waters are very different from the Norwegian waters, they are warmer, more saline, and currents are stronger, meaning that the Brazilian marine ecosystem is more corrosive than NorthOil environmental experts initially expected. Failing to take this aspect into account caused a number of technical failures that did not allow the program to gather sufficiently good data streams. As a countermeasure, the support structure was rebuilt in titanium and designed such that all sensors were much more protected from the water current.

Eventually, the data collection was carried out successfully. The internal analysis of what went wrong during the first monitoring rounds turned the company's attention to a phenomenon they were not looking for originally, namely damages caused by the corrosive effects of the water on the nearby oil platform that would have otherwise remained unnoticed and caused serious accidents: It came as a big surprise for the whole organisation, so we have conducted massive reinforcements or measures in relation to the platform which stands there. It's a little stupid if the platform suddenly disappears! (Environmental advisor, NorthOil) Environmental monitoring strongly relates to safety in the Brazilian case. Given that the planning of the platform had been done by another company, it also emphasized the importance of carefully weaving environmental monitoring practices to the company's business choices:

[It is a] typical example that […] shows a very special example of the extreme need to have good meteorological and oceanographic data before you go in. One thing is in a way the environmental measurements, but in relation to the safety part, it is totally essential. (Environmental advisor, NorthOil)

Discussion

Our three empirical vignettes resonate with the concept of synthetic situation, defined as informational projected "others" with which humans interact and which evolve over time [START_REF] Knorr Cetina | The Synthetic Situation: Interactionism for a Global World[END_REF]. Oil and gas professionals necessarily rely on evolving digitalized forms of knowing such as simulations and real-time computerized analysis to interpret events they cannot access directly. In the case of reservoir monitoring, knowledge about the presence of oil develops along a temporal dimension as data analysis is a process distributed in time and space through the seismic data and the software used. The G&G specialists' activities for using seismic data to assemble a model of the underground are therefore shaped by contingencies that evolve over time and stretch beyond the specifics of particular computer or software in use. Moreover, the phenomena under investigation (the presence of oil, the drilling activity, environmental risk) are algorithmic, namely enacted through digital technologies. However, the performative nature of synthetic situations -i.e. the extent to which they constitute the object of enquiry by enacting relationships in practice [START_REF] Barad | Posthumanist Performativity: Towards an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter[END_REF] -in technology-saturated settings such as oil and gas offshore operations remains underdeveloped. We elaborate upon the performativity of synthetic situations in three ways.

First, in our empirical cases algorithmic phenomena are the phenomena, rather than standing in for the physical referents. The discovery of new trends and latent patterns (viz. new phenomena) without well-formed hypotheses or models is a promise of Big Data analytics [START_REF] Lycett | Datafication": Making Sense of (Big) Data in a Complex World[END_REF], but the way the data are caught up in the material means of their production is understudied in that literature [START_REF] Lycett | Datafication": Making Sense of (Big) Data in a Complex World[END_REF]. The G&G personnel, by re-interpreting the old datasets, are able to discover new trends and patterns to understand if oil is present. Similarly, the environmental advisors conducting environmental monitoring in Brazil are able to make sense of a phenomenon they were not originally looking for, i.e. potential environmental harm caused by the corrosive effect of the water on the oil platform. These situations are, thus, beyond synthetic, in the sense that they are algorithmic, i.e. entirely dependent on the tuning of sociomaterial arrangements of the monitoring systems [START_REF] Orlikowski | Exploring Material-Discursive Practices[END_REF]: the presence of an oil-bearing layer in the seismic data and the corrosive effect of the Brazilian waters are never independent of the digital data processing algorithms.

Second, noise is irreducible in algorithmic phenomena. Big Data techniques as synthetic situations are often intended as ways to cope with exceeding amounts of information by being able to filter out the noise. In our study, however, it is never possible to filter out the noise, because, as the world is constantly enacted and re-enacted through material-discursive practices [START_REF] Orlikowski | Exploring Material-Discursive Practices[END_REF], the noise becomes the source of new knowledge. In this process, oil and gas professionals engage with the "dual materiality" of phenomena [START_REF] Østerlie | Dual Materiality and Knowing in Petroleum Production[END_REF]: they go constantly beyond the screen to worry about data quality, sensor reliability, i.e. the material circumstances of the data that make up their synthetic situation. This also differs from Knorr Cetina's example of a scoping system [START_REF] Knorr Cetina | The Synthetic Situation: Interactionism for a Global World[END_REF], where traders are able to successfully filter out the noise without systematically going beyond the screen. In contrast, the monitoring activities in oil and gas offshore operations involve the material circumstances of data processing (algorithms, simulations, and analysis tools), as well as the material circumstances of data production.

