A phenomenological approach to algorithms, then, is concerned with excavating the meaning-making capacities that emerge as people have “strange encounters” (Ahmed, 2000) with algorithms. As chapter 5 will show, people make sense of algorithms despite not knowing exactly what they are or how they work. When the outcomes of algorithmic processing do not feel right, surprise, or come across as strangely amusing, people who find themselves afected by these outcomes start to turn their awareness toward algorithmic mechanisms and evaluate it. As with the social analytics described by Couldry et al. (2016), when modes of appearance or senses of identity are at stake, actors may reflect at length on how to influence such operational logics; and, in doing so, they performatively participate in changing the algorithmic models themselves, a key reason it is important to study actors’ own experiences of the afective landscape of algorithms.
INTERROGATING THE CONFIGURATIONS OF STRATEGIC UNKNOWNS
The final methodological tactic that I want to address here focuses on examining algorithms as configurations in situated practices. Donna Haraway’s notion of figuration is particularly instructive in this regard as it points to the individuation of figures through co-constitutive relationships. Throughout her work, Haraway develops the notion of figures and figuration as a means of talking about the ways in which diferent elements come together, both materially and discursively, to form the appearance of more or less coherent relations. The cyborg, which is probably Haraway’s most well-known figure, is to be understood, above all, as a coalition across boundaries of identity. As a figure, the cyborg is not marked by a stable identity, but by the interaction of diferent and often conflicting concepts. Figurations, then, hold together “contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes” because each idea, although conflicting, might be “necessary and true” (Haraway 1991: 149).
By conceptualizing algorithms as particular figurations that comprise and suggest conflicting ideas, we might be able to study the becoming of algorithms and the diferent ways in which algorithms come to mater in specific situations. As figurations, the identity of algorithms is variously made and unmade, and it is the analyst’s task to study when the algorithm becomes particularly pertinent and to challenge the conceptual separation between, for example, the social and the technical. Interrogating the configuration of algorithms begins with tracing out its specific cultural, historical, and political appearances and the practices through which these appearances come into being (Suchman, 2004). In this chapter, I have described this process as one of moving from a question of where the agency of algorithm is located to when it is mobilized, by whom and for what purpose.
Neither Black nor Box
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