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Aesthetics and the Infrastructural Turn in the Digital Humanities

2016; Duke University Press; Volume: 88; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00029831-3650271

1527-2117

Jessica Hurley,

Digital Games and Media

The infrastructures of the digital humanities are, like all the best infrastructures, simultaneously omnipresent and invisible. The digital humanities depend on and operate through a vast, interlocked network of objects, capital, people, and ideologies: ASCII code; fiber-optic cables; tenure lines; server farms; research centers and literature labs; wage laborers and graduate students who scan, attach metadata, and program search functions; the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA); the manpower, capital, and geopolitical location required to apply for a .edu domain name ($185,000, US institutions only); laptops; postdoctoral fellowships; silicon mines; Silicon Valley; the contemporary fetish for STEM in higher education. And while more and more resources are accruing to digital humanities scholarship, developing more and more entrenched infrastructures for its practice within academic institutions, relatively little attention has been paid within that scholarship to the infrastructures of the digital itself. Digital humanities scholarship is primarily seen and sold as a method, an ideologically transparent tool for analyzing and representing data, allowing a devalued humanities profession to accrue scientific status.Recognizing digital humanities scholarship’s blindness to its own conditions of production, Alan Liu called in 2012 for a new “intellectual infrastructure” for the digital humanities that would take its own cultural and technological practices as an object of critical interrogation (“Where Is the Cultural Criticism in the Digital Humanities?” in Debates in the Digital Humanities, edited by Matthew Gold, Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press [2012], 502). The five books discussed in this review collectively constitute a wide-ranging and timely response to Liu’s call, theorizing in different ways the stakes of scholarship in the digital age. Infrastructure emerges here as what lies below the search function, the database, the educational videogame, or the concept of digital media itself: the histories, technologies, media corporations, languages, and ideologies that subtend not only digital humanities scholarship but so much of life in the digital age. Most compellingly—and perhaps unexpectedly—this collection reveals the centrality of aesthetics to digital infrastructures, raising an exciting new set of questions to which the digital humanities might be attuned: no longer asking how we can use digital methods to read literary objects, but rather how we might come to see digital and new media objects as co-constituted by science and art, requiring a reading practice that can attend to both.Orit Halpern’s impressive Beautiful Data opens in a futurist city whose infrastructure is completely determined by its relationship to data. In Songdo, South Korea, the world’s largest private real estate development, digital media are the beginning and end of urban space, including buildings whose primary function is to gather and transmit data, and biotechnological sensors in the walls that transform the intimate movements of the human body into another interface for transmitting data that can be collected, packaged, and sold. The logic that subtends Songdo’s massive infrastructures, Halpern argues, is one that has developed from early post–World War II cybernetics into the primary way in which we conceptualize the world: as an endless stream of data that demands to be organized and aestheticized. Rather than valorizing or attacking our data-driven present, Halpern historicizes the transformations in attitudes to observation, cognition, and visualization that were necessary to produce the world in which digital humanities scholarship now finds itself, where data visualization becomes “the benchmark of truth, and . . . a moral and democratic virtue” (148). Bringing together the history of science with studies of media, affect, and aesthetics, Beautiful Data offers a compelling account of the epistemological infrastructures of the digital that have, since 1945, radically changed the ways we see, interpret, and think.After opening her book with digital infrastructures at their most totalizing scale, Halpern turns to the postwar writings of Norbert Wiener, the MIT-based mathematician who coined the term cybernetics to define systems of communication and control. In a move that defines Halpern’s scholarly approach, she takes the well-known figure of Wiener and situates him along three contextual planes: his synchronic relationship to peers such as Warren McCulloch and Claude Shannon, his diachronic relationship to past thinkers of selfhood and time such as Sigmund Freud and Henri Bergson, and his diachronic relationship to the future, where Halpern shows how Wiener’s theories come to shape the work