This foregrounds a third way in which our study extends Knorr Cetina's concept: the synthetic situation is productive rather than reductive. What originally looks like noise that must be reduced is in fact a new situation. Zuboff [START_REF] Zuboff | Big Other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information Civilization[END_REF] for example shows how Google managed to create enormous revenues by turning apparent noise generated by Internet users into a marketable asset for commercial and surveillance purposes. Similarly, the process of re-processing the old datasets from oil exploration showcases that the situation for the G&G personnel is actually constituted by what was originally considered noise. This, too, proves to have business value for APC. At the OCD, drilling monitoring unfolds in a synthetic situation that looks like that of the traders described by Knorr Cetina [START_REF] Knorr Cetina | The Synthetic Situation: Interactionism for a Global World[END_REF]: the OCD personnel must rely on on-screen projections to make sense of a remote reality. Nevertheless, the apparent noise -namely the overhead of work to call and talk to the offshore engineers -turns out to be a pivotal part of their synthetic situation, which therefore extends behind the screen to encompass the informal machinery of sense-making enacted by the offshore personnel in communication with the OCD. The synthetic situation of the OCD is also further extended on the formal level, by tying the sense-making practices (which the OCD personnel know unfold informally) to contractual clauses and KPIs. Finally, also environmental harm offshore Brazil emerged out of the noise, namely the bad quality data obtained as a result of short circuits and damages to the monitoring station, and the associated workarounds to repair it. In this case, the situation encompasses also the (apparently mundane) interactions of social and technical elements with the materiality of nature to make sense of natural phenomena with good enough approximation.

Conclusions

Our paper takes steps towards conducting interpretive studies of knowing in the era of Big Data and the IoT -namely through synthetic situations characterized by physical inaccessibility (such as the energy industry and space exploration) and virtualization (such as the car industry [START_REF] Bailey | The Lure of the Virtual[END_REF]). Our analysis has also methodological implications, as the variety and uncertainty of the data involved challenge the dynamics of traditional qualitative research bounded in space and time. Focusing on the productivity of algorithmic phenomena implies a shift of focus from the actors' meanings to include what sociomaterial assemblages "do" in practice [START_REF] Barad | Posthumanist Performativity: Towards an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter[END_REF]. We accordingly supplemented our interpretivist method by scaling access and capture the longitudinal and distributed nature of both the development and use of digital enterprise technology [START_REF] Williams | Research Commentary -Moving Beyond the Single Site Implementation Study: How (and Why) We Should Study the Biography of Packaged Enterprise Solutions[END_REF]. We in other words investigated the way datasets "travel", namely how an interpretation is performed together with the materiality of both the physical reality and the algorithms behind the evidence that makes it the right interpretation. This perspective on the quantification of quality recognizes that algorithms are performative of categories (e.g. what is noise) and ultimately have political implications in terms of legitimizing human actions [START_REF] Kavanagh | Ethnography In and Around an Algorithm[END_REF] and shifting knowledge/power relations [START_REF] Zuboff | In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power[END_REF].

Table 1 .

 1 Summary of data generation methods

	Participatory tions	observa-	• 3 years with R&D division (environmental monitor-ing)
			• 4 years with R&D division (reservoir monitoring)
			• 2.5 years with R&D division (participating in a large-
			scale digitalization project)
			• 11 months in an onshore operation centre
			• Daily and weekly meetings
			• Conferences and seminars related to digitalization in
			the oil and gas industry
	Semi-structured views	inter-	• 38 interviews with engineers and environmental ad-visor involved in environmental monitoring pro-
			grams
			• 24 interviews with developers of new digital technol-
			ogies for operational departments
	Document and software analysis	• Electronic archives (internal documents and presen-tations)
			• Email discussions and minutes of meetings

This is not a critique of the concept itself -"situated" clearly was intended to be empirically open by Suchman, in line with her ethnomethodological affinities -but rather to the studies, often ethnographically inspired, that build on the notion.

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the following projects funded by the Norwegian Research Council: Digital Oil (www.doil.no; #213115); Sirius (www.sirius-labs.no; #237889); and the Center for Integrated Operations in the Petroleum Industry (www.iocenter.no).


Tim Ingold
email: tim.ingold@abdn.ac.uk

Lucas Introna
email: l.introna@lancaster.ac.uk

Donncha Kavanagh
email: donncha.kavanagh@ucd.ie

Séamas Kelly
email: seamas.kelly@ucd.ie

Wanda Orlikowski

Susan Scott
email: s.v.scott@lse.ac.uk

Thoughts on Movement, Growth and an Anthropologically-Sensitive IS/Organization Studies: An Imagined Correspondence with

In what follows, we present the outcome of an imagined dialogue with Tim Ingold on possible future directions for an anthropologically-sensitive approach to studying Information Systems (IS) and Organization Studies (OS). The aim is to try to convey some of the strangeness and freshness that we have found in his thought, with a view to stimulating IS/OS scholars to engage further with his work and ideas. The piece takes the form of an imagined Q&A session with Tim, which we have synthesized from excerpts of previously published interviews and writings.

Q: Liveliness, movement and engagement are central themes in your ecological approach to anthropology. Can you tell us a little about where these themes came from?

I am the son of a prominent mycologist and grew up with that sense of science as something you do in a very homely way, involving observation and drawing. And I think that is somehow very deeply embedded in the way I think. My father's scientific practice involved walks along river banks where he would collect the scum that often accumulates in brackish pools, bringing it home in glass phials to be investigated under a microscope set up on our dining room table. He had improvised an elaborate contraption involving a pile of volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, a glass plate and an early version of the anglepoise lamp, which allowed him to project the forms of the fungi revealed under the microscope so that they could be accurately drawn. This he did with the utmost care, using a mapping pen, Indian ink and high quality Bristol board.

