Eitan Wilf | The Hebrew University of Jerusalem (original) (raw)

Books by Eitan Wilf

University of New Mexico Press , 2021

The chapters in this captivating volume demonstrate the importance and power of design and the ub... more The chapters in this captivating volume demonstrate the importance and power of design and the ubiquitous and forceful effects it has on human life within the study of anthropology. The scholars explore the interactions between anthropology and design through a cross-disciplinary approach, and while their approaches vary in how they specifically consider design, they are all centered around the design-and-anthropology relationship. The chapters look at anthropology for design, in which anthropological methods and concepts are mobilized in the design process; anthropology of design, in which design is positioned as an object of ethnographic inquiry and critique; and design for anthropology, in which anthropologists borrow concepts and practices from design to enhance traditional ethnographic forms. Collectively, the chapters argue that bringing design and anthropology together can transform both fields in more than one way and that to tease out the implications of using design to reimagine ethnography--and of using ethnography to reimagine design--we need to consider the historical specificity of their entanglements.

University of Chicago Press, 2023

Explores how creative digital technologies and artificial intelligence are embedded in culture an... more Explores how creative digital technologies and artificial intelligence are embedded in culture and society.

In The Inspiration Machine, Eitan Y. Wilf explores the transformative potentials that digital technology opens up for creative practice through three ethnographic cases, two with jazz musicians and one with a group of poets. At times dissatisfied with the limitations of human creativity, these artists do not turn to computerized algorithms merely to execute their preconceived ideas. Rather, they approach them as creative partners, delegating to them different degrees of agentive control and artistic decision-making in the hopes of finding inspiration in their output and thereby expanding their own creative horizons.

The algorithms these artists develop and use, however, remain rooted in and haunted by the specific social predicaments and human shortfalls that they were intended to overcome. Experiments in the digital thus hold an important lesson: although Wilf’s interlocutors returned from their adventures with computational creativity with modified, novel, and enriched capacities and predilections, they also gained a renewed appreciation for, and at times a desire to re-inhabit, non-digital creativity. In examining the potentials and pitfalls of seemingly autonomous digital technologies in the realm of art, Wilf shows that computational solutions to the real or imagined insufficiencies of human practice are best developed in relation to, rather than away from, the social and cultural contexts that gave rise to those insufficiencies, in the first place.

University of Chicago Press, 2019

Business consultants everywhere preach the benefits of innovation—and promise to help businesses ... more Business consultants everywhere preach the benefits of innovation—and promise to help businesses reap them. A trendy industry, this type of consulting generates courses, workshops, books, and conferences that all claim to hold the secrets of success. But what promises does the notion of innovation entail? What is it about the ideology and practice of business innovation that has made these firms so successful at selling their services to everyone from small start-ups to Fortune 500 companies? And most important, what does business innovation actually mean for work and our economy today?

In Creativity on Demand, cultural anthropologist Eitan Wilf seeks to answer these questions by returning to the fundamental and pervasive expectation of continual innovation. Wilf focuses a keen eye on how our obsession with ceaseless innovation stems from the long-standing value of acceleration in capitalist society. Based on ethnographic work with innovation consultants in the United States, he reveals, among other surprises, how routine the culture of innovation actually is. Procedures and strategies are repeated in a formulaic way, and imagination is harnessed as a new professional ethos, not always to generate genuinely new thinking, but to produce predictable signs of continual change.

University of Chicago Press, May 1, 2014

Jazz was born on the streets, grew up in the clubs, and will die—so some fear—at the university. ... more Jazz was born on the streets, grew up in the clubs, and will die—so some fear—at the university. Facing dwindling commercial demand and the gradual disappearance of venues, many aspiring jazz musicians today learn their craft, and find their careers, in one of the many academic programs that now offer jazz degrees. School for Cool is their story. Going inside the halls of two of the most prestigious jazz schools around—at Berklee College of Music in Boston and the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music in New York—Eitan Y. Wilf tackles a formidable question at the heart of jazz today: can creativity survive institutionalization?

Few art forms epitomize the anti-institutional image more than jazz, but it’s precisely at the academy where jazz is now flourishing. This shift has introduced numerous challenges and contradictions to the music’s practitioners. Solos are transcribed, technique is standardized, and the whole endeavor is plastered with the label “high art”—a far cry from its freewheeling days. Wilf shows how students, educators, and administrators have attempted to meet these challenges with an inventive spirit and a robust drive to preserve—and foster—what they consider to be jazz’s central attributes: its charisma and unexpectedness. He also highlights the unintended consequences of their efforts to do so. Ultimately, he argues, the gap between creative practice and institutionalized schooling, although real, is often the product of our efforts to close it.

