Synergies

I found Katherine Hayles' How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis to be a perfect book to guide our course on DH toward its conclusion, since Hayles is able to summarize and balance out many questions and debates that we have taken into consideration in these months: what Digital Humanities is/are, whether it is/should be a separate field or discipline, how reductive the idea of 'mere tools' can be, the transformative effects of our interactions with, and creation of, digital cultural objects.

I was particularly pleased to find, in Hayles, a good answer to the perplexities I had about Moretti's theories of distant reading. Hayles shows us how different modes, such as close, hyper and machine-based, readings, can, should, and do, inevitably, interact, instead of excluding one another.  This whole book calls for a dynamic synergistic interaction, and an hybridization, rather than a rigid separation, between TH (Traditional Humanities) and DH; among close, hyper, and machine-based readings and among the pedagogies based on these types of reading; between narrative and database; between spatial and temporal visualizations and representations; between analysis and interpretation. One of the crucial moments of the book is when Hayles, on page 81, argues that the right attitude toward the technogenesis she describes is not that of understanding it as progress but rather, that of adapting to it, and, most of all, to intervene in the activist sense discussed by Anne Balsamo in her call for humanist scholars to develop new tools, and even in the resistant and opposing anti-dominant ideology sense, in Malabou's idea of neural plasticity vs. flexibility. Hayles's book is in this sense, both very lucid and visionary, close to reality and flirting with utopias. It's also a very brave attempt to explore the questions of the redefinition of the boundaries of cognition and perception, their unconscious mechanisms, and the questions of their extendedness and embeddedness. In this sense, this book is an overview of the main questions and problems that crucially regard DH. I think its merits also lie in the curiosity toward multimodal electronic novels such as TOC or toward the spatial aesthetic of OR. I have not read extensively in recent DH theory, but it seems to me pretty rare to find this interest in digital-born literature as conjugated with the praise of algorithmic and computational thinking and operating within DH.

Hayles is even able to discuss code and related visions of it as a lingua franca, and even has time to dig into the changes brought about by telegraphy and its bearing on the understanding, and the practicing, of language and writing. Indeed, Hayles is successful to show, or at least to indicate the path of, the changes that the "technogenetic spiral" is bringing forth, and its "strong aesthetic dimension as well as neurocognitive and technical implications"(247). I would have not been happy with this book if I felt it was only about showing that there is no other option but adapting to, or aligning with, the digital technogenesis. This book is, more importantly, about intervening within it and, possibly, against it. In this sense, the proposed object of study of Comparative Media Studies seems to me to be a good counterpoint to Manovich's theorization about the dissolving status of the very concept of media. Yes, Hayles call for the hibridization of forms of reading and of cognitive patterns of imagination and representation, but she also argues that the materiality of different media (and not only of software!) and its interactions with human understanding should be studied, while differences between and among media should be emphasized and observed in their evolution. In other words, she proposes synergies and ruptures, continual transformation but also resistant identities. And, most of all, she helps us develop an awareness of the reciprocal causality between the human and the technological, to  accept of the coexistence of the old and the new, and, possibly, to create fruitful interactions between the two.  Hayles' book is both cynical and hopeful. It refuses simplistic explanations, and proposes complex questions, it shows how much is unconsciously happening to us but also how much we can actively do, how much we can consciously try to make happen. 

Graphs, Maps, Trees and... Language

". . . In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied an entire City, and the map of the Empire, an entire Province. In time, these Excessive Maps did not satisfy and the Schools of Cartographers built a Map of the Empire, that was of the Size of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. Less Addicted to the Study of Cartography, the Following Generations understood that that dilated Map was Useless and not without Pitilessness they delivered it to the Inclemencies of the Sun and the Winters. In the Deserts of the West endure broken Ruins of the Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in the whole country there is no other relic of the Disciplines of Geography.

Suárez Miranda: Viajes de varones prudentes, libro cuarto, cap. XLV, Lérida, 1658."

