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 .....”