Papers by Eitan Wilf

Journal of Business Anthropology, 2022

Of Two Iterations of Creativity and One Pandemic Discourses and practices that situate creativity... more Of Two Iterations of Creativity and One Pandemic Discourses and practices that situate creativity as a recipe for success in different domains and at different levels of social reality have had an increasingly global reach in the last few decades. Creativity has become the focus of managerial theories, self-help books, and experts whose goal is to help individuals, firms, cities, and nation-states all over the world harness creativity as a resource for boosting productivity and for creating value. Among the recent iterations of creativity, two have become especially visible and consequential. The first iteration is the "creative city," which, broadly speaking, refers to an urban policy of investing resources in creative practices as a way of increasing a city's attractiveness to cultural tourists and especially to knowledge workers who, so it is hoped, would be lured into the city in search for a better quality of life and in turn attract with them lucrative companies from the "creative industries" such as the high-tech and design sectors. This policy has been embraced by cities around the world in different forms following the high traction it gained as a result of its dissemination in a

Journal of Cultural Economy, 2021

Innovation consultants belong to a professional group of people who claim that they can help orga... more Innovation consultants belong to a professional group of people who claim that they can help organizations become more innovative by reconfiguring them in ways that can facilitate the unimpeded flow of information between as many of their employees as possible. They are thus a prime example of phatic experts, inasmuch as they present themselves as people whose expertise turns on establishing channels of communication and contact between employees. In addition to ensuring that they make their clients and their products more innovative, innovation consultants must make socially legible their own economic actions, and themselves as economic actors who are capable of such actions, as part of what sociologists call a profession's 'technical mystique,' that is, expert knowledge made visibly concrete and socially recognizable. Based on fieldwork with innovation consultants in the USA, I examine what phaticity looks like in the contemporary business world; how phatic ideologies regiment what counts as appropriate 'contact,' 'channel,' and 'communication' between organization members; how phaticity is mediated as a socially legible genre by means of material artifacts and the built office environment; and what rhetorical functions and outcomes such a mediation has.

Designs and Anthropologies: Frictions and Affinities, 2021

Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, 2008

Social Anthropology, 2020

This article draws on fieldwork with innovation consultants in the USA to argue that neoliberal a... more This article draws on fieldwork with innovation consultants in the USA to argue that neoliberal assumptions about how large-scale markets should be organised to maximise their efficiency now inform assumptions about how small-scale business firms should be organised to maximise their innovative potential. A key mediating concept between macro-level neoliberal theories and micro-level innovation strategies is 'free information flow'. This concept emerged in the mid-20th century in the context of military-industrial and engineering efforts to develop a mathematical theory of communication. Because this concept does not align with the embodied and meaning-making nature of human employees, attempts to translate macro-level neoliberal theories to micro-level business innovation strategies have run into difficulties. These difficulties expose a problem that is intrinsic to neoliberal theories themselves. On the one hand, neoliberal theories emphasise the importance of each economic player's context-specific knowledge for an efficient economic order. On the other hand, they rely on a notion of context that is inflected by a predetermined goal, i.e. maximising economic efficiency, in relation to which people become epiphenomenal. This notion has very little to do with the lived reality of context as an emergent and indeterminate outcome of people's everyday activities and interactions.

Journal of Business Anthropology, 2020

Although many corporations make claims about the newness of their products in order to make the p... more Although many corporations make claims about the newness of their products in order to make the public interested in purchasing them, not all of them make the same kind of claims. Whereas previous studies have highlighted claims to newness that are based on emphasizing the newness of almost all the parts of new products in relation to the parts of those products' previous versions, I highlight claims to newness that are based on emphasizing the oldness of the parts of new products in relation to the parts of those products' previous versions. These two distinct kinds of claims are patterned after two diametrically opposed normative ideals of newness that have a specific intellectual history in the modern west. This history and its contemporary instantiations have implications for the study of the motion of culture in general, and of the mechanisms that propel it in the corporate world in particular.

The Routledge Companion to Embodied Music Interaction, pp.241-248, 2017

My purpose in this chapter is to provide a cultural anthropological perspective on the body’s pot... more My purpose in this chapter is to provide a cultural anthropological perspective on the body’s potential to provide a foundation for cultivating a wide spectrum of culturally specific normative ideals of embodied music interaction. I argue that the playing body always exists within some kind of cultural context at the same time that it has its own, culturally independent features. A cultural anthropological perspective on embodied music interaction is therefore one that focuses both on the ways in which embodied music interaction is culturally shaped and also on the ways in which the body is harnessed to achieve culturally specific ends due to its own culturally independent features.

