Day, Ronald E. “Death of the User: Reconceptualizing Subjects, Objects, and Their Relations.” Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 62, no. 1 (2011): 78–88.
Ron Day writes for JASIST alot. His work develops critical theory in a journal that is largely devoted to empirical social science. I have a conflicted relationship with most of his work that ends up in JASIST. Ron is super intelligent, but the general audience he ends up writing for works from a very different theoretical perspective. This is great on the one hand because it generates articles that are accessible to a number of differing perspectives. But on the other hand, it also leads to some strange passages that seem out of place because they read like direct responses to a peer reviewer–kind of like a short one-on-one Q & A session in the middle of an article. Case in point:
… the method of this article requires explanation. One charge against it may be that the article involves intellectual bricolage. This is true.
Anyway, this particular article analyzes the concept of the user in several theories central to Library & Information Science, most notably Nick Belkin’s Anomalous States of Knowledge (ASK). My interest with this article had to do with Day’s use of Lacanian psychoanalysis as a way to critique “the information user.” I’ve been working on a similar topic for understanding information architecture.
One of the most important sections of this essay, at least for LIS, is Day’s explanation of Lacanian theory.
It is not at all the intention of this section or this article to propose psychoanalysis as a new ‘approach’ for empirical analysis, but rather, to examine the construction of the subject within psychoanalysis, particularly, Lacanian psychoanalysis, as a bridge between the LIS user model—based on need—and a fuller and more precise theoretical, sociocultural model. (82)
It seems to me that resistance to critical approaches within LIS has often understood critical theory as constructing empirical theory. This confusion has drawn critique which argues that the critical theory is a poor model for empirical information behavior, and not without warrant. Absolutely!
The issue here is that critical theory does something very different than empirical theory. The confusion of the two approaches in LIS doesn’t seem productive, and it’s nice to see Day clearly say that critical theory doesn’t necessarily provide a model for empirical analysis. I should point out, that I think this theoretical confusion is primarily due to the different theoretical worlds that various LIS scholars tend to approach their work with. One of the most useful exercises I did in grad school was to try and place the work of different LIS academics onto a spectrum of research approaches. Although the exercise was necessarily reductive, it was also a useful tool for understanding why people that seem to disagree with each other are different. (Thanks to both Kristin Eschenfelder and Steve Paling for asking me to do those exercises!) Differences in cognitive frames make disciplinary discussion primarily difficult at the theoretical level.
One of the great things about this article is that it is a descriptive romp through Lacanian psychoanalytic concepts, discursive psychology, and quasi-objects in the tradition of Serres and Latour. From my point of view, this is great: Day does some powerful work summarizing dense concepts. The article isn’t a quick read, but because of its brevity and publication venue, it should be accessible to those who don’t follow the theorists that Day describes.
The one thing I’m unsatisfied with, though, is that Day doesn’t ever get around to really critiquing the information-seeking models he mentions. He suggests that the other information-seeking models participate in a folk psychology and mechanistic view of information behavior, but that’s the extent of critique. It’s a little unsatisfying to have the information behavior literature treated as if it is largely the same. (I should say that in a few places Day says that not all information behavior models have the same problems he addresses, but that many do.) Maybe it’s just my personal preference as a rhetorical critic, but I wanted to see more critique of a model like ASK (hopefully contemporary uses of ASK!) after the lengthy theoretical description.
One reason I want to see that type of critique: it seems to me that an information behavior researcher’s easiest appeal would be that they don’t actually use the information behavior models in the way that Day suggests. So give them an example of how they do! (A hedge here: this paper came out of a conference panel — perhaps a critique wasn’t addedbecause there was a very obvious real disagreement during the panel. If that is the case, perhaps the people that Day is writing for don’t need examples of how they are using information behavior models mechanistically. Perhaps they were looking for a well-written description of Day’s POV?) I guess my primary concern is for Day to demonstrate that the target of his critique is legitimately a contemporary issue.
For my own work, I found his recap of imaginary/symbolic orders, affect, part-objects, and quasi-objects useful for further thinking about standards, classifications, and information infrastructure. Technical standards, standards documents, classification systems, and the people interacting with them can be critiqued with those concepts. Sometimes it’s nice to have a well-written reminder of dense theory. Day does a nice job of that with this article.
UPDATE: Just a few notes after thinking about this article a bit more.
Day’s discussion about differences between subjects and identities is a useful discussion for enriching information behavior studies. Day puts it better than I could as he writes that in his understanding of the world includes “the expression and emergence of bodies, particularly subjects, as singularities, and then only later—through the overlay of representational categories of recognition and even classification—their being named as identities” (79: Check out the passages around that area if you want to know more. It’s a good set of passages.) As far as I know, I hadn’t seen this difference mentioned in the LIS literature before. I hope it gets further explored in user studies.
Day’s concept of double mediation is also quite good. He describes a way of thinking about information behavior in terms of two axes. The first is a social/cultural/historical axis. That is, a way of understanding how a person is situated within contexts that afford their ability to act in the world. The second axis, which I’m still thinking about, he describes with heavy-handed term affect (I say heavy-handed, because this term has really taken off everywhere. It’s hard to keep track of how it’s being used). He uses Deleuze and Guatarri’s writing to talk about affect. By affect, he seems to mean the ways that bodies move through and interact in physical space. The reason this part of his discussion isn’t quite clear to me is because I’m trying to figure out how to conceptualize both axes together. It’s hard to focus on one axis without losing focus of the other.
Day describes the ideas he puts forth in this article as formal causation. I know this term has some disciplinary leverage elsewhere, but I think that, at least within LIS, it would be useful to find a different term to describe the same idea. Formal causation, as a term, is a speed bump for me. I have to stop and think about it every time I see it. Because it’s conceptually related to mechanistic causation, it also isn’t very cordial about the ways that it suggests other approaches to scholarship. There needs to be a better way to get at the same set of ideas.
One last thought: this article reminds me a lot of Josh Gunn’s “Refitting Fantasy” from a 1994 issue of the Quarterly Journal of Speech. Like Day, much of Gunn’s writing is devoted to sketching out concepts for an audience that may be resistant to the ideas from Lacan (and in Gunn’s case, Slavoj Žižek). One reason that both are good articles is because each author stretches to bring a extradisciplinary ideas into the mainstream of their own discipline.
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