of thinkers far beyond the field that we would normally identify as cybernetics, such as Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze, and Jacques Derrida. As the chapter circulates through Wiener’s epistemological past, present, and future, a story emerges that traces not only how an idea came to transform our understanding of memory, selfhood, and time, but also how that idea circulated into its future, what its impacts were, and how it contained within itself possible futures that are not as present in our present as they might have been and yet were not entirely lost, that left traces of resistance behind them. Subsequent chapters focus on data, perception, and environment in the work of Gyorgy Kepes and Charles Eames; irrational cognition in the psychological theories of Warren McCulloch and Gregory Bateson; and the aesthetics of information design and/as population control in the high Cold War. These chapters similarly track how new theories of data and perception produced new material infrastructures, which in turn trained subjects in new modes of perception and cognition—all the while showing how these theories and infrastructures are in themselves quite indeterminate, as they circulate in a larger intellectual ecosystem whose interactions are not limited to monolinear cause and effect.This is the beauty of Halpern’s scholarly method, which she defines as cybernetic, attentive to “history as a matter of densities and probabilities rather than deterministic relations” (36). This is a book that performs its most important argument: that while this past produced our present in a story that Halpern’s detailed archival work brings to light, that story is nonetheless contingent. Cybernetics becomes visible here as a set of epistemologies that produces fantasies and infrastructures of total surveillance, total control, the ultimate victory of governmentality. But it is also a method that, for Halpern as well as for the postwar theorists, architects, designers, and computer scientists that populate Beautiful Data, offers a temporality that is radically nondeterminate and a model of interlinked subjectivity that forcefully counters Cold War logics of paranoia and containment.Central to the cybernetic theories that Halpern historicizes in Beautiful Data is the concept of the black box: for cyberneticians, any entity is most usefully seen as one whose internal organization may be “opaque, unseen, and potentially different” but whose behavior or action is nonetheless “intelligible and predictable” (44). Subjectivity or interiority becomes irrelevant, and the object is “black boxed,” viewed only from the outside. One of the most striking features of the digital humanities has been its move to black-box literature itself, as in Franco Moretti’s concept of distant reading, which uses data visualization methods (graphs, maps, trees) to show how a book, genre, or motif travels across time and space without including the content, or meaning, of the text within its interpretation. Aaron Jaffe’s quirky yet surprisingly gripping The Way Things Go: An Essay on the Matter of Second Modernism offers a useful corrective to several recent movements, from distant reading to object-oriented ontology, that reduce objects, including the objects of literary study, to pure behavior.Although Jaffe does not address cybernetics directly, he takes as his object of critique the fantasy that undergirds it: a world of black-boxed objects whose behaviors and communications can be mapped and predicted, and whose attempts at communication never fail. The Way Things Go, written as an instruction manual for the book itself, followed by a succession of short sections counting down from 100 to 0, is modeled on a Rube Goldberg machine: that collection of active things that, once positioned, unfurl their own thingly narrative. In second modernity, the world of complex systems, “we are given the world with the snapshots, the programmed chain of rigged things, we can observe, and remember to communicate about” (48). Yet, as Jaffe points out, each of the objects in the Goldberg machine must be placed, propped, coiled, or balanced by human labor that is then concealed within the seemingly independent interplay of things. “The human is black-boxed inside the machine . . . presenting a mise-en-scène of the human side effect without the human” (50). By transforming the object from the effect of human endeavor to a side effect, Jaffe expands the scope of thing theory to include the small, frivolous, throwaway, and broken. In so doing, he effectively historicizes the emergence of second modernity, in which the world of things becomes understood as uncontrollable and incomprehensible, as a product of modernist critical theories and aesthetic methods that established the world of things as one of endless production, consumption, novelty, and waste.Like Halpern, Jaffe refuses a teleological narrative structure for his account of the way things go. This refusal of linear storytelling is, again, a performative enactment of the theory being established; in