Distributed Agency, 2017

This chapter theorizes a number of ethnographic sites—from mechanical divination in Central Afric... more This chapter theorizes a number of ethnographic sites—from mechanical divination in Central Africa to gamelike interactions among jazz students and the development of jazz-improvising computerized algorithms in the United States—in which contingency produced by and harvested from nonhuman entities functions in the cultivation rather than the extension of basic dimensions of human agency understood to be lacking in these specific ethnographic contexts. In so doing, the chapter provides a window into a relatively under-theorized dimension of the idea that agency is distributed between and semiotically mediated across the human/nonhuman divide.

The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology, 2018

The anthropological interest in jazz can be divided to three main categories. First, because jazz... more The anthropological interest in jazz can be divided to three main categories. First, because jazz is inherently an improvised form of music, it provides an opportunity to theorize the emergently creative, real‐time nature of human interaction. Second, efforts to institutionalize jazz in bureaucratic structures throughout the twentieth century provide appropriate contexts in which to analyze the dynamics and contradictions of institutionalized creativity. Third, the appropriation of jazz, which is identified in the popular imagination as a quintessentially modern American art form, by musicians from cultures outside the United States is amenable to analysis in terms of globalization, indigenization, and multiple modernities.

The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology, 2018

Modernity was long associated with a set of normative ideals and practices that were heavily inde... more Modernity was long associated with a set of normative ideals and practices that were heavily indebted to the Enlightenment tradition, which posited an inevitable historical trajectory of humanity's gradual progress and perfectibility through the advancement of science and reason. The culmination of this progress was supposed to be the modern West. Whereas anthropologists reproduced this master narrative in the early days of the discipline, today they have a greater appreciation for the ways in which cultural orders across the world creatively engage with Western modernity to produce alternative or multiple modernities.

American Ethnologist 46(2):202-213, 2019

Because ethnomethodology was founded in cybernetics, it institutionalized the idea that interacta... more Because ethnomethodology was founded in cybernetics, it institutionalized the idea that interactants strive to maintain interactional order and compensate for disorder through negative feedback mechanisms such as “repair work.” This idea informed a key strand in the study of human‐machine interaction in the United States, especially the idea that humans are inclined to repair the gaps in machines’ behavior and thus sustain the feeling that they are interacting with intentional entities. In some situations, however, humans prefer to expose and even exacerbate machines’ interactional incompetence. Such a preference manifests the aesthetic category of the uncanny, here theorized as the sudden awareness of the material foundations of one's immediate world, an awareness that emerges when those foundations become “noisy” and begin to reflexively point to themselves.

This essay seeks to clarify an undertheorized dimension of capitalism’s transition to post-Fordis... more This essay seeks to clarify an undertheorized dimension of capitalism’s transition to post-Fordist flexible accumulation—namely, the “acceleration in the pace of product innovation” (Harvey 1990:156). Based on ethnographic fieldwork in innovation workshops organized in New York City by consultants and attended by business entrepreneurs,
this essay argues that whereas cutting-edge technologies such as computerized algorithms and robotic technologies dominate many post-Fordist production and distribution systems, the Post-it note—a small rectangular piece of paper with weak adhesive properties—looms large as a key semiotic technology of idea generation in many contemporary business-innovation contexts for two reasons: (1) its small dimensions afford pragmatic ambiguity and consequently the decoupling of data from the reality of the market under the guise of its reflection, and (2) its
weak adhesive properties afford the synoptic arrangement of such pseudodata on conventional visual templates of what a valid insight should look like and thus the quick production of ritual insights. In doing so, the essay builds on and contributes to recent semiotic and linguistic anthropological studies that have paid close attention to the role
played by graphic artifacts in organizational knowledge production.

This chapter explores the ways in which the idea of jazz music as the quintessential art of produ... more This chapter explores the ways in which the idea of jazz music as the quintessential art of productive risk-taking and flexibility in the face of uncertainty has been incorporated into organizational theories and practices aimed at improving the functionality of the 21st century organization. It argues, first, that the incorporation of the jazz metaphor into the business world has been motivated by the realization that this metaphor is productive of an organizational structure that is not only flexible enough to cope with unexpected events but is also capable of producing unexpected events that can be further developed into and function as innovations in fields in which to remain stagnant is to perish. Second, it is claimed that the incorporation of organizational templates from jazz represents a mode of legitimation and naturalization of a new work-related form of uncertainty—namely, creative uncertainty—and its concomitant affective manifestations such as anxiety, which are becoming prevalent in knowledge-based organizations. Through the selective appropriation of the practice of jazz improvisation, organizational theorists have legitimized this new work-related form of uncertainty and its potentially problematic affective manifestations, reframing them as productive resources for the organizational management of uncertainty, as well as for employees’ self-expression.

