Soft is a good word for a flexible and nonhierarchical style, open to the experience of a close connection with the object of study. Using it goes along with insisting on negotiation, relationship, and attachment as cognitive virtues. Our goal is the revaluation of traditionally denigrated categories.

Turkle and Papert, “Epistemological Pluralism and the Revaluation of the Concrete” (1990ish)

An important article, which I thought to be dated and simplistic when I first read it four years ago. I had always admired Turkle’s work, but whatever — this seemed a defensive “boys and girls are different but that’s good” kind of thing at first, but it says a whole lot more than that. Turkle (I’ll just say her) argues that there are relational ways of thinking (in computing, engineering, art, just about anything) that resist the impulse to distance, objectification, hierarchy, and rigid logical categories that defines a supposedly “male” or “masculinist” sensibility that is hegemonic in computer science and other fields. She talks about bricolage, attachment, negotiation as different and patterns of behavior and thinking that, while not exclusively female, are overwhelmingly preponderant among girls and women.

I don’t know if I super love the framework of gender difference, which is characteristic of its time (the 1980s) and borrows in part from the work of Gilligan and others. But I fucking love the way she talks about people’s relationships with computer programming, digital objects, LEGOs and other things as affective, intimate, and interpersonal. This is a great bridge over the artificial distinction between caring industries and the “hard” world of tech (valorized, more or less implicitly, by Baumol). She talks about “the idea of closeness to objects.” (Her collaborator Papert famously talked about computers as “objects to think with,” in a way that foregrounds both their abstract value as thinking machines but also their utility and phenomenological reality as tools — in his book Mindstorms, which I desperately need to read.)

“A better sense of where I am in the pattern,” the 9-year old Alex says of her approach to programming with Logo. “Thinking about how the program feels like inside,” another child, Anne, says.

“Bricolage is a way to organize work. It is not a stage in a progression to a superior form,” Turkle and Papert say. This seems important to care, but in a way I can’t quite say. “For bricoleurs,” they say, “it [programming] is more like a conversation than a monologue.”

With-ness. What does this have to do with it all?

This seems key: “Gilligan’s priority shows itself in recent writing where she redescribes Kohlberg’s theory as being about only one side of moral reasoning. In this view, Kohlberg is talking about justice, thus leaving the other side of morality, namely care, to her (Gilligan, 1988).” Emphasis obviously mine.