Riles, Annelise

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Cornell Law Faculty Publications Faculty Scholarship
Summer 2002
User Friendly: Informality and Expertise
Annelise Riles
Cornell Law School, ar254@cornell.edu
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Riles, Annelise, "User Friendly: Informality and Expertise" (2002). Cornell Law Faculty Publications. Paper 1038.
http://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/facpub/1038
"FROM THE TRENCHES AND TOWERS"
COMMENTARY
User Friendly: Informality and
Expertise
Annelise Riles
Toward the end of their essay, Nader and Grande quote the provoca-
tive words of Vaclav Havel: "We have to abandon the arrogant belief that
the world is merely a puzzle to be solved, a machine with instructions for use
waiting to be discovered." What I want to do in this piece, by way of taking
on Havel's challenge, is to suggest we think more about the relationship
between informality and expertise as these appear in techniques such as
ADR, which are exported to "facilitate." These techniques go beyond the
benevolent technocratic paternalism Foucault once identified as govern-
mentality (Foucault 1991): They appeal, rather, to a new market-inspired
rationale of providing a service, filling a need, or solving a problem people
surely want solved. I want to suggest that this new "user-friendly" rationale
is far more impervious to critique, including academic critique. In this sense,
I am less interested in what the proper "solution" to the dispute resolution
debate might be as in the character of the engagement between academics
and practitioners in which this paper is situated.
I am an outsider to the ADR debate per se. However, as an ethnogra-
pher of nongovernmental organizations, with their equally innocuous "in-
formation sharing," "networking," and "skills-training" agendas, I find much
in the authors' critiques that speak powerfully to phenomena I have ob-
served (Riles 2000). In particular, I want to embrace the authors' attention
to "such mundane questions as, Who is providing funding? Who is asking
the questions? Who benefits?" (Nader and Grande 2002, 577). This turning
of ethnography on the tools of user-friendliness not only exposes the inter-
ests ADR and kindred practices serve, but also refocuses attention on how
Annelise Riles is professor of law and of anthropology, Cornell University.
© 2002 American Bar Foundation.
0897-6546/02/2703-613$01.00 613
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614 LAW & SOCIAL INQUIRY
these practices disguise interests precisely by rendering them mundane:
Sure, we receive funding from all sorts of sources, the ADR expert tells the
ethnographer, but aren't you more interested in seeing ADR at work, seeing
real people's uses of these techniques? The rest is merely background, no
different from the drudgery you encounter in your own life every day. What
is exciting here, rather, are what we actually do." This rhetoric is seductive
indeed, and Nader and Grande powerfully suggest that we nevertheless turn
our attention to the technical details and the mundane practices that are
also our own (cf. Riles forthcoming a).
I want to focus on one particularly ubiquitous image of user-friendliness
that seems to have become a kind of imperative of its own. "Informality"-
the "alternative" to "formal" dispute resolution processes in the ADR con-
text, or again in the case of NGO "networks," the alternative to old-fash-
ioned "institutions," "collectives," or "movements" (Riles 2000)-now has
powerful appeal in fields from medicine to management studies (Martin
1994). Appeals to the rhetoric of informality seem to obviate the most in-
tractable political conflicts of our time: Whatever one may think about who
should win or lose in any particular context, who could oppose jettisoning
rigid rules for flexible standards? Who could be against abandoning large
committees for informal break-out groups? In our late modern world, the
flexible, anti-institutional approach, of which ADR is a paradigmatic exam-
ple, seems more up to the minute, more hopeful, more technically sophisti-
cated (cf. Riles forthcoming c). The powerful intervention of the authors'
essay, and indeed of the larger body of Nader's work on ADR, is to make the
countercultural assertion that informal is not necessarily more just, or in-
deed more effective.
Now, as the authors point out, the fashions of formal and informal
dispute resolution come and go in a seemingly perpetual cycle. One could
read this piece as yet another step in this cycle: After several decades in
which ADR has been the fashion, perhaps this article signals a new trend, a
return to formal law. If so, the arguments presented in this article partici-
pate in a wider resurgence of interest and faith in formal law, what Justice
Scalia has termed "The Rule of Law as the Law of Rules" (Scalia 1989)-a
faith not without its own hegemonic pretensions and consequences (Riles
2001). What should we make, then, of the pendulum swings the authors
identify from formal to informal and back again? What does it mean in this
context to advocate for the one or the other?