American Anthropologist

Scholars of cultural evolution and change have tended to conceptualize innovation as a process th... more Scholars of cultural evolution and change have tended to conceptualize innovation as a process that results from individual experimentation involving random or very loosely guided trial-and-error alterations to existing cultural elements. Alternatively, they have focused on individual experimentation via decision rules and different heuristics with already existing, potentially innovative cultural elements whose emergence is left unexplained. Based on ethnographic fieldwork I conducted with a number of business innovation consultancy groups in the United States, I theorize institutionalized innovation as a new engine of cultural evolution that might be unique to complex industrial societies characterized by intense intragroup competition that puts pressure on constant innovation. This engine might be responsible for a faster pace of cultural evolution. At stake is a systematic strategy of purposeful innovation that is neither entirely random nor entirely calculation based. Rather, it is based in the rationalized and rule-governed production of what I call “structured contingency,” and it is capable of being applied to products and services across different business domains, including to itself.

Signs and Society 3(S1):S13-S40, Feb 1, 2015

This essay draws on fieldwork conducted in a workshop organized in New York City by an innovation... more This essay draws on fieldwork conducted in a workshop organized in New York City by an innovation consultancy group and attended by representatives of different business corporations. In this workshop, participants are supposed to learn a set of innovation techniques for generating new products and services and to become convinced that there can
be added value in buying the consultancy group’s services. The task of the consultancy group embodies a basic cultural contradiction because innovation is widely associated with
notions that derive from a modern Romantic ethos of creativity, which itself connotes resistance to routinization. To overcome this contradiction the facilitators engage the participants
in ritual semiosis. They orchestrate densely multilayered and multimodal discursive practices that reflexively consolidate a macrosociological order, which opposes a Romantic ethos and a professional ethos, and that dynamically figurate transformations in the microsociological context of the participants’ role-inhabitance with respect to innovation—
from their role-inhabitance of a Romantic ethos at the beginning of the workshop to their entailed role-inhabitance of a professional ethos at the workshop’s end.

Public Books, Apr 15, 2015

Review of: Chromatic Algorithms: Synthetic Color, Computer Art, and Aesthetics after Code, by Kan... more Review of: Chromatic Algorithms: Synthetic Color, Computer Art, and Aesthetics after Code, by Kane, Carolyn L.

University of New Mexico Press , 2021

The chapters in this captivating volume demonstrate the importance and power of design and the ub... more The chapters in this captivating volume demonstrate the importance and power of design and the ubiquitous and forceful effects it has on human life within the study of anthropology. The scholars explore the interactions between anthropology and design through a cross-disciplinary approach, and while their approaches vary in how they specifically consider design, they are all centered around the design-and-anthropology relationship. The chapters look at anthropology for design, in which anthropological methods and concepts are mobilized in the design process; anthropology of design, in which design is positioned as an object of ethnographic inquiry and critique; and design for anthropology, in which anthropologists borrow concepts and practices from design to enhance traditional ethnographic forms. Collectively, the chapters argue that bringing design and anthropology together can transform both fields in more than one way and that to tease out the implications of using design to reimagine ethnography--and of using ethnography to reimagine design--we need to consider the historical specificity of their entanglements.

University of Chicago Press, 2023

Explores how creative digital technologies and artificial intelligence are embedded in culture an... more Explores how creative digital technologies and artificial intelligence are embedded in culture and society.

In The Inspiration Machine, Eitan Y. Wilf explores the transformative potentials that digital technology opens up for creative practice through three ethnographic cases, two with jazz musicians and one with a group of poets. At times dissatisfied with the limitations of human creativity, these artists do not turn to computerized algorithms merely to execute their preconceived ideas. Rather, they approach them as creative partners, delegating to them different degrees of agentive control and artistic decision-making in the hopes of finding inspiration in their output and thereby expanding their own creative horizons.

