Digital Aesthetics

Sean Cubitt

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 1998
• ISBN:
  9781446226636
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The aesthetic nature and purposes of computer culture in the contemporary world are investigated in this book. Sean Cubitt casts a cool eye on the claims of cybertopians, tracing the globalization of the new medium and enquiring into its effects on subjectivity and sociality.

Drawing on historical scholarship, philosophical aesthetics and the literature of cyberculture, the author argues for a genuine democracy beyond the limitations of the free market and the global corporation. Digital arts are identified as having a vital part to play in this process. Written in a balanced and penetrating style, the book both conveniently summarizes a huge literature and sets a new agenda for research and theory.

1

READING THE INTERFACE

When my father died it was like
A whole library had burned down

(Anderson 1994: 227)

Cybercafé

In small rooms in clubs, and in customised bars where a quarter buys a few minutes of connection, you can log on to the matrix. You don’t spill your coffee, and you don’t smoke because it damages the hard drives. There’s little to observe, except the absorption, and nothing to understand unless you are absorbed. No two screens show the same thing, quite often not even similar things. And yet there’s something familiar. Several things familiar. The book is dead, so the graffiti on the wall says, though there are books on sale here, million-selling titles on netsurfing, virtual homesteading, cyberpunk and hacker theology. Someone is searching an archive; on another screen there’s a little illuminated manuscript where quicktime figures flicker gently in the video breeze (what a shame that this beautiful effect will be superseded by next-generation liquid crystal displays with a transistor for every pixel). There’s an online Shakespeare, Moby Dick, dictionaries and a Bible left by electronic Gideons. Elsewhere, you browse through search engines to unearth the themes and concatenations of themes that lure you. Someone is writing a letter. In the myriad worlds of digital comms, reading and the architectures of reading persist and will persist, even after shopping-’n’-fucking novels and comic books become props in costume dramas. The world is at your fingertips, but which world and whose is scrolling through what geographies of mind? Through which detours do the universal claims of writing recycle the histories of globalisation through the silent intimacies of these absorbed and transfixed netreaders in this transfigured local?

Hypertext and the Colonial Dialectic

In a heartfelt defence of theory in the context of the ‘new literacy’ of postliterate, electronically mediated education, Wlad Godzich writes:

As the designers of the Macintosh and Windows interfaces have discovered, images have a greater efficiency in imparting information than language does. What is important for our present purposes is that [such] developments entail a diminution in the role played by the type of language that the culture of literacy is built upon: the so-called natural language as universal mediator. In addition, we need to take into account the fact that the claim to universalism for language has suffered setbacks with the expansion of the market to a global scale, whereas mediated images and electronic messages, backlit by the aura of advancing technology, have overcome local resistances far more efficiently. (Godzich 1994: 11)

Godzich’s ‘present purposes’ centre on the struggle for humanistic learning in English and English Literature in the North American education system. It is then not so shocking that, guarded though his use of the term ‘natural languages’ is, he has not the same perception of English as the Kenyan novelist Ngugi wa Thiong’o, appealing for the use of Kiswahili as a Pan-African language:

To know a language in the context of its culture is a tribute to the people to whom it belongs, and that is good. What has, for us from the former colonies, twisted the natural relation to languages, both our own and those of other people, is that the languages of Europe – here English – were taught as if they were our own languages, as if Africa had no tongues except those brought there by imperialism, bearing the label MADE IN EUROPE. (Ngugi 1993: 35)

Ngugi’s argument is not only that an oppressor language ends up carrying racist terms and structures, nor simply that the meeting of emergent and dominant languages can never be on the basis of equality, but centrally that ‘the rural and urban masses, who had refused to surrender completely in the political and economic spheres, also continued to breathe life into our languages’ (Ngugi 1993: 35). The Gikuyu from which this essay is translated, and the Kiswahili lingua franca of East Africa, are far more capable of voicing the experience of anti-colonial and post-colonial struggles than a tongue which has historically become the medium of national elites and the international English-speaking bourgeoisie (Ngugi 1993: 37). Writers as diverse as Ranajit Guha (1988) and Jimmie Durham (1993) demonstrate the geographical spread of English as a racist instrument of exploitation, oppression and genocide, and the core role of other languages in the resistance to colonialism. The status of English as standard language of the net merely accelerates an historical process initiated long ago.

