By now we have (in the previous articles in this series) seen that digital data is neither immaterial nor identically reproducible. Every instance of every bit of digital data is materially unique in time and space. However despite the fact that all digital data is in principle “knowable”, since it is produced by human activities, our understanding of it suffers from several, perhaps irremediable “scalar interpretation” problems.

a. digital information, on the surface on which it is usable by human beings, is reproduced at a regular rate according to the local electricity system. Each fraction of a second instance of, say, each pixel on a screen, is, in principle different, since the materiality of the screen technology is degrading, there are current variations etc. On the macro level of observable actions, human beings do not act at anything near 50 or 60 Hz, such frequencies are epistemically alien. Therefore, in order to understand what is happening at that speed of reproduction of digital data, the representation must be simplified, “abstracted” or slowed down.

b. digital information is electronic information stored and processed through volatile memory.  It must be reinstantiated at a regular rate to appear stable for anyone using or accessing it. The data is thus constantly reproduced while it is being consumed.This reproduction is carried out by automatons on the scale of chemical interaction, i.e. far below the wavelength of light perceptible by human vision. The structure of computational devices, CPUs, memory etc, is invisible and opaque to human beings and must be enlarged in order to enter into conventional epistemology. Typically this size amplification is carried out through microscopes. For very small components, microscopes which are not ‘scopes’ in the direct sense of optical devices, but tactile sensors, STM which feel around in the dark. The measurements of these sensors are transformed into numbers, charts and images, thousands of times larger than the phenomena they represent. The images which result are arbitrarily coloured and contoured to give the illusion of objects we might encounter with our unaided senses.[1]

“First only through this program do the data acquire an appearance, a surface and a depth. A form of shadow also appears in the images they show, which adds to the impression of plasticity. Such a shadow is naturally but a phantasm, it has nothing to do with the actual processes at play, how could there be shadows where there is no light?” [2]

Scientific concepts of quantum particles are appropriated or apprehended into necessarily holistic world views conditioned by personal empirical experience, informed by classical physical behaviour. In other words, though our perceptions constantly interface with the subatomic world, our empiricism is based of experience of the world in classical physics. This experience propagates holistic systems of significances, within which we situate and come to understand our contemporary conditions and find meaning.[3]

c. Again, digital data is produced and processed on the electronic i.e. subatomic scale, a realm of quantum behaviours which are alien to conventional time/space epistemology of human experience. Quantum physics behaviour must be translated to conventional physics behaviour in order for it to be “ex-plained” and “de-scribed” in human discourse. [4] This process of translation must resolve fundamental epistemological incompatibilities. Needless to say, information about quantum behaviour is profoundly disruptive to conventional notions of truth, fact and certainty. The media products we consume, however, though they are generated on the quantum level, maintain conventional truth criteria, importantly those of surplus value, profit, ROI and private property, and IP.

d. electronic information is sub-atomic, this means it instantiates valency and conductive chemical principles of the materials of the physical memory and transport structure. These materials must be of the highest chemical purity for the electronics to function as expected. Extreme metallurgical precision is required, involving enormous global infrastructure to take the ore from the ground and process it into the materials which can make up computational devices. Though the data is subatomic, the real estate, hardware, automated robots, specialized production and fabrication and assembly buildings, clean rooms, and personnel all operate on conventional (macro-)materiality subject to conventional economic pressures. This is not to mention all the intermediate forms of logistics, trucking, shipping, air cargo, rail, ports, airports, roads etc, and the electricity production grid the provisioning of which must be negotiated between governments, corporations, and various local and trans-local actors at human scale.

e. Conventional geo-politics with armies, paid militias and security details, pirates and police control massive worker populations in the mining industry where where not only the exotic essential so-called rare-earth metals required for electronics are sourced, but these human-scale manifestations of discipline and control also ensure the provisioning of the more abundant minerals such as copper and tin for integration into the electronics production chain. . There is also the feedback loop of the cyber.weapons/war industry where military research leads the digital technology innovation curve, establishing control over macro-political territory for economic gain.

Persistence of Anthropomorphism: Politics

Humans play an odd obsolescing medial role between the infinitesimal and immense of digital information. This is made more confusing by the fact that all the information we have about the information comes to us in forms (semantic) which are adapted to our epistemological predilections and habits.

This has enormous political, economic and cultural implications. The political science of democracy is a work in progress. There are and will perhaps always be powers which are exercised beyond the purview (and thereby the regulation) of a social body. In other words, government will always be inadequate to provide justice for all citizens. Unfortunately that inadequacy is opportunized by the most powerful, so it is fair to say that government always intervenes on the behalf of the powerful at the expense of all others. Under capitalism, the government always intervenes first in defence of private property. Digital technologies will never “solve”this endemic problem. In fact it could be argued that, due to the structural hegemonic “cyber-” (control) design priorities in the hardware which reproduce digital information, digital technologies cannot even be commandeered to serve the purposes of the many at the expense of an elite.

