The Politics of Schemas: Part 1
by Kendall Grant Clark | Pages: 1, 2

Schemas reflect particular interests

Schemas are political, in the first sense, because they serve or reflect particular interests, thus tending to exclude the interests of others. Schemas may be political in another sense by formalizing an understanding of a world-chunk that's strongly or weakly contested. Here I'm adapting the idea of contestedness from W.B. Gallie's classic essay "Essentially Contested Concepts" and William Connolly's The Terms of Political Discourse. The meaning of an essentially contested concept is perpetually contested and recognized as such by the parties of the contest (among several other criteria). Democracy is an example of a Galliean essentially contested concept.

Contestedness is of course a practical reality of rational deliberation, and schema-making is partly constituted of rational deliberation. Some world-chunks are or contain social, economic, or cultural practices, conventions, or resources the meanings of which are strongly or weakly contested. A strongly contested world-chunk is one that is or contains concepts or practices the meanings of which are contested in principle. A weakly contested world-chunk is one which is or contains concepts or practices the meanings of which are decidable in principle, but which have been so long or so intensely contested that the relevant parties can conceive of no mutually satisfactory resolution. If the chunk of the world formalized by a schema is (or contains that which is) weakly or strongly contested, the schema necessarily takes a position not shared by all relevant parties.

When a world-chunk is contested, its schema necessarily formalizes an understanding that is not shared by the relevant parties. In other words, it favors or privileges one understanding among many. Insofar as schemas are developed by institutions with particular interests and understandings of contested world-chunks, the schemas they produce will reflect those interests and understandings, which are likely at odds with the interests and understandings of others. How common are nontrivial, wholly uncontested world-chunks? As one might expect, schemas, like other technological productions, reflect the contested understandings of the institutions that produce them.

Schemas confer power

But politics is about power and coercion as much as it is about interests, discourse, and deliberation. Schemas that are de facto or de jure standards empower the institutions that produce and control them. What is the nature of that power? The answer lies in the nature of social power as asymmetrical access, an idea developed by the feminist philosopher Marilyn Frye in "Some Reflections on Separatism and Power" (Frye 1983). "Access is," Frye says, "one of the faces of Power" (Frye 1983, p. 103). If I have power over a person I have greater access to that person than the person has to me; and this asymmetry of access is directly proportional to the power difference between us. The more power I have, the less access the other has to me, and the more access I have to the other. As Frye says,

Differences of power are always manifested in asymmetrical access. The President of the United States has access to almost everybody for almost anything he might want of them, and almost nobody has access to him. The super-rich have access to almost everybody; almost nobody has access to them. The resources of the employee are available to the boss as the resources of the boss are not to the employee. The parent has unconditional access to the child's room; the child does not have similar access to the parent's room ... The slave is unconditionally accessible to the master. Total power is unconditional access; total powerlessness is being unconditionally accessible. The creation and manipulation of power is constituted of the manipulation and control of access (Frye 1983, p. 103).

Applying Frye's notion of social power to schema-making is easy enough. Standards are sites of social power. Controlling them confers power. Access to standards is largely asymmetrical. Institutions that control a schema qua standard have access thereby to the understanding of a world-chunk formalized by the schema. But few who use, directly or indirectly, the schema have access to it. Schema-makers have access to those who use the schema by influencing, even determining, the ways in which they interact with parts of the world.

Institutions that control schemas that structure widely used Semantic Web applications will have power over users. A sign of that power will be patterns of asymmetrical access. Users will have no access to the schema, except when controlling institutions are democratic, and no power to control, change, or improve it to reflect or better reflect their interests or understandings of the world. The controlling institution has significant access to the ways in which these users interact with the world through the mediation of machines and machine representations of the world.

A schema is never neutral ground upon which the relevant parties meet, on equal terms of symmetrical access, to agree to machine representations of a world-chunk. Like the child's room, the worker's shop floor, and the slave's body, schema users are likely to inhabit territory they do not control, territory controlled by institutions with interests and understandings perhaps inimical to their own. Children are not employees, neither children nor employees are slaves, none of whom are Semantic Web users; but the idea of power as asymmetrical access applies to each.

So by the "politics of schemas" I mean two senses: first, the interests reflected in the schema, which are the interests of the institution of production; and, second, the adjudication of strongly and weakly contested world-chunks. In short, schemas are political when they shut out some interests while serving others, and when they take positions on contested questions and issues. Having determined the ways schemas may be political, the conditions under which they may be apolitical are clear as well. Schemas are apolitical when all relevant (that is, all affected) parties have the same interests, and the world-chunk formalized by the schema is not contested. Neither is a sufficient and both are necessary conditions of apolitical schemas.

I have shown two ways in which schemas, and schema-employing technologies like the Semantic Web, may be political. In the second part of this essay, I will explain the relevance of political schemas to the XML community and what the XML community can and should do about them.

Works Cited

William E. Connolly, The Terms of Political Discourse, Princeton University Press, 1993.
Donald Davidson, ``On the Very Idea of A Conceptual Scheme,'' Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, Oxford University Press, 1984.
Marilyn Frye, The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory, The Crossing Press, 1983.
W. B. Gallie, `` Essentially Contested Concepts,'' in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 56(n.s.), 1956.
Donald MacKenzie, Inventing Accuracy: A Historical Sociology of Nuclear Missile Guidance, MIT Press, 1993.
David Noble, America by Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism, Oxford University Press, 1979.
--------, Forces of Production: A Social History of Industrial Automation, Oxford University Press, 1986.
Michael Perelman, Class Warfare in the Information Age, St. Martin's Press, 1998.
Herbert Schiller, Information Inequality: The Deepening Social Crisis in America, Routledge, 1996.
--------, Culture Inc.: The Corporate Takeover of Public Expression, Oxford University Press, 1991.
John Searle, The Construction of Social Reality, Free Press, 1995.
Paul Strassmann, The Politics of Information Management: Policy Guidelines, Information Economics Press, 1994.

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