Though he would never admit to it, this was his way of honouring the forms of nature, of not just contemplating their beauty but knowing them from the inside; and the results were true works of art. He loved his fungi. But perhaps what I did not realize at the time was that as a field of the botanical sciences, mycology is a deeply subversive discipline. Fungi, you see, just don't behave as organisms should. We typically describe the organism as a blob-like entity with an inside and an outside, bounded by the skin, and interacting with the surrounding environment across the boundary. But fungi are not like that. They leak, they ooze, their boundaries are indefinable; they fill the air with their spores and infiltrate the ground with their meandering, ever-branching and ever-extending fibres. What we see above ground are merely fruiting bodies, like street-lamps which cast their aerial illumination only thanks to hidden, subterranean circuitry.

Q: How did this early exposure to the practices of science of your father shape your engagement with it?

At school, guided by inspirational teachers, I sat at the edge of my seat in wonder at the mysteries of the universe as they were being unravelled by science. I experimented with cloud chambers and grew crystals in solution. It was obvious that I was going to be a mathematician and a scientist. A year of studying natural sciences at the University of Cambridge, however, put paid my illusions. After the excitement of school science, lectures at Cambridge were an intense disappointment. I found much of what was taught intellectually claustrophobic, dedicated to the regimented and narrow-minded pursuit of objectives that seemed remote from experience. Unlike many of my fellow students, outraged by science's renunciation of its democratic principles and its surrender to the mega-machines of industrial and military power -this was, after all, a time when the war in Vietnam was at its height -I never became radically hostile to the scientific project. But I could see no future in it for myself. I wanted to study something in which there was room to grow, where I could discover the world and myself at the same time. And that was what led to anthropology. There is an enormous division in the university between the natural sciences, on the one hand, and the arts and humanities, on the other. I was looking for a subject to study that would help to bridge and transcend that division.

It seems to me that, over the course of my lifetime, science has increasingly lost its ecological bearings, while the arts have increasingly gained them. As regards the journey in my own teaching and research, I now imagine it as an Odyssey -a journey home -to the kind of science imbibed in childhood, as the son of a mycologist. This was a science grounded in tacit wonder at the exquisite beauty of the natural world, and in silent gratitude for what we owe to this world for our existence. Today's science, however, has turned wonder and gratitude into commodities. They no longer guide its practices, but are rather invoked to advertise its results. The goals of science are modelling, prediction and control. Perhaps this is why, more and more, we turn to art to rediscover the humility that science has lost? It seems to me that the people who are doing what I understoodforty years ago -to be science are now artists. Thus, my project is now one that seeks to integrate anthropology with the practices of art, architecture and design.

Q: What, then, made you an anthropologist?

It is commonly supposed that anthropology is a centrifugal discipline that discharges its practitioners into fields as remote and far away as possible, in order that they may experience ways of life as different from their own as they could hope or expect to find. Many anthropologists would agree, flaunting their encounter with "radical alterity" as a badge of honour. But for me, it has always felt the other way around. Ever since I embarked on my studies of the subject, anthropology has been about finding my way home. I had no settled point of origin from which to start. It was not as though, even before setting out, I already knew all there was to know about myself and what I was going to be. Like most apprentice anthropologists, I did go to a relatively distant place to undertake fieldwork, and in my case this involved a prolonged stay among Skolt Saami people in the far northeast of Finland.

At the time, however, I had almost no idea of whom I was or where I came from, let alone of where I was going. I had a name and address, a passport, and next of kin to be contacted in case of emergency; I even had a degree from a respected university and a scholarship to support my work. But the voice with which I spoke, the hand with which I wrote, even the mind with which I thought -these were not yet me. They were but habits I had borrowed or styles that I had, at one time or another, sought or been trained to emulate. In that sojourn in Lapland, however, and through the moral education it gave me, I took my first, tentative steps homeward. The road has been long and tortuous. I have not arrived yet, and probably never will. But I am now more confident that it is indeed my voice that speaks, my hand that writes and my mind that thinks. With voice, hand and mind I now declare: This is who I am.

Q: How would you like to see your kind of anthropology develop?

The way I see anthropology is that it lies at the crossroads of two divisions: one between the humanities and the natural sciences; the other between theoretical speculations about what human life could be like and empirical observation of what human life is like, somewhere, sometime. I would like to bring anthropology back to the centre, where I think it belongs, in public debates about what it means to be human, about freedom, about responsibility, about ethics. At the moment it isn't there. Instead, the ground is being occupied by psychologists, historians and economists, and what they say often perpetuates -rather than dispels -prejudice and misunderstanding. I worry that anthropology has allowed itself to fall below the horizon of public consciousness. We need much more ambition in what we do. But, in a way, the debates don't change. The fundamental questions are still: what does it actually mean to be a human being in the world; what is language all about; how is it that we perceive the way we do; how can we remember things; why do we tell stories all the time? These are basic anthropological questions.

Q: What might this mean for the practice of anthropology? Or, more specifically, what might be entailed by an ecological anthropology?