What is perhaps more surprising is that Godzich presumes that everyone, everywhere is universally at home with the window–icon–menu–pointer (WIMP) interface of the Mac and Windows, a culturally specific and, in the event, interculturally normative visual vocabulary as powerful as colonial English. The North American provenance of this most familiar of human-computer interfaces (HCIs) is famous: imagined by Vannevar Bush in the 1945 Atlantic Monthly essay ‘As We May Think’; unveiled as windows and the mouse by Doug Engelbart at the US Department of Defence Advanced Research Project Agency in 1968; picked up by Alan Kay at Xerox PARC in the mid-1970s; raided for inspiration by Steve Jobs and Apple in 1979; and universalised with the 1990 launch of Microsoft Windows. There was the conscious intention, experienced as inspiration, to reduce the opacity of existing command-driven interfaces, to make the HCI user-friendly, comparable to familiar workplaces, and simple: ‘If the computer is only a vehicle, perhaps you can wait until high school to give “driver’s ed” on it – but if it’s a medium, then it must be extended all the way into the world of a child’ (Alan Kay cited in Levy 1995: 58). But who is this user? Friendly after the manners of which culture? Familiar to whom? Simple for the child of the wired suburb or the peasant village? The commercial and ideological analogy with corporate bureaucratic work patterns determined a global technology. At the same time as glamorising through clean technology, bureaucratic capital deskills its labour force, and while offering the appearance of naturalness and emancipation from onerous chores, introduces new orders of supervision and surveillance.

The HCI is the lived experience, the phenomenological apparition, of the ‘third office revolution’ that follows the reorganisation of clerical-secretarial work from handcraft – copperplate and double-entry bookkeeping – to the mechanised office – typewriters, file cabinets and adding machines – and finally into the digital networked office of the 1960s (Diani 1989: 67–9). Office organisation is closely linked with the evolution of management, and has a particularly swift response to changes in the mode of expropriation. Not only does the technologisation of the clerical workplace proletarianise and feminise a previously white-collar and male job (see Braverman 1974; Aronowitz 1992, 1994 – Aronowitz’s second essay markedly less optimistic than his first), in the process shifting women from the position of idealised consumers to ideal promulgators of textuality; it also opens the office trades to a new mode of control, even as it replicates in office after office the serried ranks of desks Bob Cratchit would have recognised. The progressive technologisation of the workplace cannot disguise the fact that the knowledge professions are engaged in vital labours of information inputting, filing and management, distribution and exchange, billing and banking, as they have been since A Christmas Carol.

At least one element of the interface remains intensely unfriendly: the QWERTY keyboard, invented by Christopher Latham Sholes, ‘father’ of the typewriter, during the 1870s as a way of ensuring that the bars connecting the keys to the letters would not jam when used at any speed. This delaying strategy designed to slow down the pace of typing was marketed quite bogusly as a ‘scientific arrangement’ of the keys: QWERTY bears no relation to the proximity of common combinations or the frequency of occurrence of individual letters, and is notoriously difficult to memorise (Beeching 1974: 39–43; see also Bliven 1954). Ratified as international standard in 1905 under pressure from typing professionals who already dreaded having to acquire a second set of hard-won skills and expensive teaching manuals, QWERTY will continue to plague everyone for as long as text interfaces are dominated by the office environment, where its inertia cannot be shifted. Though far better input systems have been marketed on a regular basis since the 1870s, QWERTY still dominates even non-roman keyboards, and its layout is even more obstinately set in the binary addresses allocated to each key in standard machine code. Few of us who have sweated so hard to get used to this character set would opt to change for another. Scholes’ hegemony enters even the intuitive level of personal skill, and is as profoundly ourselves as acquired sphincter control.

What is on offer in the WIMP interface is intuitive only in the sense that we are forgetful of ever having had to learn it. Its iconography is likewise a learnt environment. Images with any claim to realism are data-intensive, and, like news images, seem to require verbal commentary as supplement. WIMP does not use indices, images with a one-to-one correspondence to actually existing things, but icons, which operate not by similarity but at first through fuzzy analogy and, as the user becomes more familiar with them, as an internalised grammatical structure. The success of the Mac’s desktop metaphor has little to do with the mixed metaphors of windows, folders and disks, and much more to do with the way their interrelation forms a grammar, a syntagmatic organisation of word processing and data management internalised as familiar.