Digital technologies require enormous material resources to function. Nation-scale power grid, network cabling including submarine cables, server farms and data-centers.

In considering a nomos of the Cloud by counting the transoceanic fiber-optics also digging through the countryside, data centers buried deep in mountains near dams, the exotic minerals pulled from African rivers to make cell phones, alongside the engineered hallucinations of augmented reality, an inability to stay true to the dirt-venerating provincialism of Schmittian nomic priorities is seriously challenged. No workable distinction between ground and water, between Cloud infrastructure and Cloud interactivity as mapped across some spectrum from tangible to virtual, can survive much poking and prodding. Even so, there are nomic claims on the undetermined territory of the Cloud, as recent revelations regarding state surveillance programs and state versus state cyberwarfare make plain, for example. Even so, the residual confusion of jurisdictional divisions of land, sea, air, and cyber is itself worth mapping forensically. From its buzz and howl, perhaps alternative governmentalities for the decades that lie beyond might cohere.[5]

Even should a government be commandeered by the mass, the so-called “reconfiguration thesis” that somehow the digital infrastructure can be reappropriated to the advantage of the many, is unlikely.

“the use-value which the logistics industry produces is a set of protocols and techniques that enable firms to seek out the lowest wages anywhere in the world, and to evade the inconvenience of class struggle when it arises. In this sense, unlike other capitalist technologies, logistics is only partly about exploiting the efficiencies of machines in order to get products to market faster and more cheaply, since the main purpose of the faster and cheaper technologies is to offset the otherwise prohibitive cost of exploiting labour forces halfway around the world. The technological ensemble which logistics superintends is therefore fundamentally different than other ensembles such as the Fordist factory; it saves on labour costs by decreasing the wage, rather than increasing the productivity of labour. To put it in Marxist terms, it is absolute surplus value masquerading as relative surplus value. The use-value of logistics, for capital, is exploitation in its rawest form, and thus it is truly doubtful that logistics might form, as Toscano writes, “capitalism’s pharmakon, the cause for its pathologies (from the damaging hypertrophy of long-distance transport of commodities to the aimless sprawl of contemporary conurbation) as well as the potential domain of anti-capitalist solutions”.”[6]

The electronics production chain is over-determined by capitalist work-efficiency considerations and would have to be completely reconfigured from the bottom up to ever properly serve an emancipatory an egalitarian function. I have argued elsewhere that improved conditions at the base of the production chain would perhaps even make the production of digital technologies as we know them today impossible.[7] Contrarily, enormously creative, imaginative, inventive and innovative new forms of both mitigating general want, and caring for all according to their needs, are likely to emerge from the emancipated poor of these places.

Data is not immaterial “there is no cloud only someone else’s computer” [8]. The stack is owned physically and encircled with barbed wire and hired mercenaries and guards. You cannot go there. Unaccountable financial elites hide behind governments and play one government against each other to their advantage. Local laws are there first and foremost to protect private property. Citizens are thus still in the position described by Marx in 1868: their freedom is that of the freedom to sell their labour to capital on the market.  The pittance they receive for their invaluable participation in socially necessary production is even pre-emptively expropriated by an unfair and fraudulent  commercial regimes  on all the socially necessary reproduction costs: food, shelter etc.  The object is to monopolize people and control their behaviour, not only in the present, but as far as possible into the future, so an every increasing part of the value they produce can be appropriated.

——-

Notes

[1] The question of arbitrary selection of “relevant details” in scientific illustration is the theme of the excellent “Objectivity”   Galison, P. Daston, L.: (2007) Objectivity. Zone, Brooklyn

[2]  Nordmann. A. Et al. Hrsg.: (2006) Nanotechnologien im Kontext. Akademische Verlagsgesellscha , Berlin p.106

[3] Gottlieb, B. (2016) “A Political Economy of the Smallest Things” ATROPOS, New York, p. 61

[4] Excellent on this is Brigitta Falkenburg’s (2007) Particle Metaphysics. Springer, Berlin

[5] Bratton, B. “The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty” MIT Press Cambridge  p.49

[6] see Jasper Bernes “Logistics, Counter-logistics and the Communist Prospect” https://endnotes.org.uk/en/jasper-bernes-logistics-counterlogistics-and-the-communist-prospect

[7]

a heavy heaving freedom

  “were programs, strategies and practices to become prevalent which could sustain other less-hegemonic conditions of production, such forms of productions will likely not be able to supply us with the same technological devices, and same techno-scientific vectors we are persistently informed are the unique guarantee of our survival as a species. We will increasingly need to rely on much more involving and troubling things, possibly somewhat less convenient but potentially even more breath-takingly fulfilling and redeeming. We will need to rely more on eachother.”

