5 Relocating Innovation: Postcards from Three Edges Endre Dányi, Lucy Suchman, Laura Watts This chapter is based on a research project titled “Relocating Innovation: Places and Material Practices of Future Making” that we undertook between 2008 and 2010 (Suchman et al. 2008). We were working across three diverse, seemingly incomparable fieldsites: a nascent renewable energy industry in the Orkney islands, Scotland; the Hungarian Parliament in Budapest; and Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in Silicon Valley. We knew that our project was held together through our shared interest in questioning narratives of innovation based in geographies of center and periphery. But how to produce generative connections between our ethnographic research materials, which seemed so disconnected? How to compare, and what to compare, when comparison is not random juxtaposition but thoughtful work, which must cut strategically in order to produce conversations and openings across continents and time zones (Deville et al. 2016; Jensen et al. 2011; Niewöhner & Scheffer 2010)? One answer for us was a collaboration technique that involved making, sharing, and comparing ethnographic postcards.1 Our chapter offers a demonstration and discussion of three of those postcards, exchanged between our “edgy” future-making fieldsites. We draw on archaeologist Michael Shanks’s notion of katachresis, a forcible juxtaposition designed to produce frictions (2004: 152), suggested to us as an empirical strategy during a project workshop. In what follows, we show how to make postcards from moments with “ethnographic effect,” how to use those postcards to create 91 katachresis across fieldsites, and how postcards helped us both to think about fieldsites differently, and also to re-specify what we could mean by innovation and future-making. The initial idea The idea of making postcards came early on, in preparation for a workshop with the Anthropology Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2009. The aim was to engage workshop participants in thinking about how our fieldsites could generate interesting, unexpected connections. During our research we had sailed away, over the curve of the Earth, in different times and to different parts of the planet. Perhaps it was that sense of distance and difference, not just geographic but also experiential, that inspired us. On Laura’s shelf was an old, much loved book Postcards from the Planets (Drew 1992). In its beautiful pages, a future tourist had sent back to Earth a series of postcards from the planets in the Solar System. The postcards rendered each planet as a human experience, one the reader could imagine and inhabit – a mixture of both evidence and somewhat florid interpretation. In a similar way, we thought that we could send postcards from our distant fieldsites, to make them more accessible for ourselves and for each other, and to make them travel. More prosaically, since we had not visited each other’s fieldsites at that point, they were postcards to share both our experiences of places unknown to the others, and specific empirical evidence from those places. Postcards could render moments from our ethnographic fieldsites, and make pieces of places that could travel.2 In practical terms, the internet (a blogging platform, to be more precise) was our initial postal service, where we each “posted” an image and a related paragraph.3 We were sporadic, with the upcoming workshop providing impetus. But it was still a conversation, a blog thread, where one person made a postcard or two, and another responded with their postcards. Now, almost a 92 decade later, we have returned to reflect on this process. Let us remember: how did we make each postcard? How did we cut out a fieldsite fragment, as an image and some text? Sample postcards from the edges From Silicon Valley: The project takes me back to materials collected over a 20-year period, from roughly 1980 to 2000. The materials exist primarily as paper files, items kept on the hunch that there was something interesting that might be said about them later, in some future when I would have the time to engage them. The call to make postcards suggests a particular pass through the files, a hunt most obviously for photographs but also other visual images, or fragments of text that might be framed as an image. Most of these are images generated from within the everyday life of my fieldsite, rather than my own photography. Among the former are multiple instances of a particular genre, a variety of modes of mapping one’s work in a way that indicates a history of productive labor and a promise of future returns on investment. Among these I’m struck by one titled “Flow of PARC Contributions” (Figure 1).4 Figure 5.1. “Waterfall of Innovation”, courtesy of PARC, a Xerox company. 93 In a trope reminiscent of the “waterfall model” of product development but rendered pastoral, the image pictures a torrent flowing from the upper left corner of the frame, then falling as a broad cascade that dominates the view. Two clearly unnatural elements mark the picture’s iconography. The first is a reversal of time, as the future recedes upstream. The second is a structural fixing of the cascade’s flow, as time stops in a freeze frame of the year 1993, and the waters are divided into four distinct streams labelled Leverage, Process, Product, and Intellectual Property. Onto each stream is affixed a label that in turn translates activity into an enumerable entity (Verran 2010), a project. Time is mapped to a space of intervals between a present moment and a projected future. If maps have politics, this map is a technology of accountability to a narrative of product(ivity). Not to have a place on the map indicates the uncertainty of one’s own future. The fact that our own research group barely shows up is a portent of troubles to come. As our themes developed (of which more below), this postcard became an example of the theme “Place and Landscape”. From Budapest: My postcards included several images of the Hungarian Parliament as a monument, a tourist attraction, a complex organization, a theatre-like arena for political debates, and a backdrop of mass demonstrations. I also had a few images of politicians and one related to Hungary’s socialist past. The image on one of my postcards is a photo that I took in the so-called Statue Park – a private collection of dozens of socialist statues that were removed from public squares and almost destroyed after 1989 (Figure 2). 