this case, that “stories about stuff are insufficient as critical practice for the way things go” (130). Ideas and objects appear and vanish throughout the book like novelty items in the modern marketplace: dribbling glasses, Charles Baudelaire, and novelty as central to modernism; soap, Fight Club (1999), Ulrich Beck, and waste as central to second modernity. Like the Goldberg machine, it feels deeply constructed; this way of encountering things, texts, and concepts is unintuitive, relying on a logic of juxtaposition and circulation by which an argument accretes as the machine runs through its pre-established set of movements. At the same time, it enacts Jaffe’s own critique of the Goldberg machine, drawing constant attention to the accumulation of objects that is required to make the book itself comprehensible. As a readerly experience, it is by turns exhilarating and frustrating in a way that I suspect depends on one’s own readerly accumulation of scholarly things. Concepts pass quickly from novelty to waste here. They flash up and are gone, so that more than a passing knowledge of Gérard Genette is required to fully appreciate the argument that Jaffe makes about mimologics, and a familiarity with the Jeff Goldblum filmography is necessary to transform the metaphor of Richard Powers’s novel Gain (1998) as a “brundlefly” into an effective commentary on its bipartite structure with overtones of the irreversible nature of risk in the face of new technologies (99). His objects, in other words, quite frequently fail to communicate, and his method demands a constant excavation of both the book’s black boxes and our own. Without the history of our own scholarly and cultural labor, the book will fail to communicate with us, or us with it. Jaffe’s argument that literary criticism is the mode appropriate to the analysis of so many nonliterary objects is thus particularly powerful when thinking about the occluded infrastructures of the digital humanities, as he so effectively demonstrates the need for literary-critical interpretation of infrastructure itself, suggesting modes in which digital humanities scholarship might approach digital objects through literary methods rather than the other way round.Such a literary-critical approach to digital objects is exemplified by Colin Milburn’s Mondo Nano. Required reading for anyone working in the digital humanities, media studies, or in the transdisciplinary spaces of science and literature, Milburn’s book models several different literary approaches to digital objects. Close readings of videogames, massively multiplayer online games, and promotional texts published by the nanotech industry produce compelling portraits of the current nanotechnological imaginary, but even more impressive is Milburn’s literary-scientific-historical account of how nanotechnology has been shaped, from its beginning, by its engagement with “the liquid forces of history, mythology, games, literature, and the arts” (107). In Mondo Nano, digital infrastructures at every scale, from the molecule-sized car to the forthcoming metropolis of NanoCity in northern India, are inseparable from the digital aesthetics through which they are first conceptualized and that they, in turn, inspire and produce.Milburn shares with Jaffe a ludic approach to scholarship. Mondo Nano is a book about games and play, and it develops a mode of writing that is playfully suited to the object under consideration: a scientific world that consistently imagines and invents itself through games, as scientific breakthroughs are bodied forth as molecular-level games of soccer and a game-playing public takes up nanotech piecework for fun in Foldit. Opening with an analysis of IBM’s 2013 video of a molecule boy playing with an atom, Milburn quickly establishes that the work of nanotechnology is inseparable from the world of play. The following chapters trace the serious implications of this ludic technology, always situated somewhere between the future and the present, as it makes itself part of lived experience through videogames that create in advance the citizens of future nanotech worlds, military research priorities that translate superhero fantasies into next-generation supersoldiers, and plans for nanotech cities that force us to question the nature of power and freedom, and whose futures face off with the futures of speculative finance. In addition to analyzing the complex temporalities and politics of nanotech objects, Milburn also develops an arresting theorization of play itself as a mode by which we might encounter and manage the second modernity described by Jaffe, an incomprehensible world of complex systems whose structures lie far beyond—or perhaps beneath—any form of human comprehension. Play, according to Milburn, “is a form of engagement, a manner of learning, experiencing, and experimenting from the bottom up, little by little, bit by bit. . . . When it is no longer possible to imagine sufficient mastery of anything, having fun becomes a significant alternative to having formal expertise” (294). Concretizing