[8] slogan of the Free Software Foundation of Europe  
 

“I’ve never seen such excitement about double entry bookkeeping!”-Dmytri Kleiner

Blockchain technology has given us is the ability to exchange money tokens directly without an intermediary. In a future stateless communist society we will certainly need such technologies, if indeed we still need quantified exchange. In the meantime, lets be honest, these technologies are about banking. Blockchain technology is an anarcho-capitalist next-generation assault on government, government in general, but especially government regulation of the finance industry. The development of the popular Ethereum cryptocurrency system is so tied up with the finance industry it has been called “blockchain for banks” and “bankchain”. This implies that Ethereum does not disrupt banks at all but rather super-charges them. If you like institutions which make money from lending, institutions specialized in helping the wealthy avoid contributing to society in general, institutions which intensively lobby governments globally to deregulate the finance industry even more after the egregious fraud-caused crashes of the last two decades, you should celebrate Ethereum.

Cryptocurrencies can not mitigate or challenge capitalist exploitation, they intensify. Firstly on the level of hardware, they are offensively energy-expensive and wasteful, crunching useless math for the equivalent of the tap of a notary’s stamp. Besides the blatant disregard for environmental sustainability, the computer hardware production chain is a trail of blood & tears, of unacceptable and unfair labour conditions, more dependency on cryptocurrencies will only exacerbate humanitarian problems endemic to the digital economy. Unfairness is nothing new for the finance industry, it is its modus vivendi, blockchains are simply a novel way to obfuscate usury and to make private investor finance sound advanced and progressive which it by definition can never be.

Another innovation for which blockchain technologies are lauded is the open source architecture with its completely transparent, append-only ledger, where each transaction can be verified cryptographically. This is the core of the so-called “trustless network” ideology which maintains that intermediaries such as banks can not be “trusted” to process transactions impartially. Of course “trust” is not abolished in the “trusted network” but rather shifted to an indistinct, voluntary and irregular array of people who are able and willing to look at blockchain code and ensure that everything is right. Writing the code is one thing, making sure the code is secure, free of bugs, vulnerabilities and does what users expect of it requires significant auditing. This is why the projects which “succeed” are the ones where people get paid. A project like Ethereum got so much credibility so fast because banks were funding development. In otherwords “trustless” in this sense still means “trust the capitalists”.

Technologies alone cannot “improve” societies, no matter how ingeniously designed. The ability to do without “trust” reveals itself to be an extremely privileged position. Anyone with dependents will know how necessary, and fluidly reconfigurable, trust is and must be in a society. Trust negotiations embedded in cultural and social practices have acquired their supple effectiveness over centuries of living close together in towns and cities. The trade-offs and compromises required by social collaboration are part and parcel of the cultural and social techniques we grow up in. There is intractable unfairness here too, of course, and we have inadequate recourse to address these, but to imagine that one can simply withdraw to a safe hiding place behind a computer screen and hardcode massively entangled social relations anew is simply delusion.  Computers and network hardware are themselves the result of intense human collaboration on a massive scale.

The computer behaves like a loyal servant, it does what it is coded to do. We have a owner-slave relation with our machines, we are all mini-data-plantation owners. Today much hope is invested in visions of algorithmic modelling of any problem which then can be unravelled by ingenious computational routines.  Money may appear the perfect material for futuristic modeling because it is inherently quantified. Money can be converted into all manner of commodities,and, reduced to number in its contemporary form, can appear to be a media for computationally  remodeling the world like so much silly putty. This is why projects like Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies seem so revolutionary and promising. But money is just a technology of social expression, in principle it could be used for the general emancipation of all.

Governments always work in the interest of the powerful. Taxation is often misapplied and unfairly extracted. There is socialism for the rich and austerity for the poor. Automation combined with deregulation of global finance powers global war, terror and the most excessive exploitation-as-usual, as well as resisting any attempt to address environmental emergencies. Under the current conditions, enlightened and enforceable taxation regimes are unquestionably required to adjust the composition of wealth towards sustainable economies which benefit everyone.

Distributed, unfalsifiable, transparent transactional ledgers could help the citizens make informed political decisions and even help distribute decision making towards a truly stateless solidarity society. But this would require a long-term investment in various auditing and interpretation practices. Acknowledging that “the rich will not let us code away their wealth”, “good government”,  even as a transitional measure towards the society we desire, will take a an enormous and coordinated struggle on many fronts to achieve. The formidable computational power at our disposal today must be employed not only to model the enlightened fiscal policies we require, but also to simulate the struggles which will be required to enact these. Strategies can be developed, tested and honed for advanced political-economic modeling practices towards speculative scenarios of sustainable general prosperity. Let a million simulated Cybersyns bloom!

ATMs (Automated Teller Machines) are convenient not only because they do not sleep or notice what you look like, but also because we restrain our imagination of what we can expect them to do. We don’t expect we could make small talk with the machine while making our transaction, we never think we could ask the machine for advice or for directions. The ATM is designed only to provide a very limited range of the possible automizable functions of a bank teller, and at this it is precisely designed to be excellent. As long as we conform ourselves to the device as much as it conforms to a restrained requirement we can expect from it, we consider this “convenient”. Convenience means coming together, con-, together and –venere, to come. If we want to understand the world of technical effects we need to look not only at the technologies but also at how the technologies have already changed how we look at them.