The mycologist Alan Rayner once remarked to me, in passing, that the whole of biology would be different had the fungal mycelium -rather than, say, a mouse or a sea-urchin -been taken as a prototypical exemplar of the organism. Many years later, this thought would come back to haunt me -what if we were to think of the person, like the fungal mycelium, not as a blob but as a bundle of lines, or relations, along which life is lived? What if our ecology was of lines rather than of blobs? What then can we mean by "environment"? People, after all, don't live inside their bodies, as social theorists sometimes like to claim in their clichéd appeals to the notion of embodiment. Their trails are laid out in the ground, in footprints, paths and tracks, and their breaths mingle in the air. They stay alive only as long as there is a continual interchange of materials across ever-growing and ever-shedding layers of skin. Thus, just as mycology subverts deeply held intuitions in the biological sciences, so -it now seems to me -anthropology does the same for the social sciences. Anthropologists, mycologists of the social, are the awkward squad, the jesters, the fools, who sidle up to power and chip away at its pretensions. And perhaps their awkwardness lies in precisely this: that they see a world of intricately enmeshed relations rather than one already divided into discrete and autonomous entities.

In the latter years of his life, my father used to rail against the way, in his view, biological science had lost touch with the reality of living organisms. He found much of the literature incomprehensible. It was produced by modellers who had never observed or handled anything that lived or grew upon this earth, and who spent their time in laboratories or in front of computers, analysing massive datasets spewed out by machines from the stuff fed into them. In the spectacular and lavishly funded rise of e-social science we have seen much of the same. Fuelled by the digital revolution, it has become an immense data-processing exercise from which the people have effectively disappeared. In the social as in the biosciences, qualitative field-based inquiries with living people or living organisms are increasingly regarded as naïve or amateurish. It is as though science had turned its back on the living, avoiding sentient involvement of any kind. In this brave new world, life is disposable, and its forms -whether human or non-human -are mere grist to the mill of data-analytics, the purpose of which is to produce results or "outputs" whose value is to be judged by measures of impact or utility rather than by any appeal to truth.

A datum is, by definition, that which is given. But what today's scientists count as data have not been bestowed as any kind of gift or offering. To collect data, in science, is not to receive what is given but to extract what is not. Whether mined, washed up, deposited or precipitated, what is extracted comes in bits, already broken off from the currents of life, from their ebbs and flows, and from their mutual entailments. For the scientist even to admit to a relationship of give and take with the things in the world with which he deals would be enough to disqualify the inquiry and any insights arising from it. Ideally he should leave it all to his recording equipment and exit the scene, only to return to register the outcomes once the job is done and to transfer them to a databank or storage facility for safe keeping. That this is impossible in practice -especially in the field sciences for which the laboratory is nothing less than the world we live in, and from which there is no escapeis often considered a shortcoming, a weak point in the methodological armoury that could compromise the objectivity of the results. For what is methodology, if not a shield to protect the researcher from direct sensory contact with materials? The prescriptions of methodology treat the researcher's own presence not as an essential prerequisite for learning from what the world has to offer us, but as a source of observer bias to be reduced at all cost. Any science that fails in this regard is considered to be methodologically "soft", and anthropology by that measure -and mycology too, as my father used to practise it -is positively squishy.

Q: So this "squishiness" needs to be celebrated and embraced by anthropologists?

Yes indeed! Let us compare a hard object -say a ball -with a squishy one. The first, when it comes up against other things in the world, can have an impact. It can hit them, or even break them. In the hard sciences, every hit is a datum; if you accumulate enough data, you may achieve a breakthrough. The surface of the world has yielded under the impact of your incessant blows, and having done so, yields up some of its secrets.

The squishy ball, by contrast, bends and deforms when it encounters other things, taking into itself some of their characteristics while they, in turn, bend to its pressure in accordance with their own inclinations and dispositions. The ball responds to things as they respond to it. Or in a word, it enters with things into a relation of correspondence. In their practices of participant observation -of joining with the people among whom they work and learning from them -anthropologists become correspondents. They take into themselves something of their hosts' ways of moving, feeling and thinking, their practical skills and modes of attention. So too, my father corresponded with the fungi as he drew their forms under the microscope. His hand, along with the pen it held, was drawn into their formative processes, and as he drew the forms re-emerged on the surface of the board. Correspondence, whether with people or with other things, is a labour of love, of giving back what we owe to the human and non-human beings with which and with whom we share our world, for our own existence and formation.

Two centuries ago, in Germany, Johan Wolfgang von Goethe proposed a method of science which demanded of practitioners that they should spend time with the objects of their attention, observe closely and with all their senses, draw what they observed, and endeavour to reach a level of mutual involvement or coupling, in perception and action, such that observer and observed become all but indistinguishable. It is from this crucible of mutual involvement, Goethe argued, that all knowledge grows.

Q: What became of Goethe's vision -this notion of a sensual and involved science?

I have a strong suspicion that the virulent repudiation of what we could call the science of correspondence coincides in a way that is not accidental with the colossal expansion, over the last four decades, of globalization and the political economy of neoliberalism. These, of course, were the decades of my career as a professional anthropologist. What I have witnessed, over these decades, is the surrender of science to the forces of neoliberalism. And to find a counter-movement in the contemporary world, we have to turn not to science but to art.

Q: So anthropology might be understood as a form of art?