First, we might pay attention to the agreed bases of this dispute: Advo-
cates on all sides assume a significant divide between formal and informal
law that is perhaps less self-evident than the advocates of ADR, or even the
authors of this essay, might suggest. To take one example used by the au-
thors in their paper, is the World Court really an instantiation of formal
law? From one perspective, it is; but from another perspective, the World
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Informality and Expertise 615
Court is really a form of ADR of its own-a dispute resolution forum freely
chosen by the parties, with the proviso that they may always disavow the
final decision of the arbiters without sanction. The World Court looks for-
mal from the point of view of state to state bilateral negotiations of disputes;
but it looks informal compared to bringing a suit against a foreign sovereign
in a domestic court, for example. My point is that formal and informal dis-
pute resolution procedures-and indeed formal and informal technologies
of the wider category we are considering here- exist only in relation to one
another. Without formal law, ADR is not an "alternative" at all. This is true
in the concrete legal sense, where the decisions of alternative dispute reso-
lution forums usually depend on the powers of the state and its formal legal
machineries for ultimate enforcement. Yet it is also true in the more subtle,
and pervasive "discursive" sense in which both formal and informal ap-
proaches gamer their authority and legitimacy from the implicit or explicit
comparisons they effectuate with the other.
What I want to suggest is that from this point of view to think of
formal and informal dispute resolution as alternatives, to appeal to the jus-
tice or injustice of the one in contrast to the other, is to participate in the
very vocabulary that ultimately enshrines ADR as a powerful (that is: effec-
tive, efficient, modem, technical, expert, sensitive, flexible, user friendly)
alternative. Indeed, one could take the authors' questioning of the equation
of the "informal" with the "indigenous," the "traditional," and so on a step
further: One could ask whether the entire opposition of formal and informal
which now constitutes the matrix within which the clients of international
development organizations find their options presented to them, as if in
menu form, does not in itself impose a particular technocratic epistemology
and politics upon others who may imagine themselves and their choices in
very different terms.
Rather than engaging with the opposition of formal to informal dispute
resolution as if it were a real choice that demands to be made, I prefer to
think of formal and informal as two genres of expertise (cf. Kennedy 2000).
From this standpoint, we might inquire into the sociality of expertise, as it is
fostered, represented, imagined, and expressed in dialogues between aca-
demics and practitioners-such' as this dialogue, for example-in which dif-
ferent communities (academics, practitioners) are constituted in part by the
positions their members are imagined to take, the choice they make from
the agreed menu of options, formal and informal (cf. Riles forthcoming b).
From this standpoint, there is something particular, I think, about
ADR, NGO networks, information technologies or audit practices (see
Shore and Wright 1999), and all the other technologies and techniques
that insert themselves into our lives and the lives of others as if to fill a latent
need: These technologies are troubling, and they engage the question of how
to manage the academic-practitioner divide, precisely because in these tech-
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616 LAW & SOCIAL INQUIRY
nologies, academics see their claims and arguments coming back to them,
instantiated as "real" phenomena, as options in the world. In the case of
ADR, for example, the problematization of "tradition" and traditional dis-
pute resolution norms or practices has been a central theme in the anthro-
pological theory of the 19 8 0 s and early 19 9 0 s (e.g., Moore 1992). And yet,
as Nader and Grande note, the insight is deployed in ADR practices to
effects that might give its authors pause. Or again, consider the authors' call
for greater attention to local solutions and social context: Whether or not
ADR delivers on its promises, the move to localize, to pay attention to
context, to appreciate the complexities of the situation "on the ground" is
central to the ADR commitment; it is the reason for turning away from
formal law, the core principle of its self-serving ideology. Here, then, we
have another agreed basis upon which the academic/practitioner and ADR
critic/ADR proponent divides are constructed: No one is against detailed
understandings of local disputing conditions or against contextual ap-
proaches. If they were asked to respond to the charges that they ignore local
conditions, for example, the targets of the authors' criticisms might respond
by claiming that they do pay attention to these issues. Or in typical pragma-
tist fashion, they might respond that they are doing the best they can under
complex institutional, economic, and political constraints. They would not
directly dispute the value of local knowledge, however. We need an ap-
proach to the politics of these technologies that allows us to account for the
shared theoretical bases of formal and alternative, academic and practi-
tioner, social science and technique.
This is important because the class of technologies of which ADR is an
example already anticipate the insertion of critical academic response into
their projects and programs. They extend to the academic two choices-
"engage us in the language of the programmatic; give us concrete sugges-
tions for improvement" or speak in the outsider's language of critique.