We are thrown into a world, a culture, a context already transfused with technical aesthetics, a world of conveniences.  The cultures we are born into are full of compensatory and adaptation methods residual of the many generations of technical revolution and upheaval which occurred through the generations. Marshall McLuhan referred to this as the “environment of services” for which we need a new “ecology”.  The technical environment becomes a second nature of social/human effects wrought by technical processes.

One of the peculiarities of the electric speed is that it pushes all the unconscious factors up into consciousness. This began with Freud and Einstein back in 1900. But, the hidden aspects of the media are the things that should be taught because they have an irresistible force when invisible. When these factors remain ignored and invisible they have an absolute power over the user. The sooner the population or the young or old can be taught the effect of these forms, the sooner we can have some sort of reasonable ecology among the media themselves. What is desperately needed is a kind of understanding of the media which permits us to program the whole environment, so that say literate values would not be wiped out by new media. [1]

McLuhan’s sensibility is literate, he comes from literature, rather than philosophy. For McLuhan, literacy was a fundamental technical revolution which forever transformed how we live and understand the world. His agenda is to deepen and broaden the insights into lived conditions afforded by the conversion or translation of Nature into Culture through language. The ecology he is looking for “between the media themselves” would be an ecology between systems of knowledge and communication. This ecology is a consciously anthropocentric modelling of our technical aesthetics.

Technical aesthetics comes from precision. We analyse the behaviours of materials in the world and abstract principles through precise observations and measurements. From these principles, we construct facsimile machines, which, unlike the world, are completely beholden to us. This is the cyber– (control) in all technologies, machinic processes derived from the world but which are adapted to our needs and designed to obey our commands. The functionality of the facsimile machines is relative to the precision of our observations and measurements. Precision comes from pre– (before) and cision (cut). We have already cut down the range of phenomena and variables to observe before we become even more precise in our observations. Technical aesthetics is how we precisely make machines and about the world these precisely made cyber-machines reveal to us.

Onomatopoeia reveals that even in the ancient technology of language, the great heterogeneity and diversity of the world is first and fundamentally proscribed and conformed before it comes to serve its communicative function. Looking through this list of onomatopoeic dog sounds from various languages, it is easy to observe that what might be a common sound around the globe is refracted into dozens of local approximations to conform to the predilections of those local languages. The generalizable “bark” of a dog (as a sound from Nature”) is precisioned as it enters civil language. Language is as much about control as it is about expression.

Dog barking
In Afrikaans, woef
In Albanian, ham ham
In Arabic, haw haw, hab hab
In Armenian, hav hav հաւ հաւ
In Basque, txau txau (small dogs), zaunk zaunk (big dogs)
In Batak, kung-kung
In Bengali: gheu gheu ঘেউ ঘেউ, bheu bheu ভেউ ভেউ, bhou bhou ভউ ভউ
In Bulgarian, bow bow бау бау, djaff djaff джаф джаф
In Catalan, bup bup
In Chinese, Cantonese, wōu-wōu 㕵㕵
In Chinese, Mandarin, wāng wāng 汪汪[zho 14]
In Croatian, vau vau
In Czech, haf haf
In Danish, vuf vuf, vov vov, bjæf bjæf
In Dutch, waf waf, woef woef
In English, woof, arf, bow wow, ruff
In Estonian, auh auh
In Finnish hau hau, vuh vuh
In French, ouah ouah, ouaf ouaf, wouf wouf
In German, wau wau, waff waff, wuff wuff
In Greek, ghav ghav γαβ γαβ, woof
In Hebrew, hav hav הַב־הַב,[heb 4] haw haw הַאוּ־הַאוּ[heb 4]
In Hindi, bho bho भो भो
In Hungarian vau vau
In Icelandic, voff voff
In Indonesian, guk guk
In Italian, bau bau
In Japanese, ワンワン (wan wan)
In Kannada, bow bow
In Kazakh, арп-арп, шәу-шәу
In Korean, meong meong 멍멍
In Latgalian, vau vau… -Wikipedia [2]

Jumping a few millennia ahead we have invented sound recording technology. This technology abstracts sound from the multi-dimensional context where it is produced by transferring the air-pressure vibrations which produce sound in a human aural cortex through a mechanism to be inscribed on a surface. This technology is precise also in that all the possible vibrations which produces the phenomenon of sound are not processed by the technology. The earliest devices concentrated on the range around 100Hz and 800Hz, around the range of the human voice. The recordings were barely audible above the mechanical noise of the apparatus which was recorded together with the voice or music. Listeners of the time disregarded the intense grinding noise and launched themselves into the soundworld they were promised was being “reproduced”. Listeners have to perform a second abstraction, abstracting out the instrumental context of the sound reproduction which had already abstracted out of the transsensual multidimensional context of the original sound phenomena.

The verisimilitude of technical aesthetics is always nostalgic, and liberating. What is recorded in technology seems to be perpetual and leaves us in the present free to re-configure our identities since they is already abstracted technologically and no longer seem bound in complex historical processes. There is also a lingering mournfulness in the rejected excess of the precision, in the unrecorded context of the document and in the disregarded apparatus of reproduction.