What might pejoratively be regarded as squishy science could, I think, be better and more positively described as the art of inquiry. In this art, every work is an experiment: not in the natural scientific sense of testing a preconceived hypothesis or of engineering a confrontation between ideas "in the head" and facts "on the ground", but in the sense of prising an opening and following where it leads. You try things out and see what happens. Thus the art of inquiry moves forward in real time along with the lives of those who are touched by it, and with the world to which both it and they belong. Far from matching up to their plans and predictions, it joins with them in their hopes and dreams. This is the very opposite of methodology.

It is not to wrap method up into an impregnable shell, protecting the investigator from having to share in the suffering of those subjected to his hard-ball tactics, but rather to compare method to a way of working, akin to a craft, which opens up the world to our perception, to what is going on there, so that we in turn can answer to it. We could call it the method of hope: the hope that by paying attention to the beings and things with which we deal, they in turn will attend to us, and respond to our overtures. Anthropology, I believe, can be an art of inquiry in this sense. We need it not to accumulate more and more data about the world, but to better correspond with it.

Q: How does this view square with traditional conceptions of the anthropological project?

This is not the way in which most practising anthropologists currently think about their discipline. The majority of my colleagues would insist that the primary task of the anthropologist is ethnographic: that is, to give a richly detailed, accurate and nuanced account of life as it is lived for particular peoples in particular times and places. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this, of course, just as there is nothing wrong with a history of art that looks back on how artworks have been made and received, again in specific times and places. For ethnography as for the history of art, understanding is about putting things in context. Yet for all its manifest scholarly virtues, to put things in context is also to lay them to rest, to silence them or neutralize their power, so that the things themselves cease to engage our attention as active and ongoing forces in the world. They are, so to speak, accounted for, ticked off, put in their place. But people don't act, nor do artists work, in order that their deeds and works may be accounted for by future historians. They act and work in order to make a difference in the world. Thus to create a work of art is to give birth to a new being, a being that will have its own life, alongside the lives of those who touch and are touched by it. The thing springs up, and like a rebellious child, refuses the efforts of its elders to put it to bed.

Anthropology, for me, is not about describing the world, or wrapping it up. It is, in the first place, about attending to presence, about noticing, and responding in kind. It means acknowledging that persons and other things are there, that they have their own being and their own lives to lead, and that it behoves us, for our own good, to pay attention to their existence and to what they are telling us. Only then can we learn. The same, I think, might be said for art. It too is an opening on the world rather than an attempt at closure -an opening that exposes the practitioner to its trials and to its gifts. That is why art combines well with anthropology but not with ethnography. For what art and anthropology open up, ethnography -like art history -seeks to contain.

Q: Is this notion of anthropology as art likely to be dismissed as "unscientific" within the contemporary academic world?

Very probably. I remember the science of my childhood, grounded in tacit wonder at the exquisite beauty of the natural world, in care, attentiveness and in silent gratitude for what we owe the world for our existence. Much of today's science, however, has turned wonder and gratitude into commodities. They no longer guide its practices but are rather invoked to advertise its results. Science has even enlisted art to promote its hard-sell, to offer images that beautify its results, soften its impact and mask its collusion with corporations whose only interest in research is that it should "drive innovation". For in the neoliberal economy of knowledge, only what is new sells. True, much scientific research, in what is nowadays known as "academia", lacks immediate application. It is said to be curiosity-driven or "blue sky". Scientists have been vociferous in defending their right to undertake blue-sky research. But in the land of academia, curiosity has been divorced from care, freedom from responsibility. Academia's income comes from its exports of knowledge, but it is left to those who buy the knowledge to determine how it should be applied, whether to build bombs, cure disease or rig markets. Why should scientists care? This attitude reveals the lofty appeal to blue skies to be little more than a self-serving defence of special interests increasingly concentrated in the hands of a global scientific elite which, in collusion with the corporations it serves, treats the rest of the world -including the vast majority of its increasingly impoverished and apparently disposable human population -as a standing reserve of data to feed the insatiable appetite of the knowledge economy.

We should care, of course, because truth matters. And the responsible search for truth demands that care and curiosity go together. They are really two sides of the same coin. We are curious about the well-being of people we know and love, and never miss an opportunity to ask them how they are doing. That is because we care about them. Should it not be the same for the world around us? Is not curiosity a way of caring? Not, it must be said, according to the protocols of normal science which require, in the name of objectivity, that we sever all personal relations with the things we study, and remain unmoved and unperturbed by their condition. We owe them nothing, according to these protocols, and they offer us nothing in return.

It is a great mistake, however, to equate the pursuit of objectivity with the pursuit of truth. For if the former prescribes that we cut all ties with the world, the latter demands our full and unqualified participation. I may be being childish or naïve, but in my innocence I still believe in science as the pursuit not of innovation but of truth. And by truth I do not mean fact rather than fantasy, but the unison of experience and imagination in a world to which we are alive and that is alive to us. It is a truth that comes not after science, in its proud record of discoveries and achievements, but before science, in the more humble recognition that we are ourselves beholden, for our very existence, to the world we seek to know. Thus the movement from science to art, in my thinking and in my teaching, did not take me further away from science but further into it, into the very conditions of its possibility. I have gone from science to art and back again.

Q: We typically conceive of the social and natural worlds as separate, but you have been very keen to get beyond any such dichotomy. What would it mean to think beyond our conventional distinctions between cultural and natural phenomena?