When taken at face value, this menu of discursive choices proves as intrac-
table as the menu of formal and informal dispute resolution techniques of-
fered to ADR's clients. Consider, for example, the authors' attention to the
way politics-in the sense of local and global inequalities-somehow van-
ish from the ADR dispute resolution process. I take the point of this critique
to be that this omission is not simply a matter of sheer oversight, something
that better ADR training, or better information about local conditions
would overcome. Rather, the vanishing of politics is fundamental to the
ADR process-indeed, it is its purpose. Generations of academics have
made this point, the authors note, and yet ADR has "marched on." Practi-
tioners encounter the critical insight that ADR obviates politics as quite
mundane-not much of a discovery at all-since they will cheerfully assert
that the obviation of politics is indeed their very objective. So if critique
fails, it is no wonder that in this piece, the authors choose rather to present
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Informality and Expertise 617
the question of politics in the technical, programmatic mode-politics as a
factor to be included if ADR is to become more sophisticated in the future.
In translating a critical insight into a programmatic or technical one, the
authors demonstrate the power of these technical forms to absorb even the
most fundamental challenges to their project as yet another tool in the tool-
box, or factor on the checklist.
Or again, consider what happens to ethnographic knowledge in the
hands of the ADR expert: The authors point out that the ADR rhetoric of
commitment to contextual understanding of the cultural facts of disputing is
rarely honored in practice. This in turn creates a rhetorical problem for the
authors: If their essay actually engaged with the ethnographic literature in
great contextual detail, it would become unintelligible to its target audience
of ADR practitioners because the latter are interested in general arguments
about the nature of their engagement with the particular, not in the particu-
lar per se. What we have here is an example of the aesthetics of user-
friendly expertise: Detail disappears and is replaced by a gesturing toward
detail.
I first encountered this problem in the context of ethnographic work
on "networks" of nongovernmental organizations in the Pacific. Despite all
the talk within these organizations of creating informal structures that
would "reach out" to the "grassroots" and foster "information sharing" in all
directions-from top to bottom and across the network-in practice, very
little information moved through the networks I studied, although
networkers spent many hours examining organizational diagrams and dis-
cussing ways of keeping in touch. A cynic might dismiss this as incompe-
tence or worse; a believer in the liberal development agenda might question
whether this distortion of the primacy of substance over form is just the
absurd particularity of a faraway place. Yet if we think of the time we aca-
demics devote to our own funding application procedures, protocols, website
design, evaluations, auditing processes, or mission statements, and the way
in which the substance of what we care about is replaced in these practices
with the effect of substance and detail, I think we can recognize that the
practices of networkers in Fiji are not as distant as these true believers might
claim.
To return to ADR and the ways in which informality has become its
own realm of expertise, my point is that it is not just that standardized
solutions have replaced specific ones. Rather, in these new technologies we
encounter the standardization of the specific: The expert's manual becomes
a kind of formal tool of its own-one can take it anywhere-but it ac-
knowledges and even points to its own gaps; it makes room for the inclusion
of local conditions and specificities. It incorporates in advance the critiques
of the anthropologist by gesturing at repeated moments to the local, the
particular, the need for translation and adaptation, and by translating our
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618 LAW & SOCIAL INQUIRY
analytical perspectives-our concerns about the vanishing of power, for ex-
ample-into technical factors to be taken into account by the expert. The
particular becomes quite literally a gap in the expert form, something
imagined, prefigured by expert knowledge itself (Riles 2000). This standard-
ization of the particular depends, however, on imagining and constituting a
point of need-a place for the technologies to insert themselves into others'
lives and for those others' particularities to express themselves into the
technologies. As Havel's comments suggest, these technologies produce
users. They are quite literally user-friendly.
In this essay, Nader and Grande engage the hegemonic institutional-
ization of a heady fantasy of liberal communication, a hope that political
conflict can be resolved through new and ever more technological solutions
(Baudrillard 1994). I take their insight to be that what the critics of liber-
alism have too often missed are the procedures and processes, the mundane
technical details that draw us (academics and practitioners alike) into a
faith in dialogue, in imagining the world as sets of problems and solutions.
What I want to suggest here is that we have in the form of informality, and
its self-image as an "alternative," one important element of this aesthetic of
the technical through which our collective hope in the liberal fantasy is
continually renewed. From this vantage point, the present political moment
demands a response that is neither in the mode of critique nor of technoc-
racy. It demands an encounter with what is invisible or uninteresting pre-
cisely because it is shared by the academic and the practitioner as the agreed
basis of our disputes and claims to expertise.
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User Friendly: Informality and Expertise

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