The function of hypertext, the family of programs which link text files to one another and to image and sound files, is to provide a paradigmatic dimension of substitutions in the syntactic universe of the WIMP. Originally an architecture for complex documents, it has become the key structural protocol of the internet, a move caught in Nicole Yankelovich’s title ‘From Electronic Books to Electronic Libraries’ (1991). In that essay, Yankelovich reviews an earlier co-authored piece on hypertext (Yankelovich, Mayerowitz and van Dam 1991) which argued that the core qualities required from the software were (1) promoting connectivity, (2) promoting audiovisualisation, (3) creating and revising documents, (4) browsing, searching, customising and retrieving information, and (5) preserving the historical integrity of information. The rapid growth of individual databases and their networking made vital a further five functions: (1) wide-area hypermedia (linking geographically dispersed work groups), (2) full-text search (using automatic indexing of each new text), (3) information agents (personalised search engines earmarking new items of likely interest), (4) integration of reference works (for example, access to dictionary, encyclopaedia and thesaurus direct from hypertext) and (5) filtering (narrowing the range of searches to manageable proportions through assemblages of criteria like keyword, author, file-type and date) (Yankelovich 1991). With the exception of the information agent, still available only as search engine but likely to be sold soon as customised news broker, all of these are now common, not just on single machines and local areas, but as typical features of the most popular network browsers like Netscape.

What may yet turn out to be an historical transformation in culture is falling victim to the management of change – a phrase which reeks with the intent to ensure that the future looks as much like the present as possible. ‘“Reason” for a long period’, surmised Max Horkheimer, ‘meant the activity of understanding and assimilating the eternal ideas which were to function as goals for men. Today, on the contrary, it is not only the business but the essential work of reason to find means for the goals one adopts at any given time’ (Horkheimer 1994: vii). In other words, philosophy has abandoned the pursuit of absolute, metaphysical truth. In its place, reason has become science, and science in turn, as technology and as social science, has become the instrument of domination. In some ways, escaping from that idealist fantasy of absolute knowledge has freed science from an old burden. But even though reason has lost its teleological mission to drive humanity towards the end of history, it has found a new vocation in the planning and administration of change. Five-year plans, investment plans, actuarial tables, even buying insurance policies and mortgages, are all examples of the way in which rational administration of the present turns into the obsessive administration of the future. The intelligent agent, seeking out the familiar, is one more example of this instrumental reason sacrificing serendipity and diversity, the grounds of evolution, in the interests of a fetishised efficiency.

Even by the lights of instrumental reason, the HCI has not achieved the efficiency for which it strove. Contemporary media scholarship replaces Godzich’s causative model of omnipotent authorial intention driving unthinking square-eyed zombies with the motives and rewards of viewing: the negotiation of meanings and pleasures in lived conditions (see, for example, Lewis 1992; Morley 1987, 1992; Seiter et al. 1989; Silverstone and Hirsch 1992) – meanings and pleasures not necessarily attuned to the instrumentality of transmission. The evidence is that processing power does not increase the throughput of work (see Bowen 1989; Franke 1989; Warner 1989); that networks bear enormous traffic in gossip, not functional communications (see Sproull and Kiesler 1991, 1993). This extraordinary rebirth of letter-writing on the brink of the 21st century is astonishing, but not necessarily useful, in the sense that it cannot be restricted to the rational, linear syntax of efficient management. Hypertext not only assembles different documents; it conjugates different ways of reading. Each is as bound to history and geography through the typical products – novels, libraries, magazine stands – with which they are associated. Tracing their temporal and spatial distributions is a first step toward understanding their logics, and the interstitial places and times where the solidity of the present becomes as fungible and porous as a wallfull of dry rot. The cybercafé may yet be the centre of a new public sphere, new democracies, new subjectivities. But those chains that hold the illuminated scripts to the walls are more than metaphors of the mediaeval library.

Ptolemy’s librarians at Alexandria wrote their critical suggestions concerning the integrity of the Homeric text into the copies they made, from multiple sources, in pursuit of an increasingly impossible dream: the perfect rendition of a text which is most likely never to have achieved a definitive version during the lifetime(s) of its author(s) (see Reynolds and Wilson 1974). Against these vagaries, there is only faith. Spinoza’s is perhaps the definitive statement:

the meaning by which alone an utterance is entitled to be called Divine, has come down to us uncorrupted, even though the original wording may have been more often changed than we suppose... for the Bible would have been no less Divine had it been written in different words or in a different language (Spinoza 1951 [1670]: 172)

The text Spinoza describes is one which exists despite words, but which demands words in order to take on that communicable existence without which it is purposeless. The separation of the text from its distribution through individual editions and particular copies dematerialises it. Literary scholarship eschews the study of bookmaking in favour of this disembodied text, pursued regardless of its physical presence, words without ink or paper. Without that material anchorage, text is free to become infinite, to assume magical, semi-divine powers. It is such a theological concept of the infinite text that inhabits cyberspace, and which a materialist account of reading must expose.