Sociocultural anthropology established itself as an independent sub-discipline by designating the social and cultural as a specific domain of study, allowing it to distance itself from certain retrograde positions found within the domain of physical anthropology. However, the nature/culture dichotomy on which this division was based has been the object of sustained criticism. The challenge for our discipline is to define an anthropology beyond nature and culture.

Q: But what does this imply for the way we think about being human in the world?

I contend that person and organism are one and the same; the organism-in-its-environment is a being-in-theworld. To follow this through requires a completely different kind of thinking, one that starts not from populations of individuals but from fields of relations. We need to integrate the social and the biological -to seek to better understand persons-organisms as "biosocial becomings".

Q: So developing a new conceptual vocabulary would seem to be very important. The notion of attending to "biosocial becomings" is intriguing -the emphasis on movement and becoming is clear, but are you advocating some form of sociobiology?

Absolutely not! One has to be careful with how one uses the term "biological". We should reject neo-Darwinian forms of naturalist epistemology that attempt to interpret the evolution of culture by establishing an analogy between genes and memes. This kind of reductionistic view of evolution is extremely dangerous. Evolution does not lie in the mutation, recombination, replication and selection of transmissible traits. It is rather a life process. And at the heart of this process is ontogenesis.

My aim is to restore the person to the continuum of organic life -not in the reductionist fashion of sociobiology, by putting it all down to genes, but by repositioning the organism as a locus of growth within a continuous field, and by thinking of evolution not statistically but topologically, as the unfolding of that field. Life is not in organisms; rather organisms are in life. Or in other words, living things are both generated and held in place within the ever-unfolding matrix of relations to which they contribute in their activity. This means giving a central place to growth and development in the constitution of life-forms.

Q: Is this why you are so adamant in your dismissal of hylomorphism?

Yes. In my 2013 work, Making, I attack the hylomorphism that is at the heart of the Neo-Darwinian view -the notion that the form of an organism is something already determined before its actual development. The fallacy of this way of thinking lies in supposing that the form miraculously precedes the processes that give rise to it. And the way to overcome the fallacy is simply to reverse the order, so as to give primacy to the process of ontogenesis -to the fluxes and flows of material entailed in making and growing -over the forms that arise within them.

For me, there are no objects. I see a world in the making, not a world already made. Making things is not an imposition of form on matter, as though the end were already settled before the task began. For how can form precede the processes that give rise to it? How can a known and determined future precede the present and the past? In my childish eyes, not knowing what the future holds, making is a never-ending task of worldweaving, a correspondence of material movement and ambient vision.

Q: Ontogenesis as a lively process of making and growing, which involves flows of material … How does all this relate to conventional ecological conceptions of the relationship between organisms and their environment?

We are all, and have always been, organism-persons. But these organism-persons should not be thought of as bounded entities but as sites of binding, formed of knotted trails whose loose ends spread in all directions, tangling with other trails in other knots to form an ever-extending meshwork. As I have already described, this description of the organism-person would serve just as well for the fungal mycelium.

And for this reason I have come to question what we mean by "the environment", and eventually to see it not as what surrounds -what is "out there" rather than "in here" -but as a zone of interpenetration in which our own and others' lives are comprehensively entangled. Within this zone, organisms grow to take on the forms they do, incorporating into themselves the lifelines of other organisms as they do so. Every organism is a site of infestation, a vast ecosystem in itself.

Q: This emphasis on entanglement and growth suggests a very active role for organismpersons in producing their "environments"?

Yes. This puts paid, once and for all, to the idea, still earnestly promulgated by many biologists and psychologists, that the child is a product of "nature" and "nurture", or of the interaction of genes and environment, in varying and often contested proportions. For children are not products, period. They are the producers of their lives with others, including grown-ups.

All knowledge is founded in skill, in the improvisatory exploration of ways of doing things, under the watchful eye of more experienced hands. This is how children learn: not through having knowledge first socially transmitted to them, and then enacting in practice what they each have individually acquired, but by growing in knowledge, as they do in strength and stature, by following the same paths as their predecessors and under their direction. It is a process, if you will, of guided rediscovery, in which every generation stands to find out for itself much of what its forbears already knew, and possibly much else besides. Learning, as children know very well but as their teachers so often do not, is a creative process in which knowledge is not so much passed on as perpetually grown and regrown. And if people differ in what or how they know, it is not because they have inherited different "packages" of transmitted representations, but because their lives have been entangled in environments, and in communities of practice, that differ in what they afford, in the kinds of attention they demand, and the responses that these demands call forth. Skill, in essence, inheres in the coordination of perception and action, attention and response. What we are used to calling cultural variation, then, consists in the first place in variations of skill. And to account for this variation we have to attend not to the content of inherited tradition but to the dynamics of ontogenetic development.

Q: So the emphasis is on the porousness of boundaries between the human and nonhuman, organism and environment, and on their mutual interpenetration?

Yes -the domain of the social and the biological are one and the same. The person is not so much a creature of society as an active and ongoing creator of his or her own and others' selves. In the new language of relationality, person-selves are seen as mutually constitutive.

Therefore, we must think of human beings in terms not of what they are but what they do. If we imagine life as a "line of becoming" it appears that cultural forms arise within the weave of life, in conjoint activity. That being the case, we must think of evolution not as change along lines of descent but as the developmental unfolding of the entire matrix of relations within which forms of life (human and non-human) emerge and are held in place. And it requires us to think of these forms as neither genetically nor culturally configured but as emergent outcomes of the dynamic self-organization of developmental systems.