Technical aesthetics produce slices from the conventional empirical spectra of lived space-time continuum. These are inscribed for posterity. Even when recomposed they never lose their immanent historicity. This is also why listening to a recording or even looking at a selfie one has just taken is tinged with nostalgia. We keep changing, physically and contextually, but we can replay the recording as often as necessary, sure that we will hear the same thing. In this way recordings stand in for memory, and recorded facts come to dominate historical narratives.

“…the idea was that the image should document politics. But in the first half of the 20th Century, and even stronger after the second war, this relationship began to change. All of a sudden, politics was made in order to get into an image. The purpose of politics, which so far nobody knew the purpose of politics, progress is not a purpose, progress is a method, but where do we advance at?  What do you mean we advance? We don’t know where.  All of a sudden, we discovered where. We advanced to the image. … Politics is aimed at being taken, aufgenommen, in an image. And, you know, this created a curious phenomenon. Events began to accelerate. They rolled toward the image. Things, one event followed an other, because every event wanted to be taken in an image. There were the people with the television cameras and there were the photographers and there were the people with this film, the filmmakers, they were standing there, and all history rolled toward them and they said: “please, take me, please put me to the image!” Vilém Flusser [3]

With mass-production, we have the social effect of the “same” recording being heard by many people who are not in the same place. This leads to a new criticism of lived space where the centralized distribution of recordings asserts itself through the ear and accentuates the arbitrary local experience of the listening space accompanied by the eye. The popular adoption of headphones and portable music players are the expression of this new pleasure of abstraction.

By abstracting out the paid human labour countenance of the bank worker, a bank transaction can be accomplished without encountering the bank as an institution and as a business. Robot tellers and electronic transactions disburse endless flows of lucre at anytime of day or night, contributing to the notion that money is something akin to a basic resource like water or light. This adjusts our living habits. We need to plan less in advance. We can work at any hour of day or night. We enjoy a new “freedom” of just-in-time services. Any breakdown in the banking service environment becomes seriously inconvenient and may even endanger civil peace.

—

NOTES

[1] Marshall McLuhan in a post-lecture Q&A session recorded by ABC Radio National Network on 27 June 1979 in Australia. https://youtu.be/a11DEFm0WCw?t=4m30s

[2] from Wikipedia article on cross-linguistic onomatopoeias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-linguistic_onomatopoeias

[3] Vilém Flusser from “Television Image and Political Space in the Light of the Romanian Revolution”  Lecture in the Symposium THE MEDIA WERE WITH US. The Role of Television in the Romanian Revolution. Budapest, the 7th of April, 1990 (24’30’’)

“ I differ toto caelo from those philosophers who pluck out their eyes that they may see better; for my thought I require the senses, especially sight; I found my ideas on materials which can be appropriated only through the activity of the senses. I do not generate the object from the thought, but the thought from the object; and I hold that alone to be an object which has an existence beyond one’s own brain.”  – Ludwig Feuerbach [1]

Scientific knowledge practices have an inexorable bias towards human perception. That these practices may waste more than they produce has to do with the severity of this bias. The prevalence of digital technologies today has systemically integrated industrial, mass-production practices based on discrete quantification regimes into our understanding not only of ourselves but of the world. These practices were developed not to understand the world but to control the world for the benefit of human beings.

The alphabet “unrolls” the universe into uniform sequential lines of code. This silent code represents sounds of words, which reconstitute semantic messages through reading. The alphabet creates an environment of silent and private storage of information. The social effects generated by the alphabet is enormous compared to the message content of any particular sequence of text [2].

Information is encoded in alphabetic texts to serve the purposes of human beings. There is already an anthropomorphic filtering going with the composition of the first word.

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” John 1:1

The Old Testament testifies to separating out humanity from the entirety of existence through language. Thus there can henceforth be no absolute truth in any language utterance, but only in the existence of languages themselves. Onomatopoeia shows how linguistic systems always and arbitrarily anthropomorphize all phenomena.