The algorithms these artists develop and use, however, remain rooted in and haunted by the specific social predicaments and human shortfalls that they were intended to overcome. Experiments in the digital thus hold an important lesson: although Wilf’s interlocutors returned from their adventures with computational creativity with modified, novel, and enriched capacities and predilections, they also gained a renewed appreciation for, and at times a desire to re-inhabit, non-digital creativity. In examining the potentials and pitfalls of seemingly autonomous digital technologies in the realm of art, Wilf shows that computational solutions to the real or imagined insufficiencies of human practice are best developed in relation to, rather than away from, the social and cultural contexts that gave rise to those insufficiencies, in the first place.

University of Chicago Press, 2019

Business consultants everywhere preach the benefits of innovation—and promise to help businesses ... more Business consultants everywhere preach the benefits of innovation—and promise to help businesses reap them. A trendy industry, this type of consulting generates courses, workshops, books, and conferences that all claim to hold the secrets of success. But what promises does the notion of innovation entail? What is it about the ideology and practice of business innovation that has made these firms so successful at selling their services to everyone from small start-ups to Fortune 500 companies? And most important, what does business innovation actually mean for work and our economy today?

In Creativity on Demand, cultural anthropologist Eitan Wilf seeks to answer these questions by returning to the fundamental and pervasive expectation of continual innovation. Wilf focuses a keen eye on how our obsession with ceaseless innovation stems from the long-standing value of acceleration in capitalist society. Based on ethnographic work with innovation consultants in the United States, he reveals, among other surprises, how routine the culture of innovation actually is. Procedures and strategies are repeated in a formulaic way, and imagination is harnessed as a new professional ethos, not always to generate genuinely new thinking, but to produce predictable signs of continual change.

University of Chicago Press, May 1, 2014

Jazz was born on the streets, grew up in the clubs, and will die—so some fear—at the university. ... more Jazz was born on the streets, grew up in the clubs, and will die—so some fear—at the university. Facing dwindling commercial demand and the gradual disappearance of venues, many aspiring jazz musicians today learn their craft, and find their careers, in one of the many academic programs that now offer jazz degrees. School for Cool is their story. Going inside the halls of two of the most prestigious jazz schools around—at Berklee College of Music in Boston and the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music in New York—Eitan Y. Wilf tackles a formidable question at the heart of jazz today: can creativity survive institutionalization?

Few art forms epitomize the anti-institutional image more than jazz, but it’s precisely at the academy where jazz is now flourishing. This shift has introduced numerous challenges and contradictions to the music’s practitioners. Solos are transcribed, technique is standardized, and the whole endeavor is plastered with the label “high art”—a far cry from its freewheeling days. Wilf shows how students, educators, and administrators have attempted to meet these challenges with an inventive spirit and a robust drive to preserve—and foster—what they consider to be jazz’s central attributes: its charisma and unexpectedness. He also highlights the unintended consequences of their efforts to do so. Ultimately, he argues, the gap between creative practice and institutionalized schooling, although real, is often the product of our efforts to close it.

Journal of Business Anthropology, 2022

Of Two Iterations of Creativity and One Pandemic Discourses and practices that situate creativity... more Of Two Iterations of Creativity and One Pandemic Discourses and practices that situate creativity as a recipe for success in different domains and at different levels of social reality have had an increasingly global reach in the last few decades. Creativity has become the focus of managerial theories, self-help books, and experts whose goal is to help individuals, firms, cities, and nation-states all over the world harness creativity as a resource for boosting productivity and for creating value. Among the recent iterations of creativity, two have become especially visible and consequential. The first iteration is the "creative city," which, broadly speaking, refers to an urban policy of investing resources in creative practices as a way of increasing a city's attractiveness to cultural tourists and especially to knowledge workers who, so it is hoped, would be lured into the city in search for a better quality of life and in turn attract with them lucrative companies from the "creative industries" such as the high-tech and design sectors. This policy has been embraced by cities around the world in different forms following the high traction it gained as a result of its dissemination in a

Journal of Cultural Economy, 2021

Innovation consultants belong to a professional group of people who claim that they can help orga... more Innovation consultants belong to a professional group of people who claim that they can help organizations become more innovative by reconfiguring them in ways that can facilitate the unimpeded flow of information between as many of their employees as possible. They are thus a prime example of phatic experts, inasmuch as they present themselves as people whose expertise turns on establishing channels of communication and contact between employees. In addition to ensuring that they make their clients and their products more innovative, innovation consultants must make socially legible their own economic actions, and themselves as economic actors who are capable of such actions, as part of what sociologists call a profession's 'technical mystique,' that is, expert knowledge made visibly concrete and socially recognizable. Based on fieldwork with innovation consultants in the USA, I examine what phaticity looks like in the contemporary business world; how phatic ideologies regiment what counts as appropriate 'contact,' 'channel,' and 'communication' between organization members; how phaticity is mediated as a socially legible genre by means of material artifacts and the built office environment; and what rhetorical functions and outcomes such a mediation has.