Q: If we problematize the common distinction between the "natural" and the "artificial", what are the implications for how we should conceive of activities like designing and building?

I don't think, in the end, that we can sustain this division between the natural and the artificial, and it is probably not helpful to do so. But that also means, perhaps, substituting the word growing for building, because building always has this thing that you're putting something in place, whereas, growing gives the sense of a process going on under certain conditions. So, when a gardener says: "I'm growing these plants in my garden", it means that he is planting the seeds, putting in place certain conditions to favour the growth of those particular plants. But, still, other things are involved for the plant to grow. The gardener is not building it, in that sense.

The same argument you could make about the growth of a forest, you could also make about the growth of those kinds of structures that we tend to call artificial, like houses, or roads and the like. Can we think of these things as also grown, in the sense that the structure emerges out of a set of practices or processes? Some of these practices and processes might be undertaken by humans, and maybe in building a house, most of them are. But, still, other things always come in, houses have other animal inhabitants; then there is the weather, of course, and the sun, the rain and all sorts of other things with which you have to contend. So, the idea that a house is first built and then people come to live in it is, to some extent, part of an architectural conceit. It doesn't really match what actually happens.

So, rather than asking: "Do we have a division between natural and artificial?", I prefer to say that we are looking at processes by which the structures that we find in the world have grown. And, what are the conditions for growth? What has been the role of local communities in creating these conditions? And then we can ask: "What has been the role of the birds, what has been the role of the weather and everything else that has combined to create something?" Q: Let us shift now to a terrain that might be more familiar to an IS/OS readership. In your work, you have famously criticized Bruno Latour and actor-network theory. But, for us, you seem to have so much in common?

There are many parallels between the conclusions that I arrive at and the conclusions that Latour arrives at. We are both destabilizing the dichotomy between Society and Nature, we are both thinking in terms of whether a network is the same as a meshwork or different. It depends on which page of Latour you happen to be reading, because he moves backwards and forwards. There are many points and areas where there is similarity, but we come from different places and that accounts for some of the differences.

I have several objections to Latour, but I particularly object to his blanket use of the non-human -a theory that attributes the same ontological weight to a speed bump or a gun or a key as is given to a living creature gives us a seriously reductionist view of what life is. I don't see how you can invoke a principle of symmetry. For instance, in the case of a grain of sand and a mite, they might weigh the same, but we are dealing with something fundamentally different, and that difference then is bound up for me with a focus on developmental processes that I think is crucial. Developmental processes, processes of growth, maturation, decay and decomposition, are fundamental to what I understand by life. I think that simply talking about anything as an actant loses that sense of what life is and I don't find a sense of what life is in Latour, not what I understand it to be, anyway.

Of course, Latour is taken in all sorts of different directions and many of them are directions that he himself would want to disown. Thus Latour's point is often taken to be that non-humans can have agency. But it's not as simple as that. In fact it is quite difficult to criticize Latour because, whichever way you cut it, you end up with a particular caricature of what he says. And this is because he is always changing what he says, or else saying what he said before while meaning something else. I shouldn't object to that because I change what I say, too. But I do find that at one moment he is saying that actor-network isn't a theory and is not actually about networks and at the next moment he's saying that actually it is a theory and it is about networks. This inconsistency creates some difficulties for me.

I would define life as the name for what is going on in the field of relationships within which organic forms emerge, develop and are held in place -that is what I understand as a life process. And I don't find that in Latour's understanding of the actor-network. I think, if you reduce life to agency and things to objects you effect a double reduction.

Q: You mentioned earlier the importance of the idea of lines in your work. What are these lines? Or, what is it that the image of lines wants to convey?

For me lines are about life, in the sense of lifelines. Lines imply movement and growth. Ways of moving, knowing and describing. They are lines of force, of growth and of movement, not outlines. Outlines enclose. Minds and lives are not closed-in entities that can be enumerated and added up; they are open-ended processes whose most outstanding characteristic is that they carry on.

Q: But are lines then these lone travellers that just carry on …?

No, in carrying on, they wrap around one another, like the many strands of a rope. A whole that is made up from individual parts is a totality in which everything is articulated or "joined up". But the rope is always weaving, always in process and -like social life itself -never finished. Its parts are not elementary components but everextending lines, and its harmonies reside in the way each strand, as it issues forth, coils around the others and is coiled in its turn, in a countervalence of equal and opposite twists which hold it together and prevent it from unravelling. This interweaving of lines I call a meshwork -the trails along which life is lived. It is in the entanglement of lines, not in the connecting of points, that the mesh is constituted. A meshwork, in which every node is a knot. Indeed, I would suggest that in a world where things are continually coming into being through processes of growth and movement -that is, in a world of life -knotting is the fundamental principle of coherence.

Q: That is interesting. What do you want to convey with this idea of a knot or knotting?

