|
Archive download the following text as pdf-file
THIRD OAKLAND TABLE,
1st of September to 6th of October 2001 called off
From "making up one's
mind" to "decision-making"
Career decisions, investment
options, health care provisions, life style choices, family planning,
dietary options - at every turn one is challenged to make decisions.
Counselors offer to help in decision-making on vacation plans
or the hair color fitting your skin, running versus jogging,
or on tolerable ways to end a marriage. Even the Church goes
after its lost sheep with slogans to make the ultimate decision
that counts.
Decades ago, food, clothes
and shelter had become commodities and thereby objects of consumer
choice: In the supermarket, the mix of nutritional inputs spoils
the appetite; the choice between NIKE and ADIDAS obviates old-time
shopping; and resale value looms larger than commitment to neighbors.
Now, intangibles increasingly require decision-making also. While
just twenty years ago doctors urged clients to follow their orders,
now they have become counselors who offer a menu of options from
which they expect the informed client to make a selection. They
no longer dare recommend a therapy, but rather confront their
patient with test parameters, therapeutical options and the risk
corresponding to each. The patient himself might be burdened
with the choice between an experimental drug, a dangerous operation,
or a course of radiation treatments.
The devolution of decisions
to the client or consumer is generally praised as liberation
from expert control. Instead of being at the mercy of the physician's
judgment, the patient is cast into a decision-maker on his own
behalf. But choosing among preestablished options on the basis
of statistical probabilities has nothing to do with what decision
meant only half a century ago. Well into the seventeenth century,
a creek could "decide", separate the traveler from
the others. A judge decides a case by settling a dispute. In
contrast to modern usage, choice was not a synonym for decision.
Decision-making as a term and practice was unknown before World
War II. It came up as a technical term in strategical planning
by both the military and transnational corporations. Only towards
the end of the twentieth century did it overshadow the ways people
make up their minds: The richness of memories, tastes, phantasies,
and metaphors, all embedded in customs and traditions, that led
to picking out this goose and serving it to the guest Sunday
night dissolved into a technical model. Since statisticians and
cyberneticists adopted "decision" as a technical term
for the algorithmic determination of a defined option, the common
sense notion has been fundamentally changed. "Decision"
is now understood as the selection of an option that follows
a formalized procedure. Having lost its power to denote a concrete
human action, "decision" might refer to Sarah who wishes
to marry her long term boyfriend, to little Hassan going for
vanilla ice cream, to a fly reacting to an approaching shadow,
or to the series of zeros and ones that was calculated by a digital
algorithm.
During the Third Oakland
Table, we want to explore this shift from making up one's mind
to decision-making. Our disciplined skepticism toward decision-making
emerges from the previous discussions at Jerry Brown's Table:
During the First Oakland Table,
we contrasted global, homogeneous "space", where people
only appear as variables for planners and designers, with places
that emerge when people dwell in mutual commitment. Since then,
the terms "space" and "place" have served
us to contrast these two incomparable spheres: On the one hand,
Mayor Brown oversees in City Hall the management of administrative
constructs such as crime rate, drop-out rates and traffic flows.
On the other hand, Brown shares his house with guests; presides
a table, and fosters conversations in an unique atmosphere.
The distinction between
"place" and "space" led us to focus our conversations
at the Second Oakland Table on
the most fundamental arts of creating a place: We asked ourselves
how to celebrate hospitality in the space age. "Space"
is designed for different manageable functions such as traffic,
consumption, labor and recreation. In "space", there
is no place for the loose such as the crippled, sick, kids or
dying. They have all been put on a leash: Each category has been
put into a spatial domain where they are transformed into consumers
with needs that can only be satisfied by professional service
agents.
When the traditions of
leading a stranger over a host's threshold have been destroyed
by the professional service industry, the practice of hospitality
is no longer a cultural given. Sometimes, however, it emerges
unexpectedly: Even in row houses, apartments, workshops, or at
street corners and alleyways, which are designed as inhospitable
space, some people succeed in making them hospitable, and thereby
allow places to emerge within city space. When local guests brought
flowers from their communal gardens and offered homemade cookies
at our Saturday night's gathering, they introduced a whiff of
the hospitality of Oakland's dwellers.
Decision-making calls for
making "space" the basis for personal and political
deliberation. In innumerable forms, incentives, generally offered
in form of "counseling", turn people into clients.
They are urged to understand themselves as individual cases of
statistical populations: as a case of the unemployed, retarded,
single mothers, bisexuals or pregnant women at risk. In order
to enable them to make so-called informed decisions, they are
seduced to act upon statistical probabilities that characterize
the cohort they are assigned to, but per definition convey nothing
about a single person.
In September 2001, we want
to lay the foundations for a critical stance toward the enticement
of decision-making. We want to pay attention to the increase
of counselors and facilitators who persuade citizens to observe
and optimize themselves like managers administer their stocks?
How did it happen that thinking of oneself as an individual case
of a statistical population is now taken for granted? Why did
a bureaucratic logic - goal setting, fact finding, and deciding
on the basis of statistical calculations - become the most promoted
way of reasoning? And, finally, how to open room for people whose
choices are phantastic, foolish, principled, anarchic, primitive,
erratic, out of season? |