J. L. Borges, "Del Rigor En La Ciencia", El Hacedor, 1960 (translation by Diego Doval)

"Texts are certainly the real objects of literature [...] but they are not the right objects of knowledge for literary history" (76), writes Moretti in Graphs Maps Trees. Moretti is calling for a renewed formalism without close reading, and for a "materialist conception of form" that could save comparative literature from its decay: "take a form, follow it from space to space, and study the reason for its transformations" (90). A renewed literary history capable of taking into account not only the canonical list of works of Western literature, but to study and compare the literatures of many a country and many a class, and to go "from the extraordinary to the everyday" (3), from "the form of an object to the forces that have been at work" (57). Wonderful. But let's go back to the first quote: texts. Moretti invites us to try and go beyond them, to develop strategies and techniques that allow us to take a comprehensive overlook at them and to look for cycles, patterns, clusters, within them and, most of all, among them. Thus, we can abstractly "explain general structures" (91) instead of continuing with the classic "interpretation of individual texts" (91) which, for Moretti, usually corresponds to that scholarly practice for which we tend to ask "only questions for which we already have an answer"(26). Texts.

Texts, and literary markets, and politics, and economics, and questions of readership and reception, and questions of influence and divergence. Moretti's perspective is provocative and inspirational, because it calls for new (more scientific, if we want to call them so, but certainly more complex, in terms of the socio-contextual interconnections they are interested in) approaches to a historicized and neomarxist study of literature. Moretti acknowledges at the beginning of the book how, while "the quantitative approach to literature can take several different forms - from computational stylistics to thematic debates, book history, and more"(4) he is only dealing, at least in this book, with book history. And perhaps this latter is a 'safer' and potentially more successful area for experimenting with the study of genres, of chronotopes and of stylistic mutations, because it depends less directly on the primary material that constitutes texts, i.e. language. But in the case of stylometrics or thematic debates, there come some problems, I think, because texts are made by language and by a 'literary' use of it, with all the rhetorical strategies of allusion, symbolism, lyricism,  etc., and with all the secret codes that this use of language implies, and I am not sure that a distant reading can grasp that. I feel that language, and texts, have an ultimate capacity to escape any categorization, and to prove them wrong. Or perhaps it's us, readers, it's what is born from that reading, that escapes the singularity of patterns and of explanations and remains open to the plurality of our interpretations. Because texts belong to a historical context, participate in the making or unmaking of a political agenda, embody a marketing strategy, and imitate one another or diverge from one another, but texts are made of language, and language is constantly being made and remade by us, who are constantly being made and remade by it. There is always something that escapes the logic of explanation and the logic of communicative linearity which some quantitative approaches are necessarily based upon: the logic of the "from me to you, with no misunderstanding". But in that path "from me to you", there, I find impossible to give up on the value of reading, closely, and of re-reading, even (because the questions do stay open, no matter how we try to close them down, even through our impeccable scholarly writing).

Still, I agree with Moretti. Comparative literature does need to go beyond the boundaries of national canons, and western canons, and finally study the Weltliteratur prefigured by Goethe and by Marx and Engels. We do need to be more aware of the socio-economic embeddedness of literary genres and trends, and of the stylistic mutations related to them. (This is something that not only Moretti, but also other literary historians and comparatists, such as Gayatri C. Spivak or Claudio Guillen, have been arguing for years, although from quite different perspectives.) In this sense, I am really excited to see what can be done for literary history through the use of computational approaches. But I hope that, precisely because we claim the importance of having a "materialist conception of form", we do not forget that the first material of literature is language, and that we consider not only its socio-politico-economical referentiality, but also that intrinsic, rhetorical capacity of what we call its 'literary' usage, i.e. escaping from mere communication and open up new domains of creative redefinition of the world. Now, on this last note, one could argue that, in fact, quantitative approaches to literature do not usually regard poetry. But who says that prose never uses (and redefines) language in the way poetry uses (and redefines) it? How can we draw those limits?