Well, I will first say what knotting is not. The knot is not a building block. Blocks are assembled into structures; knots are bound or tied into nodes or nodules. Thus the order of the block is explicate, in that each is joined to the other by external contact or adjacency; the order of the knot is implicate, in that the constitutive strands of each knot, as they extend beyond it, are bound into others. Further, the knot is not a chain. Chains are articulated from rigid elements or links, and retain their connections even when tension is released. Yet they have no memory of their formation. Knots, by contrast, are not articulated and do not connect. They have no links. Nevertheless they retain within their constitution a memory of the process of their formation. The knot is not a container. Containers have insides and outsides; in the topology of the knot, however, it is impossible to say what is inside or outside. Rather, knots have interstices. Their surfaces do not enclose but lie "between the lines" of the materials that make them up.

Q: So knotting is a way of joining, of being with, but that is very different from connecting …?

Yes, lines of life do not connect. They do not go from A to B, or vice versa. Rather, they pass between points without connecting, as the waters of a flowing river pass between its banks. It is the same in music or in painting. Whether it be the issue of the melody from the meeting of violin and bow or the motion of the brush and its trace, in the movement of becoming, points are not joined so much as swept aside and rendered indiscernible by the current as it sweeps through. Life is open-ended: its impulse is not to reach a terminus but to keep on going. In the meshwork, each constituent line, as it bodies forth, lays its own trail from within the interstices of its binding with others. Thus the joining of lives is also their continual differentiation. The knots formed in the process are not inclusive or encompassing, not wrapped up in themselves, but always in the midst of things, while their ends are on the loose, rooting for other lines to join with.

Q: In one of your papers you make the distinction between joining "up" and joining "with", is this what you have in mind here?

Yes. The adverb "up" connotes a finality that is belied by the ongoing life of the thing. It is no more joined up than used up. On the contrary, it carries on. In the meshwork, lines are joined not "up" but "with". Like the voices of choral music, whose harmony lies in their alternating tension and resolution, the entwined lines of the meshwork join with one another, and in so doing, possess an inner feel for each other and are not simply linked by external contiguity. I use the term sympathy to refer to this feel.

Q: Is this notion of sympathy where your idea of correspondence comes in?

For me correspondence is the co-responsive movement of occurrent things along their manifold lines of becoming. Maxine Sheets-Johnstone argues we must recognize that the key to both self-knowledge and organic life is movement. It is not just that bodies, as living organisms, move. They are their movements. Therefore, the knowledge they can have of themselves is inseparable from the sense they have of their own movements, or in a word, from kinesthesia. Animate beings, Sheets-Johnstone insists, do not experience themselves and one another as "packaged" but as moving and moved, in ongoing response -that is in correspondence -with the things around them.

In his reflections on upbringing in The Troubadour of Knowledge, Michel Serres compares this experience of being in-between -of correspondence -to that of the swimmer, breasting the current of a swift river. Here in the midstream, you enter a world unknown to those left standing on the banks. It is one in which, after a while, there is no longer any right bank or left bank, where you cease to be between this and that, where you have become a hyphen, a denizen of the in-between. Immersed in a fluid medium, always at risk of going under, you have no option but to keep on going, in a direction orthogonal to that of the line connecting the banks on either side. "The real passage", as Serres declares, "occurs in the middle". This goes to the heart of the distinction I want to draw between correspondence and interaction. Interaction goes back and forth as agents, facing each other on opposite banks of the river, trade messages, missiles and merchandise. But to correspond, in my terms, is to join with the swimmer in the midstream. It is a matter not of taking sides but of going along. Thus where interaction is transverse, correspondence is longitudinal.

Correspondence is not a connection of points but a binding of lines. It is not interactive but multilinear. And these lines, as we have seen, join not at the ends but in the middle. Ends are not given in advance but emerge in the action itself, and are recognizable as such only in acknowledging the possibility of new beginnings. Here, beginnings produce endings, and are produced by them. Every end is not a terminal but a moment along the way. Thus for the interaction of subjects, or intersubjectivity, I substitute the correspondences of the middle voice, and for the network of connected points, the meshwork of knotted and entangled lines. I would say that the world that they study is alive and open. In a world that is truly open there are no objects as such. For the object, having closed in on itself, has turned its back on the world, cutting itself off from the paths along which it came into being, and presenting only its congealed, outer surfaces for inspection. The open world, however, has no insides or outsides, only comings and goings. Such productive movements may generate formations, swellings, growths, protuberances and occurrences, but not objects. Our natural tendency, our habit of thought, leads us to suppose that the world is inhabited by entities that are already closed in upon themselves. It prevents us from seeing that life can be anything other than an interior property of things. Conceived as the creative potential of a world-in-formation, however, life is not in things; rather, things are in life, caught up in a current of continual generation. This is not a matter of putting life into things but of restoring those things to the movements that gave rise to them. It is not that they have agency, as is sometimes claimed; they are agency. The wind is its blowing, not a thing that blows.

Our "as if" world of science, the world of objects and relations, is explicate. The order of the social world, by contrast, is implicate. That is to say, any particular phenomenon on which we may choose to focus our attention enfolds within its constitution the totality of relations of which, in their unfolding, it is the momentary outcome. Were we to cut these relations, and seek to recover the whole from its now isolated fragments, something would be lost that could never be recovered. That something is life itself.

Sources

This interview has grown through the interpenetration of a range of different sources. Most notably, these include the following:

Q:

  We have explored a number of ideas. Maybe we can conclude. Given our conversation, what would you say to Information Systems and Organization Studies researchers, in terms of how they approach what they do?