deconstruction’s abstract formulation of play through his depiction of a world made of games, Milburn both reveals the importance of play in creating the world in which we live and offers a useful scholarly method that sacrifices mastery to play while maintaining rigorous standards of scholarship.The final chapter of Mondo Nano, a history of avatars from Hindu mythology to the present, is written as an exchange between avatars in Second Life and over e-mail. One day in Second Life, Colin Milburn’s avatar Colin Dayafter and a stranger called PerkyPat Sorciere strike up a conversation. Milburn proceeds to send PerkyPat (whose name, unlike Colin’s, does not change in her email address) updates about his ongoing research. This chapter, performing knowledge production somewhere along the boundary of history, fiction, and play, enacts Milburn’s argument that an avatar is always a kind of intertextual crossing. (Perky Pat is an avatar figure into which bored colonists project themselves in Philip K. Dick’s 1965 novel The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch.) But it also makes an argument about the kind of reading that is appropriate to digital culture. Here, at the far end of the book’s spectrum of playfulness, Milburn calls forth a different kind of reader than is required by the rest of the book. As realization dawns that we are encountering some kind of fictional object, the focus shifts from a purely analytical to a literary-critical mode of thought: close reading becomes the appropriate heuristic to figure out what’s going on in this now-fictional text.This is, I think, a deliberate and important claim. Nanotech is inspired by a fantasy that it shares with another cocreation of art and science: the digital humanities. The perfect world of nanotech is inspired by “the desire for more and more information—in other words, the digitization of everything”; in its ideal form, nanotech offers a world where molecules are equivalent to bits, where there is no distinction between digital and analog, a world that is fully programmable at the molecular level (5). As digital humanities scholarship sediments into a set of practices that applies digital methods to aesthetic objects, Milburn offers a crucial reminder that digital methods have infrastructures of their own, infrastructures that require an aesthetic heuristic with which to approach them: not only because the critical analysis of objects is the practice of literary criticism but also because digital archives, search functions, and visualization programs are not and have never been separable from the aesthetic world to which we apply them. Their logics and determining fantasies come from speculative fiction, comic books, films, and games, and when we treat digital objects as black boxes, mere tools, we risk ignoring their aesthetic origins and thus devaluing the aesthetic heuristics that are not obsolete in the digital age, but are more central than ever.Two recent first books by emerging scholars in new media studies offer important interventions into what it means to think about medium itself as an aesthetic infrastructure in the digital age. Jeff Scheible’s Digital Shift takes as its object of study a world in which Facebook avatars can express political positions through equal signs, internet communication is controlled by periods, and the social becomes #searchable. For Scheible, punctuation is the medium by which a predigital system of written language is transferred across the digital shift into the age of computation. Through analyses of the period, the parenthesis, and the hashtag developed through close readings of three twenty-first century films, Digital Shift demonstrates its major claims quite convincingly: that “typographical marks correspond to particular styles of thinking,” and that “in the context of the emergence of digital media, the roles of textuality in media culture have undergone a series of shifts” (8). Especially strong is Scheible’s theorization of punctuation as a language image that also serves as a kind of affective system of diacritics, an extralinguistic conductor of feeling through the logic gates of a punctuated organizing system. Digital Shift is brief, however, weighing in at just over 140 pages of argument, and its promise to unpack “the aesthetics, ideologies, logics, and politics” (43) of punctuation falls rather beyond its own scope. The historicization of the dot-com boom in the chapter on periods, for example, is so fleeting that claims that are in themselves provocative—“the period, a self-enclosed sphere, emerges as both a synecdoche for the world but also a more manageable version of it . . . at a time when the globe seems to be spiraling out of control”—lack the necessary contextual architecture to support their own weight (70). Nonetheless, Digital Shift’s contribution to new media studies, and the digital humanities more generally, is a valuable one, demonstrating the innate textuality of the digital itself as well as a mode of literary-theoretical analysis that is well suited to the digital-textual