Matereal Methods

Abstract

As Bill Chalmers, the hero of Alan Lightman’s novel The Diagnosis, finds when his world unravels due to a mysterious illness: definitive diagnoses are important but difficult to come by. Moreover, as illustrated in great variety by the chapters in this book, they are the tip of an iceberg helped into view by a colossal body of often hidden diagnostic work. In this chapter we — a social scientist and a computer scientists — would like to explore further inside this subsurface body, combining our different perspectives and observations. We will do so by examining police and fire service officers’ work in managing safety at a large (but relaxed) public entertainment event. Risk assessment and situation awareness in the context of such work are widely recognised as forms of diagnostic work (Abbott, 1988), but apart from looking at explicitly diagnostic professional practices, we also treat diagnostic work as an analyst’s category, seeking to explore phenomenological forms of ‘micro-diagnosis’. By this we mean social and material practices that enable people to take a ‘natural attitude’, that is, an attitude that ‘gears’ them into the world as for all practical purposes factual, amenable to being acted upon as well as within (Schutz, 1970), attending specifically to processes of ‘intra-action’ or the entanglement of world and action (Barad, 2007).

I once heard that when Petrov was a young physician, years ago, he occasionally made definite diagnoses, and these were often quite correct. But with the vast increase in medical technology, and with it so many new considerations to take into account, he’s limited himself.

—Alan Lightman 2000, p. 112

From its simplest to its most complex forms, perception is essentially a diagnosis.

—Herbert Spencer 1855, § 354