Designs and Anthropologies: Frictions and Affinities, 2021

Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, 2008

Social Anthropology, 2020

This article draws on fieldwork with innovation consultants in the USA to argue that neoliberal a... more This article draws on fieldwork with innovation consultants in the USA to argue that neoliberal assumptions about how large-scale markets should be organised to maximise their efficiency now inform assumptions about how small-scale business firms should be organised to maximise their innovative potential. A key mediating concept between macro-level neoliberal theories and micro-level innovation strategies is 'free information flow'. This concept emerged in the mid-20th century in the context of military-industrial and engineering efforts to develop a mathematical theory of communication. Because this concept does not align with the embodied and meaning-making nature of human employees, attempts to translate macro-level neoliberal theories to micro-level business innovation strategies have run into difficulties. These difficulties expose a problem that is intrinsic to neoliberal theories themselves. On the one hand, neoliberal theories emphasise the importance of each economic player's context-specific knowledge for an efficient economic order. On the other hand, they rely on a notion of context that is inflected by a predetermined goal, i.e. maximising economic efficiency, in relation to which people become epiphenomenal. This notion has very little to do with the lived reality of context as an emergent and indeterminate outcome of people's everyday activities and interactions.

Journal of Business Anthropology, 2020

Although many corporations make claims about the newness of their products in order to make the p... more Although many corporations make claims about the newness of their products in order to make the public interested in purchasing them, not all of them make the same kind of claims. Whereas previous studies have highlighted claims to newness that are based on emphasizing the newness of almost all the parts of new products in relation to the parts of those products' previous versions, I highlight claims to newness that are based on emphasizing the oldness of the parts of new products in relation to the parts of those products' previous versions. These two distinct kinds of claims are patterned after two diametrically opposed normative ideals of newness that have a specific intellectual history in the modern west. This history and its contemporary instantiations have implications for the study of the motion of culture in general, and of the mechanisms that propel it in the corporate world in particular.

The Routledge Companion to Embodied Music Interaction, pp.241-248, 2017

My purpose in this chapter is to provide a cultural anthropological perspective on the body’s pot... more My purpose in this chapter is to provide a cultural anthropological perspective on the body’s potential to provide a foundation for cultivating a wide spectrum of culturally specific normative ideals of embodied music interaction. I argue that the playing body always exists within some kind of cultural context at the same time that it has its own, culturally independent features. A cultural anthropological perspective on embodied music interaction is therefore one that focuses both on the ways in which embodied music interaction is culturally shaped and also on the ways in which the body is harnessed to achieve culturally specific ends due to its own culturally independent features.

Distributed Agency, 2017

This chapter theorizes a number of ethnographic sites—from mechanical divination in Central Afric... more This chapter theorizes a number of ethnographic sites—from mechanical divination in Central Africa to gamelike interactions among jazz students and the development of jazz-improvising computerized algorithms in the United States—in which contingency produced by and harvested from nonhuman entities functions in the cultivation rather than the extension of basic dimensions of human agency understood to be lacking in these specific ethnographic contexts. In so doing, the chapter provides a window into a relatively under-theorized dimension of the idea that agency is distributed between and semiotically mediated across the human/nonhuman divide.

The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology, 2018

The anthropological interest in jazz can be divided to three main categories. First, because jazz... more The anthropological interest in jazz can be divided to three main categories. First, because jazz is inherently an improvised form of music, it provides an opportunity to theorize the emergently creative, real‐time nature of human interaction. Second, efforts to institutionalize jazz in bureaucratic structures throughout the twentieth century provide appropriate contexts in which to analyze the dynamics and contradictions of institutionalized creativity. Third, the appropriation of jazz, which is identified in the popular imagination as a quintessentially modern American art form, by musicians from cultures outside the United States is amenable to analysis in terms of globalization, indigenization, and multiple modernities.

The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology, 2018

Modernity was long associated with a set of normative ideals and practices that were heavily inde... more Modernity was long associated with a set of normative ideals and practices that were heavily indebted to the Enlightenment tradition, which posited an inevitable historical trajectory of humanity's gradual progress and perfectibility through the advancement of science and reason. The culmination of this progress was supposed to be the modern West. Whereas anthropologists reproduced this master narrative in the early days of the discipline, today they have a greater appreciation for the ways in which cultural orders across the world creatively engage with Western modernity to produce alternative or multiple modernities.