What a Softwarized World

I have read Manovich's account of "the secret history of our software culture" (5) quite voraciously. I believe I have already taken some of the questions posed by Manovich into more or less conscious consideration, multiple times, as I think most of the people living nowadays, already have. But even if the questions of this book are not particularly new or original, the inquiries into them are absolutely refreshing, because Manovich comfortably faces, explains, plays with the complexities of a softwarization that we all perceive and yet most of us feel intimidated to explore in real proximity. I do find both the history of softwarization and the call for software studies illuminating: "we have to address software itself (if not, it means we are dealing with effects rather than causes)" (9). I also agree with the idea that "software development is gradually getting more democratized"(17), although I still, frustratingly, feel part of that “not-fish-nor-meat,” as we say in Italian, category of users/maybe not merely consumers/ but certainly not programmers, that Manovich relegates to a parenthesis on page 31 "(Being able to read and modify HTML markup, or copy already pre-packaged lines of Javascript code is very different from programming)". But Manovich also acknowledges, on page 108, that Kay and Goldberg’s idea(l) of having “everybody develop new tools” (104), since “the task of defining new information structure […] was given to the user, rather than being the sole province of designers” (83), seems to be today pretty far from being real. The problem of easy-device-passive-consumerism is there, but only for a few lines (and this is perhaps the most evident flaw of the book), same for "the need to study the cultural and social forces that are shaping the development of software itself" (11).

I am very interested in the comparative connections opened by Manovich between software culture and modernist avant-gardes, although I tend to look at these latter as less media-specific, than he does (I am convinced, for example, that Whitman's poetical experimentalism was directly inspirational for many avant-gardes film makers, and that Russian futurists were not all about sound, and that Gertrude Stein was not all about language.) Manovich's narration indicates that a shift from documents to performances, pure, independent media to hybrid meta-media has taken place only and fully within the realm of software culture. More importantly, he talks about an imaginary database finally turning real within software culture, and a destabilization of the conventions of cultural communication, and about a “human understanding not limited to language” (233). All true things, cose sacrosante. And yet, I think Manovich could have been a little more generous in acknowledging the importance of Modernism’s anticipations. I am referring, here, specifically about Jacques Rancière’s ideas on the redistribution of the sensible as enacted by, as he calls it, the pre-modernist and modernist aesthetic regime of art, whose motto was that of ‘shuttling’ between art and life, and representing a common sensorium based on their permeability. Modernist art operated a perceptual rupture and a perceptual reframing of reality, which was inevitably political, since it corresponded to “a dissensual reconfiguration of the common experience of the sensible” (Dissensus 140). (The modernist (re)distribution of the sensible becomes, in this sense, the level where the question of the relationship between aesthetics and politics can be raised: “the level of the sensible delimitation of what is common to the community, the forms of its visibility and of its organization.” [The Politics of Aesthetics 18]) (How) can software culture be aesthetically, and therefore, politically, dissensual?

Manovich book does not pose nor it answers this question. At least not directly. Instead, it focuses on taking us beyond the old conceptual framework of media and the old materials, off to algorithms and data structure, data structure and algorithms, and to the necessity of the development of an adequate software epistemology that can help us understand how software is shaping our culture, and vice versa. And to thinking of a new massive number of species, as obtained by deep remixability, by continual change and permanent expandibility. We are off to recognize, and imagine, new aesthetics, and collective creations, and to the “opening of an unbounded space of creative possibilities” (330). Software is a new thinking, a new designing, therefore it implies a series of new languages and meta-languages, and more than that. I see software do amazing things with language(s), I see translation finally take place as an unending process of cultural contact, a space of foreignization and poetic electricity. I see searchability, linkability, modularity, become the new bones of the interconnected skeleton of any text. I see arts hybridize, and lands connect, and concepts and assumptions being revisited, new knowledge being made. Can you really make it new, software?

“I hear babies cry...... I watch them grow

They'll learn much more.....than I'll never know

And I think to myself .....”