Overview

This book is about media, mediation, and meaning. The Art of Interpretation focuses on a set of interrelated processes whereby ostensibly human-specific modes of meaning become automated by machines, formatted by protocols, and networked by infrastructures. That is, as computation replaces interpretation, information effaces meaning, and infrastructure displaces interaction. Or so it seems. Paul Kockelman asks: What does it take to automate, format, and network meaningful practices? What difference does this make for those who engage in such practices? And what is at stake? Reciprocally: How can we better understand computational processes from the standpoint of meaningful practices? How can we leverage such processes to better understand such practices? And what lies in wait? In answering these questions, Kockelman stays very close to fundamental concerns of computer science that emerged in the first half of the twentieth-century. Rather than foreground the latest application, technology or interface, he accounts for processes that underlie each and every digital technology deployed today. In a novel method, The Art of Interpretation leverages key ideas of American pragmatism-a philosophical stance that understands the world, and our relation to it, in a way that avoids many of the conundrums and criticisms of conventional twentieth-century social theory. It puts this stance in dialogue with certain currents, and key texts, in anthropology and linguistics, science and technology studies, critical theory, computer science, and media studies.

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9780190636531

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Reviews

Paul Kockelman has produced a work of stunning imagination. Here he showcases his breathtaking capacity to see things you didn't know could be seen. Kockelman's dazzling tour of the elements of meaning, and the infrastructure that makes meaning possible, cuts effortlessly through the disciplinary and theoretical barriers that so often thwart conceptual progress in social science. The challenging and sometimes unsettling nature of this work points to its greatest strength: the constant reminder that framing is everything. Is it a moat or a river? Is it a hindrance or a help? The answers draw simultaneously on technical structures of channels and codes and on political and ethnographic elements of human social life. This book is a landmark installment in Kockelman's masterly account of meaning, from information to value to agency. -N.J. Enfield, Professor and Chair, Department of Linguistics, The University of Sydney With semiotics its point of departure and the world of computationally enabled semiotic agents its surround, this remarkable book about paths, lines and circles is itself a bridge connecting disparate points and opening up new pathways. It demonstrates the value in circling back to received greats, whose relations Kockelman uncovers or draws afresh-Bayes, Peirce, Turing, Jakobson, Freud, Mark Twain and more-as well as unexpected progenitors, like the founder of graph theory. It does so with acute precision, putting relations themselves into novel analytical configurations so that we might make sense of the digital, social and communicative networks in which we are all enmeshed. With Kockelman as our pathfinder the work is challenging, and always rewarding.''-Bill Maurer, Professor of Anthropology and Law, University of California, Irvine, and author of How Would You Like To Pay: How Technology is Changing the Future of Money (Duke University Press) This is an extraordinary book... the author guides us on an exhilarating intellectual adventure by mapping out and rendering visible the (often unexpected) criss-crossings of models, theories, concepts, and methods in diverse disciplines. The result is to inaugurate a robust theoretical foundation for genuinely transdisciplinary scholarship. This will, I believe, be a book that many of us will continue to return to in generations to come. -Miyako Inoue, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Stanford University

Author Information

Paul Kockelman is Professor of Anthropology at Yale University. He is the author of The Chicken and the Quetzal: Portable Values and Incommensurate Ontologies in Guatemala's Cloud Forest (Duke University Press, 2016), Language, Culture, and Mind: Natural Constructions and Social Kinds (Cambridge University Press, 2010), and Agent, Person, Subject, Self: a Theory of Ontology, Interaction, and Infrastructure (Oxford University Press, 2013). He is the editor of the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology.

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