Dog barking
In Afrikaans, woef
In Albanian, ham ham
In Arabic, haw haw, hab hab
In Armenian, hav hav հաւ հաւ
In Basque, txau txau (small dogs), zaunk zaunk (big dogs)
In Batak, kung-kung
In Bengali: gheu gheu ঘেউ ঘেউ, bheu bheu ভেউ ভেউ, bhou bhou ভউ ভউ
In Bulgarian, bow bow бау бау, djaff djaff джаф джаф
In Catalan, bup bup
In Chinese, Cantonese, wōu-wōu 㕵㕵
In Chinese, Mandarin, wāng wāng 汪汪[zho 14]
In Croatian, vau vau
In Czech, haf haf
In Danish, vuf vuf, vov vov, bjæf bjæf
In Dutch, waf waf, woef woef
In English, woof, arf, bow wow, ruff
In Estonian, auh auh
In Finnish hau hau, vuh vuh
In French, ouah ouah, ouaf ouaf, wouf wouf
In German, wau wau, waff waff, wuff wuff
In Greek, ghav ghav γαβ γαβ, woof
In Hebrew, hav hav הַב־הַב,[heb 4] haw haw הַאוּ־הַאוּ[heb 4]
In Hindi, bho bho भो भो
In Hungarian vau vau
In Icelandic, voff voff
In Indonesian, guk guk
In Italian, bau bau
In Japanese, ワンワン (wan wan)
In Kannada, bow bow
In Kazakh, арп-арп, шәу-шәу
In Korean, meong meong 멍멍
In Latgalian, vau vau
In Latvian, vau
In Lithuanian, au au
In Macedonian, av av ав ав, dzhav dzhav џав џав
In Malayalam, bau bau
In Marathi, bho bho भो-भो
In Norwegian voff voff, vov vov
In Persian, vāq vāq واق واق, hāf-hāf هاف هاف
In Polish, hau hau
In Portuguese, au au, ão ão, béu béu
In Romanian, ham ham
In Russian, gav gav (гав-гав), tyaf tyaf тяф-тяф
In Sinhalese, buh buh බුඃ බුඃ
In Slovene, hov hov
In Spanish, guau guau
In Serbian, av av ав ав
In Swedish, vov vov, voff voff
In Tagalog, aw aw
In Tamil, vovw-vovw லொள் லொள், loll-loll, vazh vazh
In Telugu, bau bau
In Thai, โฮ่ง ๆ (hong hong), บ๊อก ๆ (bok bok)
In Turkish, hav hav
In Uropi, waw waw
In Vietnamese, gâu gâu, sủa sủa  [3]

The fact that these dog sounds, translated out of the universe into human language are purely yet differently mimetic and not discursive, reveals anthropomorphic biases. For example that language seems to (in)form the hearing of its users so that certain sounds which are available in that language come to represent sounds which are not provided there. The original sound is translated through the sociolinguistic conditioning of the listener into a simplified form which can be communicated to other users of that language. That dogs bark in different languages shows that we are not listening to them very carefully because we are more fundamentally concerned with each other, fellow human beings.

The world of dogs is an immense untranslatable unknown. So close to us yet so far, an abyss opens up between us and the dog whereby we sense all we lose and have lost through the exercise of power on the world through technologies such as language. This abyss is sublimated on a personal level through direct physical affective interaction with the dog, and on a cultural level through translating dog sounds into sounds available in our languages.

Sublimation is the gesture of translating the immense expansive depths and extents of the world into anthropomorphic aesthetics. Aesthetic cultural forms, writing, images, songs etc, represent the world at human scale, rendering all, in principle accessible to human understanding, investigation and control. The purpose of human technologies is to make the world a better place for humans. For better and for worse our techniques already transform the information we need from the world into anthropomorphic codes. This is why our technologies can not solve social problems.

The distinction of Human and Nature is ceasing to be relevant, humanity acknowledges its fundamental integrity in Nature anew as Human Nature supplants and sublimates Nature tout long.  In the face of so-called “anthropogenic climate change” in the “anthropocene”, the era of the the Anthropos, we need, more than ever, to find cultural forms which allow us to encounter the world outside the hall of mirrors provided by our technologies, where everything that happens is pre-interpreted to be proportional to conservative human aesthetics, human proclivities, human needs.

“There is a prohibition of image for the following reason: the idea in Judaism is that God is completely different, totally different! Toto caelo abstractio.  Which means that you cannot conceive Him and you cannot imagine Him. It is completely unthinkable and unimaginable, and therefore theology is not possible; you cannot speak about God, you can only speak to God. Now, if that is a fact, there is only one image – which is the face of the other person.” -Vilém Flusser [4]

Lets take the example of sound recording and playback. In analog recording, sound waves (variations in air pressure) are translated into variation of electrical signal through a microphone. The Microphone’s physical diaphragm moves with the sound waves in the air and mechanically transmit these vibrations to a media which can ‘record’ or otherwise transform them. In the old Phonograph or Grammophone technology, the membrane of the microphone mechanically moved a stylus which could engrave the vibration on a media. These etched vibrations could subsequently be played back by the same stylus. Instead of vibrating to transmit ambient sound to a medium, the microphone in playback translated the information etched into the medium into sound again and projects this into the audible world.

The Phonograph cylinder and the Grammophone disc are both silent repositories of encoded information, but since this information is analog, it is possible to notice direct correlations between, for example larger and deeper groove shapes for louder sounds and simpler groove shapes for simpler sounds. These technologies were very much designed to satisfy human aesthetic proclivities, their sensitivity to sound waves was prioritised at the range of human voice. 60Hz-1000Hz a tiny segment of all possible vibrations of this kind. Indeed, the early recordings were practically inaudible by today’s standards, the music or speech occluded and skewed in clouds of mechanical noise.[5]

Nevertheless the sound recording and even the shapes of the grooves themselves came to be seen as Nature writing itself, “Nature’s Pencil” as Fox Talbot described photography. Recordings were seen as “objective” and thus more accurate than “subjective” human perceptions, despite the fact that they are technically constrained in such a way that certain aesthetic sensitivities or proclivities are hard coded into the apparatus which produces them. As recording devices become mass-produced, knowledge becomes standardized around that range of aesthetic effects which the devices are designed to reproduce.