A Good Read

It is tempting to see in internet communications an entirely new mode of reading, one which eliminates the specificities of place and time, the vertigo of distance, to produce an ecstasy of pure interface between text and reader. But netsurfing still respects the older distributions of reading, though modified and accelerated: the histories of interactive marginalia, of dedicated spaces and times for reading, specifically the textual negation of place in a really engrossing read and the universalisation of space in the library. But the net also derives its metaphors of surfing and browsing from a nomadic reading, neither negating place nor universalising it, but wandering, and taking the hereness and nowness of place with it as unstill reference point. It is all too tempting to read this nomadic place as the atomistic individual. But nomads too have histories and geographies, and are as much distributed as they are media of distribution. Individuality cannot be taken as a given in the play of place and text that is reading; it is a function of them (though not exclusively), and functions in them (as it functions in other formations). Individuality too is a distributed form, and in the characteristic modes of reading digitally, new distributions are in formation which have yet, however, to sever their roots in the cultural overdeterminations of reading. The net appears at once as utterly new and unutterably ancient: the electronic storyteller, the interactive library. Constituted as both archaic and futuristic, the point is to historicise the novelty and to renew the histories of this emergent formation, and to find out how and why the mirror of reading, as intertext and mutuality, has been cracked.

Reading, books and texts have their histories and their geographies and they do not always intersect. Although each represents a geotemporal trajectory in the distribution of verbal culture across continents and centuries, each makes its own connections and continuities, detours, meanders and fortuitous epiphanies. The book has no less fugal a history than the text: early printed incunabula imitated manuscripts, while scribes copied printed sources in direct and often cheaper competition; chapbooks and feuilletons spread myths and metaphors peculiar to an epoch which believed the angel of the press had driven out the demon of superstition; almanacs and gazettes of varying degrees of respectability and contemporaneity mimicked the letter post on which merchants had relied for centuries; without embarrassment the magazine and the tabloid spin off books on regular and irregular schedules. The book, that fortress of words, was not the sole invention of printing, which broadcast a riot of cheap dissemination. Yet the book, and especially the modern novel, has evolved into the defining instance of at least one mode of reading.

Books are strangers: more radically alien than any human traveller, they come marked with the irreducible distance between reading and writing. In their folds and between their lines they carry all the distributions of space, time and textuality, rendered into a concrete instance in the moment of reading. But though they are strangers, books are not absolute others, not unapproachably cryptic, deriving from an utterly different order of being from ourselves, and this we know because we can dialogue with even the most abstruse text, even in foreign languages. We can recognise in the physical characteristics of books that that is what they are – books; and so we can begin our interchange. Books, like travellers, are radically incomplete: they must have destinations, or they fade away. And though much literary teaching has been based on the preparations deemed necessary to make yourself adequate to the text, to structure your reading in ways that correspond to the attributed desires of the text, still, because they are both strangers and familiar, and because they approach us in advance as unstable, as if by empathy they make us unstable too. The possibility of reading is premised on the reciprocal incompleteness and instability of the reader. The act of reading is a mutual surrender of text and reader to the tentative becoming of the book.

But the book we think of when we talk about a good read, the portable, comfortable thing that opens in your lap under a circle of light as you curl up in winter, or that lies with you on the beach in summer: that is a technical product that has been conformed over centuries to a mode of reading which it has been difficult to establish, hard to isolate and sometimes dangerous to practise. Because its most familiar interface is a light-emitting monitor, there is a tendency to think of the computer as an extension of the televisual. But metaphors of pages, files and folders refer us constantly to this literate culture; and not just any literacy, but literacy in the Anglo-Saxon tradition, whose language dominates the engineering literature as well as network dialogue, and whose literary complexes sway the formations of telematic reading. Of these the most familiar is the guilty pleasure of the good read, reconformed as a particular reading formation in the information age.

A core aspect of the good read is its privacy. As Janice Radway (1984) observes of women’s reading, to pick up a book, whatever it is, is to mark out a space and time as your own, apart from the demands of work and family; this is how novel-reading functions to create a minimal privacy on public transport. In fact, historically, there are many reasons to believe that the long struggle for private reading associated with the rise of the novel was won centrally by the definition of privacy as especially feminine. So Friedrich Kittler (1990) argues that German romanticism constantly addresses the abstract ‘Woman’ as its ideal reader, while reserving the world of criticism and philosophy, of writing itself, for men. Reading for women and domestic servants remained a cause of moral and religious concern from the invention of printing through to the famous summing up at the Lady Chatterley trial in 1962 (see Flint 1993; Hull 1982; Landes 1989; Lovell 1987; Lucas 1989; Shevelow 1989): a constant crisis of the contradiction between the means of production – printing – and the mod...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface: The Universal Touring Machine
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Reading the Interface
• 2 Virtual Realism: Machine Perception and the Global Image
• 3 Spatial Effects
• 4 Pygmalion: Silence, Sound and Space
• 5 Turbulence: Network Morphology and the Corporate Cyborg
• References
• Index