94 Figure 5.2. “Disappearing Dreamworlds” The postcard shows the negative image of a socialist scene: the march of soldiers in uniform, rifle in hand, moving from left to right under the guidance of the Red Star. The soldiers, who used to be metal figures, have been removed and the Red Star is completely missing. All that is left is a star-shaped hole in the concrete. These are traces of iconoclasm, or iconoclash, to use Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel’s term (2002). For the statue park is a record, not only of attempts to destroy the icons of the past, but also of the grotesque effect generated by the relocation of those icons. Stalin’s gigantic boots overshadow the stone figures of Marx and Engels, who are staring at Lenin addressing a group of peasants. Socialism is easy to ridicule – it stands for a future that has somehow expired or lost its credibility. The backside of the postcard is a reflection on exactly this sentiment. It is a quote by Susan Buck-Morss (2002), who has suggested that 1989 marked the end not only of the East, but also of the West. Socialism was a “convenient other” to capitalism, the latter of which was gradually exported to Central and Eastern Europe as the only viable future – see the oft-cited 95 fantasy about the end of history (Fukuyama 1992). This postcard became an example of the theme “Newness”. From Orkney: At the time, I was just beginning what would become a decade of extended fieldwork (Watts 2019), taking fieldnotes each day and keeping a photo record. But there were always moments, little stories told, pieces of places, which snagged and caught my attention, a glow suffusing particular parts of my memory and notes (these were inseparable). The requirement to make postcards was akin to wielding a craft knife, it made me cut out those glowing moments, and turn them into bounded pieces of a story. Sometimes the words led directly from my fieldnotes, and then I found a photograph as accompaniment. Sometimes the place led the story, and I began with a photograph and then sought to find the words for the postcard. Sometimes it all came together as a tangle, and I had to unravel and cut out the precise words, and the precise photograph. The story, the moment, never existed before. Looking back, I feel ambivalent about the solidification and smoothing work that the postcards, as a method, did to my ethnography. I cannot evade or ever lose those stories. They rattle around like ballbearings whenever I reflect on my fieldsite in retrospect. There are always consequences to making stories. This postcard began with a quote from a conversation with a colleague and collaborator in Orkney, over tea and a sandwich – that I do remember (Figure 3). 96 Figure 5.3. “Future Archaeologies” He talked about how the islands had held an international conference for renewable energy back in 2002, one of the first such conferences in the world, and how this history of taking a leading role in innovation was never remembered in metropolitan political centers – hence this postcard became an example of the theme “(Non)histories”. I also knew how the islands had been the test site for the UK’s burgeoning wind energy industry back in the early 1980s. I had visited the remains of that wind energy test site – taking a photograph of the great concrete base, still there on the hilltop. This entangled evidence was smoothed into some text for the postcard, to make an empirical point, and my photo of the concrete archaeology of the long-gone wind turbine was attached. I labelled the photograph “Future Archaeologies,” a concept that I had been exploring in a previous project (Watts 2012a, 2014a). There are no neat edges between projects; ideas overflow, previous thoughts helping to shape others. I posted this all to the blog. Returning to this postcard now, its story may roll around with hard edges, but it remains pertinent. Interestingly, the conversations with the other two postcards now make me re-tell this story in new ways. It is not as hardened as I perhaps imagined – although this should not be 97 surprising, given that stories are rehearsed, performed, and within those moments there is always the potential for accounts to be made otherwise. We can always read against the grain, for example. Making a postcard is only the first part of the method. Reading a postcard is the next move, with its own locatedness and politics. We are as implicated in our reading as in our making. “One story is not as good as another” as Donna Haraway puts it (1989: 331), reflecting on the politics reproduced by our choice of stories. Similarly, one reading is not as good as another. Thematizing the postcards But there are more steps to the method. We did not end with the online versions, since they were blog posts and not postcards as we intended – the interactions are very different between these technologies. We took the posts and turned them into physical form, printed as draft postcards on paper. In total, we made thirty-five