object.The nature of the aesthetic object is the fundamental question behind Matt Tierney’s What Lies Between. Tierney constructs an intriguing back-formation from the present day to show how the emerging new media studies of the mid-twentieth century staked its claim on technological grounds, thereby establishing the “media” of new media as a purely technological object. Technologies then take on a determining role in media theory to the extent Marshall McLuhan’s famous claim that “the medium is the message” comes to set the terms of analysis: seek the technological nature of the medium, and you will find the nature of the message. This version of media theory streamlines the idea of medium into a form of perfect communication: transparent, fully readable, never failing to transfer the message from sender to recipient. Such a theory, Tierney argues, aligns our “post-political” present with the center-ground consensus that defined American political life in the 1950s and 1960s, and it is against a fully communicative, consensus-based imaginary that Tierney sets the “void aesthetics” of his title: “Where consensus built on the media of what Jodi Dean (2009) has called communicative capitalism, void aesthetics capitalized on a different definition of medium when it mobilized art’s world-making energy—against technocracy and consensus and on behalf of collective life” (7). By excavating a counterhistory of medium itself, Tierney seeks to both challenge the consensus narrative of post-1945 America and redefine medium not as black-boxed technology but as “the shifting but shared space of community formation” (57).What Lies Between powerfully uncovers the space of resistance that formed around the cybernetic ideal of perfect communication whose development and legacies Halpern delineates in Beautiful Data and whose limits Jaffe explores in The Way Things Go. Within this space, the void comes to represent any moment where communication or aesthetic cohesion fails, where the distance between ideal and material forms or speaker and listener is not ignored or suppressed but instead productively figures “the very idea of mediation: in-betweenness, the suppressed problematic of contestation, conflict, and structural exclusion” (10). Tierney ranges widely across the post–World War II period, tracking the figure of the void through postwar films and texts by Richard Wright, Douglas Sirk, and Paul Goodman, among others, to show how traces of failed communication register resistance to political and social ideals of consensus. Particularly successful is the book’s final chapter, which reads mid-century readings of Herman Melville by big-name Americanists to show how even the thinkers that we now most associate with the Cold War consensus—Lionel Trilling, Richard Chase, Richard Poirier—used Moby-Dick’s (1851) voids and blanks to mark the internal ruptures within postpolitical thought. This literary-historical work not only challenges the very idea of a fully coherent postwar consensus culture that would not break until the 1960s, but also convincingly argues that the concept of negativity—arriving on American shores from Europe in the form of deconstruction and Frankfurt School philosophy—was so popular in part because Americanists had already been thinking in those terms, even as positivity seemed to have absolute sway. Rehistoricizing American studies to crack open the black box of technological mediation, Tierney shows the critical purchase that can be gained on media infrastructures if the medium itself can be seen as a historically contingent and socially contested object that contains within itself traces of struggle, protest, and failure.These five books range widely across the globe and the past two centuries, situating the post-45 period as a shifting object constituted by the intersections of ever-mobile temporal, spatial, technological, and aesthetic vectors. What emerges from considering them together is not a clearly defined portrait of technological aesthetics in the computational era but a more complexly unexpected heuristic, a way of looking at the braided interface between message, medium, and material world through which the aesthetic/technological object becomes one of the infrastructures of the real, “a primary dimension of political economy and social being: not so much a thing as a deep process at the heart of the world” (Milburn 114). From Scheible and Tierney’s movement against what Jaffe might describe as the novelty of the new in new media, to the ludic, performative modes of scholarly writing whereby Jaffe, Milburn, and Halpern make us critically aware of the many infrastructures through which knowledge is developed and communicated, each of these books offers a new methodology for un-black-boxing the technologies of the digital real. Excavating the black boxes of the digital age, these books signal a new intellectual infrastructure for the digital humanities that foregrounds aesthetic practices and methods and, crucially, makes the digital itself an object of critique and a site of resistance.