American Ethnologist 46(2):202-213, 2019

Because ethnomethodology was founded in cybernetics, it institutionalized the idea that interacta... more Because ethnomethodology was founded in cybernetics, it institutionalized the idea that interactants strive to maintain interactional order and compensate for disorder through negative feedback mechanisms such as “repair work.” This idea informed a key strand in the study of human‐machine interaction in the United States, especially the idea that humans are inclined to repair the gaps in machines’ behavior and thus sustain the feeling that they are interacting with intentional entities. In some situations, however, humans prefer to expose and even exacerbate machines’ interactional incompetence. Such a preference manifests the aesthetic category of the uncanny, here theorized as the sudden awareness of the material foundations of one's immediate world, an awareness that emerges when those foundations become “noisy” and begin to reflexively point to themselves.

This essay seeks to clarify an undertheorized dimension of capitalism’s transition to post-Fordis... more This essay seeks to clarify an undertheorized dimension of capitalism’s transition to post-Fordist flexible accumulation—namely, the “acceleration in the pace of product innovation” (Harvey 1990:156). Based on ethnographic fieldwork in innovation workshops organized in New York City by consultants and attended by business entrepreneurs,
this essay argues that whereas cutting-edge technologies such as computerized algorithms and robotic technologies dominate many post-Fordist production and distribution systems, the Post-it note—a small rectangular piece of paper with weak adhesive properties—looms large as a key semiotic technology of idea generation in many contemporary business-innovation contexts for two reasons: (1) its small dimensions afford pragmatic ambiguity and consequently the decoupling of data from the reality of the market under the guise of its reflection, and (2) its
weak adhesive properties afford the synoptic arrangement of such pseudodata on conventional visual templates of what a valid insight should look like and thus the quick production of ritual insights. In doing so, the essay builds on and contributes to recent semiotic and linguistic anthropological studies that have paid close attention to the role
played by graphic artifacts in organizational knowledge production.

This chapter explores the ways in which the idea of jazz music as the quintessential art of produ... more This chapter explores the ways in which the idea of jazz music as the quintessential art of productive risk-taking and flexibility in the face of uncertainty has been incorporated into organizational theories and practices aimed at improving the functionality of the 21st century organization. It argues, first, that the incorporation of the jazz metaphor into the business world has been motivated by the realization that this metaphor is productive of an organizational structure that is not only flexible enough to cope with unexpected events but is also capable of producing unexpected events that can be further developed into and function as innovations in fields in which to remain stagnant is to perish. Second, it is claimed that the incorporation of organizational templates from jazz represents a mode of legitimation and naturalization of a new work-related form of uncertainty—namely, creative uncertainty—and its concomitant affective manifestations such as anxiety, which are becoming prevalent in knowledge-based organizations. Through the selective appropriation of the practice of jazz improvisation, organizational theorists have legitimized this new work-related form of uncertainty and its potentially problematic affective manifestations, reframing them as productive resources for the organizational management of uncertainty, as well as for employees’ self-expression.

American Anthropologist

Scholars of cultural evolution and change have tended to conceptualize innovation as a process th... more Scholars of cultural evolution and change have tended to conceptualize innovation as a process that results from individual experimentation involving random or very loosely guided trial-and-error alterations to existing cultural elements. Alternatively, they have focused on individual experimentation via decision rules and different heuristics with already existing, potentially innovative cultural elements whose emergence is left unexplained. Based on ethnographic fieldwork I conducted with a number of business innovation consultancy groups in the United States, I theorize institutionalized innovation as a new engine of cultural evolution that might be unique to complex industrial societies characterized by intense intragroup competition that puts pressure on constant innovation. This engine might be responsible for a faster pace of cultural evolution. At stake is a systematic strategy of purposeful innovation that is neither entirely random nor entirely calculation based. Rather, it is based in the rationalized and rule-governed production of what I call “structured contingency,” and it is capable of being applied to products and services across different business domains, including to itself.