postcards – around ten postcards each (though we weren’t counting). Turning them into physical form was a crucial step since it then meant we could spend some time working with them on a large table, sorting them, discussing the connections, exploring them as a set. Out of this first workshop we finalized groups of themes. The themes ran across our project, and some we had already begun discussing during the project proposal. But they were still ongoing conversations, and the postcards enabled us to enrich our critique and discussion of them, to explore what they might say, how our fieldsites informed and deepened these themes and gave them shape. Most postcards could fit under several themes, and our discussions were focused less on choosing a theme than on the insights that we could gain from reading the postcards together under different themes. In short, the point of the workshop was not to solve the problem of fitting a postcard into the best theme, but to open up the themes, using the postcards as evidence to explore our comparisons and construct our arguments. 98 Our list of themes developed into these six: Place and Landscape; (Non)histories; Newness; Distributed-Centred Subjects/Objects (with thanks to Mialet 2012); and Centers/Peripheries. Once the themes were made and agreed between us (although the list could have gone on) we made the final sets of postcards, printed on stiff card stock. Each set was enclosed and packaged in a DVD case (Figure 4). Figure 5.4. Postcards It required design skills and attention to detail to construct the aesthetic we wanted: the font, the layout. Each postcard image included its short description (placed beside it in the blog postings) on the back, following the typical format that postcards have. We did not include the conceit of an address, because that was not important for us (it might be for others). 99 Having this collection of cards was akin to having our project in a box. It helped to make our project travel as a whole, beyond just the three of us. We then took the postcards to the workshop at MIT with colleagues and students. There we asked them to help us re-read and reflect further on the postcards. One participant, Chris Witmore, was particularly helpful: he suggested that the method we had been effectively following was a form of “katachresis” – that is how Michael Shanks (2004) referred to the forceful (artificial?) juxtaposition of things and places that don’t normally go together. Reading the postcards as katachresis Lucy’s image of the eternal flow of innovation shows what was supposed to come after the end of the Cold War, the end of history – not only in Central and Eastern Europe, but also everywhere else. We associate this image with the kind of neoliberal program that has generated so much frustration in the former East, to the extent that today for most people there Vladimir Putin’s Russia and Viktor Orbán’s Hungary seem more attractive than any future with parliaments. Laura’s image of a hill in Orkney shows, on the front, a concrete spot that marks the absence of a large-scale wind turbine erected there in 1986. The turbine was subsequently disassembled and removed, for wind energy was not considered to be a viable source of energy by the UK government back then. Just how wrong this assessment was is clearly demonstrated by a row of newer (Danish manufactured) wind turbines in the background. The concrete spot reminds us of various attempts – socialist and capitalist alike – to fix the future: to make it, in all senses, concrete. 100 Is Laura’s image the counterpoint of Lucy’s? A sign of hope? Some kind of socialist version of capitalism? If so, it is also a counterpoint to Endre’s postcard, as it suggests something other than nostalgia, other than a return to a past that never was. Reading the “Waterfall of Innovation” against “Future Archaeologies” and “Disappearing Dreamworlds” indexes the folding of futures into pasts (a katachresis of futures, perhaps). The landscape of “Future Archaeologies” is one of futures produced through wind rather than water, as it is in the “Waterfall of Innovation”. But, like the water upstream, the future recedes here into the line of turbines, subsequently raised. The lost opportunity of the abandoned prototype is underscored by the line of now commercially available working wind turbines, not invented here. The “miraculous year” of collapse inverts the trope of future productivity to one of creative destruction, the necessity of ending to make space for beginning. Then, the flatness of the cement pad, all that remains of the first wind turbine, echoes that of the absences in “Disappearing Dreamworlds”. But the ending it turns out, as we march from left to right, is not just of the past of socialism, but also its constitutive outside, the future of capitalism. That future flows uphill in PARC’s contributions to the profit margins of its corporate parent, immersed in the intensifying competition and consolidation of the tech industry to come. All three postcards are about absences, the absence of past innovations. The great experiment that was socialism in Central and Eastern Europe came to an end in the late 1980s. Around the same time, the great experiment that was wind energy in the UK also came to an end. Both ended due to shifts in national and international politics. Both left monumental, concrete residues in the landscape. Xerox PARC’s image does not show, but is haunted by, its history as the place credited with inventing the personal computer. The image can be thought of as the residue of that former time of innovation and experiment. There is an afterlife to innovation: it does not 101 end but has ongoing consequences. It haunts places and people, long into the future, by