In analog recording, “sound” (air pressure) vibrations move the microphone diaphragm, this mechanical movement changes the position of magnetic coils or plates which causes an “analog” electromagnetic signal to be propagated down a cable to a recorder or other device. This electromagnetic variation can be communicated to a stylus to engrave a disk or to change the magnetic charge of particles on a tape. The physical variations of signal and the physical mechanical and/or electro-magnetic variations on a tape are proportional to the “original” sounds recorded and the sound of the recording is as continuous as was the original.

This proportionality is completely disrupted in digital technology. Still, we need a mechanical interface with the world, in this case, a microphone whose diaphragm vibrates to the sounds in the air and translates this into current variations. However in digital technologies, the sound is analyzed according to a grid and transformed into discrete quantifications. The playback of the digital recording takes the discrete quantifications and generated electromagnetic signal which can move a speaker or headphone diaphragm and reproduce sound. However, since the values are discrete, the sound is no longer the same continuous process as was recorded, it is reconstituted from data points, quantifications on a grid.

For digital media the most important regimentation in the grid is the time axis. Unlike analog media, all digital media needs regular clocks. The clock in digital sound processing (DSP) determines the ‘sample rate’, how often the sounds coming through the microphone are evaluated and recorded. Since digital media requires quantitative measurements, these measurements need to be(at least temporally) distinct. DSP thus divides up continuous signal into minute discrete quantities based on a clock. The clock provides the fundamental ‘x’ axis of our grid.

Just as the alphabet excised the voice of language, and the Gutenberg Press excised the extensive persona of the scribe to provide “objective” texts, digital conversion splits up continuous existence into uniform samples according to an arbitrary clock interval. The algorithmic Julian calendar split European out of the cycles of seasons and into the empire of Christianity. The mechanical clock split the working day into uniform intervals, an apotheosis of which is Taylorism. Our knowledge practices move from a world of heterogeneous and embodied intensities into one of homogenous, mechanistic and thereby freely recombinant quantities. How these quantities are aesthetically reconstituted to reproduce information at “human scale” is the pressing moral problem of our time.

Moving from analog to digital forms of information we retreat ever further from the immensity of existence into artificial (artistic) intricacies of concatenated codes. We must sublimate the irrepressibly expansive universe into anthropomorphic codes and, as these codes become more involved and involving, smaller and faster, operating outside the purview of unaided human perception, we sublimate the technological universe of nano-mechanical operations into anthropomorphic cultural tropes.

A cathedral is not as such more beautiful than an airplane, … a hymn than a mathematical equation. … A well-made sword is not more beautiful than a well-made scalpel, though one is used to slay, the other to heal. Works of art are only good or bad, beautiful or ugly in themselves, to the extent that they are or are not well and truly made, that is, do or do not express, or do or do not serve their purpose. – Ananda Coomaraswamy[6]

—

NOTES

[1] Ludwig Feuerbach, Bruckberg, Feb. 14, 1843, Preface to the 2nd Edition of his “Essence of Christianity” translated by George Eliot

[2] This is the point of McLuhan’s famous aphorism “the medium is the message”.  In a TV appearance on 27 June 1979 in Australia, he put it thus “it doesn’t much matter what you say on the telephone, the telephone as a service is a huge environment and that is the medium. The environment affects everybody, what you say on the phone affects very few.” https://youtu.be/ImaH51F4HBw?t=2m15s

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-linguistic_onomatopoeias

[4] from an interview with Vilém Flusser by László Beke and Miklós Peternák in Budapest, the 7th of April 1990, published as  “On religion, memory and synthetic image” in “We Shall Survive in the Memory of Others” Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Köln, 2010

[5] digitized records of over 100-year-old Berliner Grammophone disks can be heard here http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/berlhtml/berlreco.html

[6] Coomaraswamy, Ananda, 1977, Traditional Art and Symbolism (Selected Papers, volume 1), Princeton: Bollingen. p.75

[WiP this is #1 in a series of 12 weekly essays unpacking the concept “Digital Materiality”.  They are prepared in the context of the seminar of the same name held every Thursday at 2pm at the UdK Hardenbergstr.  ]

“We are living in a material world and I am a material girl!”- PETER BROWN, ROBERT RANS

Is every moment of every lived life equally worthy? At stake are historical human facts, the contributions of lived life to any given technical object (necessarily the product of human attention). How their facticity is evaluated is vital for a reckoning of our civilisation bias. This is particularly pertinent as automation begins to fade forever from view.   We are presented with visions of a post-work society, yet the great majority are working harder for less money. Our civilizations allow for widespread poverty, including child poverty, persistence of slavery and prison labour at the core of the advanced technology production chain, the particular vector of technology which we are persistently told is our best hope for a future.