Signs and Society 3(S1):S13-S40, Feb 1, 2015

This essay draws on fieldwork conducted in a workshop organized in New York City by an innovation... more This essay draws on fieldwork conducted in a workshop organized in New York City by an innovation consultancy group and attended by representatives of different business corporations. In this workshop, participants are supposed to learn a set of innovation techniques for generating new products and services and to become convinced that there can
be added value in buying the consultancy group’s services. The task of the consultancy group embodies a basic cultural contradiction because innovation is widely associated with
notions that derive from a modern Romantic ethos of creativity, which itself connotes resistance to routinization. To overcome this contradiction the facilitators engage the participants
in ritual semiosis. They orchestrate densely multilayered and multimodal discursive practices that reflexively consolidate a macrosociological order, which opposes a Romantic ethos and a professional ethos, and that dynamically figurate transformations in the microsociological context of the participants’ role-inhabitance with respect to innovation—
from their role-inhabitance of a Romantic ethos at the beginning of the workshop to their entailed role-inhabitance of a professional ethos at the workshop’s end.

Public Books, Apr 15, 2015

Review of: Chromatic Algorithms: Synthetic Color, Computer Art, and Aesthetics after Code, by Kan... more Review of: Chromatic Algorithms: Synthetic Color, Computer Art, and Aesthetics after Code, by Kane, Carolyn L.

Annual Review of Anthropology 43:397-412. , Nov 1, 2014

Recurrent, most recently Romantic, ideologies conceptualize creativity as the solitary, ex nihilo... more Recurrent, most recently Romantic, ideologies conceptualize creativity as the solitary, ex nihilo creation of products of self-evident and universal value—most emblematically in the field of art—by highly exceptional individuals. Such ideologies obscure the social dimensions of creativity that come into view via anthropological analysis: (a) the nature and ubiquity of creative processes as communicative and improvisational events, with real-time emergent properties, involving human and nonhuman agents in the context of pre-existing yet malleable genres and constraints; (b) the role of socialization in the making of creative individuals, implicating processes of social reproduction; and (c) the processes by which certain objects and individuals are recognized and constructed as exemplars of creativity and thus acquire their value. This review discusses these dimensions by synthesizing cultural and linguistic/semiotic anthropological research. It concludes by addressing the recent transformation of creativity into the neoliberal philosopher's stone and the potential contribution of anthropology to the demystification of this transformation.

Current Anthropology 54(6):716-739, Dec 1, 2013

This article argues that contemporary, computer-mediated, algorithmic forms of sociality problema... more This article argues that contemporary, computer-mediated, algorithmic forms of sociality problematize a long and
major tradition in cultural anthropology, which has appropriated the notion of artistic style to theorize culture as
a relatively distinct, coherent, and durable configuration of behavioral dispositions. The article’s ethnographic site
is a lab in a major institute of technology in the United States, in which computer scientists develop computerized
algorithms that are able to simulate the improvisation styles of past jazz masters and mix them with one another
to create new styles of improvisation. The article argues that the technology that allows the scientists to simulate
and mix styles is playing an increasingly important role in mediating contemporary forms of sociality over the
Internet and that the anthropological tradition that has theorized culture as artistic style has to be reconfigured to
account for the dynamic nature of these contemporary forms of sociality not as styles but as styles of styling styles.

American Ethnologist 40(4):605-618, Nov 1, 2013

In practices that range from mechanical divination in Central Africa to gamelike interactions am... more In practices that range from mechanical divination
in Central Africa to gamelike interactions among
jazz students and the development of a
jazz-improvising humanoid robot marimba player in
the United States, contextually meaningful
contingency is widely used as a cultural resource for
negotiating problems of intentionality. Whereas
anthropologists have been concerned with the use
of contingency mostly as a cultural resource for
increasing predictability of intentions in conflictual
situations, I highlight contexts pervaded by modern
normative ideals of creativity in which predictability
of intentions constitutes a problem, for which
contextually meaningful contingency is used as a
solution. [contingency, intentionality, creativity,
semiotic mediation, mechanical divination,
computerized algorithms, jazz music]

Signs and Society 1(2):185-211, Nov 1, 2013

Against the backdrop of a long research tradition in linguistic and semiotic anthropology that ha... more Against the backdrop of a long research tradition in linguistic and semiotic anthropology that has focused almost exclusively on media technologies that reproduce Seconds, that is, specific texts in modalities such as sound and the visual image, this article focuses on media technologies that reproduce Thirds, that is, generative dispositions responsible for the production of such Seconds. It explores contemporary attempts in the United States
and France to develop computerized systems that, with the aid of specific algorithms, can abstract and enact the styles of different past jazz masters, as well as the styles of players who interactively improvise with such systems in real time. Drawing on Peircean semiotics, the article offers an analysis of these media technologies, their present application in the field of online consumption, and the cultural specificity of the Third that plays a key role in their development and reception, namely, style.