its absence as much as its presence. In all three cases you could wonder if they are failed projects by some measure. Did socialism fail in Hungary? Did wind energy fail in the UK? Did Xerox PARC fail? The quick answer in all three cases might be, in retrospect, yes. Hungary is a democracy. The UK does not have a wind turbine manufacturing industry. PARC is no longer a research organization within Xerox. But look closer. Hungary has a complicated relationship with democracy and its socialist past – it is not quite an un-marked, same-same European country. The photograph on Orkney shows a line of wind turbines on the hilltop, so wind energy is being generated – and, in fact, the islands are now producing more than 100% of their electricity from renewable energy, largely from their wind turbines. PARC is still around, and still doing much of its research for Xerox, who remain a large customer. The afterlife of innovation continues, and the story shifts. Finally, as we look at these three postcards now, we see monuments to innovation being made. This is most obvious in the Statue Park memorial, which is a monument to socialism itself. The absent wind turbine seems monumental from its concrete infrastructure on the Orkney hilltop. The PARC slide shows a waterfall of innovation, a geological feature, also intended to endure. There is a permanence inscribed in all three marks of innovation. Despite much discourse about speed and change in innovation, it seems that, in these cases, innovation holds still, is memorialized, and its monuments remain as an afterlife. Postscript: Afterlife of a project But there is also an afterlife to ethnographic research. What we have briefly shown here is the afterlife of a method of collaboration that does not presuppose the production of a singular account 102 as its outcome, but rather each of the accounts that are generated are enriched by the opportunity to think these multiple projects, times and places together.5 The connecting circuit of our research and collaboration was a shared analytic commitment to contingency, the openness of our endeavor, not needing closure and categorization. Postcards as a medium for katachresis – for thoughtgenerating juxtaposition across disparate locations – helped us to think together, find the resonance among our research sites, while also articulating their differences. Our method of writing, sending and re-reading postcards was a practical way of communicating across the three empirical cases, supporting the creation of connecting themes informed by the incomparability of their specific enactments. Protocol — Step 1: Convene a collaboration of two or more researchers, with an interest in reading across multiple research sites as katachresis. — Step 2 (optional): Develop an initial set of analytic themes. — Step 3: Have each collaborator assemble a corpus of heterogeneous materials, and inspect it for provocative/generative instances, either visual or textual. Examples should be accompanied by short commentaries, along the format of the front and back of a postcard. — Step 4: Post examples generated in Step 3 on a shared website, in a postcard format (i.e. showing front and back side by side). — Step 5: Print some or all postcards on paper (for ease of juxtaposition). — Step 6 (optional): Reprint some or all postcards on high quality card stock, packaged in an appropriate box. 103 — Step 7: Hold a workshop to develop themes and readings across postcards. — Step 8: Write, either together or separately. — Step 9: Reconvene the collaboration and repeat from Step 1. Acknowledgments We are grateful to The Leverhulme Trust for the financial support of the project (Grant Ref F/00 185/U), participants in the MIT workshop held on 20 May 2009, and all those who generously took part in our OrkneyLab: the Futures workshop in Stromness, Orkney, 22 September 2009, which deeply informed the making and readings of our project stories. Notes: 1 Postcards as a mechanism for data comparison have also been explored through the data visualization project, Dear Data (Posavec and Lupi 2016). For a recent invitation to write postcards as a form of ethnographic method see https://colleex.wordpress.com/colleex-open-formats/postcards-and-ethnography/. 2 “Pieces of places” is how archaeologist Richard Bradley has described the technology of Neolithic stone axes, which are manufactured in dramatic mountain locations and then travel, a material-semiotic device (akin to a postcard, in our thinking), which allows those mountain places travel with them (Bradley 2000). 3 The full set of postcards is available for download at http://sand14.com/archive/relocatinginnovation/download/. 4 PARC is the acronym for Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center, founded in 1970 to stake out the corporation’s claim to the future of computing. For further accounts of the 20-year residence during which these materials were collected see Suchman 2011, 2013. 5 The outcomes of our research have been published as a PhD thesis, journal articles, a book and several poems – see Dányi 2012, 2013, 2015, 2017, 2018; Suchman 2011, 2013; Watts 2012b, 2014b, 2019. References Bradley, Richard. 2000. An Archaeology of Natural Places. London, New York: Routledge. Buck-Morss, Susan. 2002. Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. 104 Dányi, Endre. 2018. “The Things of the Parliament.” In Jenni Brichzin, Damien Krichewsky, Leopold Ringel and Jan Schank (eds.) Soziologie Der Parlamente, Wiesbaden: Springer VS, Wiesbaden. Dányi, Endre. 2017. “Walking as Knowing and Interfering.” Aggregate, Vol. 3, 12 June. http://weaggregate.org/piece/walking-as-knowing-and-interfering Last accessed on 14 December 2017. 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