Rumbling on performativity_Frits Simon

me. Implementation of the new strategy would become an extension of the process.
From a power perspective a wiki is a panoptical instrument, a technology by which
the user is aware of being watched and therefore complies to the situation (Foucault,
1975). I also took into account that differences in points of view would not become too
big because we all are in the same swarm (Christakis and Fowler, 2010; Ginneken,
2009). But in principle I was prepared to deal with an unpredicted outcome of the
wiki-project and I had no intention of controlling the discussion, nor had the executive
board of the UAS.
However, I realize that acting human beings never know in reality what the accumulation
of their acting will signify. In stating this it sounds as if I interpret the acts of
human beings as fractals composing a new synergy. For me this orientation on human
beings is based on the concept of epistéme of Foucault (1966). An epistéme is described
as a certain period in time, in which reality is interpreted according to an evolved
set of signifiers. With some restrictions regarding the historical scale an epistéme can
be compared with the concept of a social object of Mead, because in the social interactions
objects are constituted by which a number of people start to act in certain
way. “Organic processes or responses in a sense constitute the objects to which they
are responses.” (Mead, 1934: 77).
Based on the work of Foucault I feel comfortable with a concept of power which
practice is located in everyday interactions, including the battle with dominant discourses
or as Stacey would call them second order abstractions (Stacey, 2010). For the
way the discourses in our society are formed and prolonged Foucault speaks of micropower
strategies, by which the interpretations of the situations are conditioned. If the
wisdom of the crowd is practised, micro-power is there in words, revision and coalitions.
To summarize the kinship as supposed by me between a complex responsive processapproach
and the concept of the wisdom of the crowd as interpreted by me has
ideological, theoretical and practical dimensions. The idealizations about human
beings within a complex responsive process-approach can be described as an actionist,
communicative (dialogical and reciprocal) and pragmatist’s orientation on human
beings. My interpretation and dealing with the wisdom of the crowd corresponds with
these idealizations by emphasizing accepted truth as a result of conversation, in which
human beings deal with each other as part of an ongoing process. Theoretically the
kinship is based on the similarities between the central concepts of a complex responsive
process-approach and the concepts which I derived from philosophy, neuropsychology,
symbolic interactionism and language-analysis.
In a practical sense the kinship is based on the fact that in day to day conversation
human reality emerges and changes, and that every participant contributes – whether
conscious or not – to what is happening. In this respect the wisdom of the crowd
rules, even if one thinks that this is not wise.
3. My taken for granted assumptions as a researcher | 83