“Material” is made of human activity. Material is that which is brought (from Nature) into the realms of human affairs. In order understand a human artifact, such as a digital object, open up the “time/space historical fact record” record through the surface of the object. These records/stories making a constellation of fragmentary (factual), even  infinitesimal, non-zero (0<x>n)  human contributions to the production of the object are the social ‘message’ of the product. The social conditions of the production of the material is played back through the use of the material. Is every moment of every human life equally worthy, or are some moments of some lives more worthy? Is it really necessary to know who made Einstein’s breakfasts in order to appreciate the true implications of E=mc2?

Once we start to account for the labour contribution to the contemporary surface, we also need to integrate a placeholder value for “reproductive labour”(1). Reproductive labour has been disregarded at the expense of hagiography interested in maintaining a hegemonic state. Like Feudalism, Capitalism depends on unpaid reproductive labour, in ones own body, ones home and elsewhere, “everyday communism”(2), which is voluntary contribution to socially necessary reproductive practices in “a permanent sense of being mutually indebted“. (3)

The material of “materiality” I am mainly concerned with in this essay is that of physical things brought into the sphere of human attention, and, principally, hyper-modern hyper-industrial production. The materiality which is designated to a realm beyond human empirical or technically-assisted access is of interest here only in as far as it impacts the behaviours of those humans that consider it. As such, we will consider the philosophical realm of meta-physics as materialized in philosophizing bodies by the entire metabolism, including intuitions and apprehensions derived from all the senses,

There is thus a materiality of thought which is the materiality of the mind, such that it must be sustained by the same practices which sustain the rest of the living tissue of the body from which the cogitating apparatus can never be entirely abstracted. Though we may never have the science which can explain how mechanically, chemically thoughts are formulated, we must maintain that the thoughts exist and that they cannot exist without a body. There is no immaterial thought, the thought of god, the divine inspiration, itself must be reproduced in the lightless bowels of its living body. The question of how the living body is reproduced in order to be able to think an ephemeral thought is a social, and, in our society, a political question.

My interest here is to put forward a rather conservative understanding of material, that it resides first and fundamentally with living humans and only with respect to those living humans. This is has the political agenda of elaborating a set of concepts, textures or gestures by which any particular or group of human beings can or is impaired from benefitting from the enormous, but finite social production of human beings on the planet right now.

Digital objects, seem at once, much like thoughts, light-speed, fleeting, almost immaterial, “meiousia” μεῖοὐσία (less material), yet whereas thoughts are reproduced by living metabolisms, digital objects are reproduced by mechanical processes, i.e. concretions of thought processes. We will go more deeply into what distinguishes digital objects in the next chapters, but before this we need to grapple with that which could possibly be ‘digital’ in the first place, the digital object, the materiality which is digital, the matter, of which materiality speaks “qualities of matter”.

Spinoza uses the word substance rather than material “which stands below” the phenomena or the behaviours, which have bearing on us, or which we perceive. For Spinoza, what characterizes material is that it has (fundamental) properties which “come from outside”, which we have not chosen. We can dis-cover these properties through behaviours, which are interactions with our discovery process. Unlike the pre-literate (pre-socratic) Greeks, Democritus, Leucippus, Epicurus, straining through metaphors, trying to elaborate fundamental physical principles of the makeup of the universe, today’s truth and science is about understanding physical behaviours and controlling these for human purposes. This means we only understand the physical properties of substances in as far as we can elicit repeatable, reliable behaviours of them. In other words, to make machines of them (to enslave, and domesticate them). Our process of understanding is anthropocratic, instrumental.

Any politics of this “digital” age which wishes to contest the “distribution of the sensible” as Jacques Rancière calls it, will have to firstly repudiate any contention of immateriality. Digital things, as anything “thengan”(4) operate in a realm overdetermined by human practices, which must be understood as fundamentally material. Thus I will examine materiality as (problematically) anthropomorphic, especially for technical products, especially in the per-industrial “digital” age. I will refer to these products as “things”, e.g. digital “things”.

If we use the flexibility which exists in German to address materiality we find two useful words for thing: Ding and Zeug. The ontological truth of the thing is in the fact that people congregate around it. It is both “thengan”/Ding = appointed time (4) and “Zeug” something conditioned by the needs of humans (useful thing) (5) “This text examines only the economy of things in a human universe proscribed by human mortality, life-span and the predilections of the human sensibility, in other words ‘human scale’25 Disruptions of, or interventions in this economy do not matter if they do not effect humanity Once they do they become things in an economy of things in a world conditioned by human scale experience “ (6)

A self-consciously anthropomorphic approach to materiality becomes most useful at the limits. On the political level today we are all divided up into individuals, socio-political atoms with a very abstract homogenous concept of “equal rights”. We know that, in practice we do not have the same right to assert our equal rights, and the dominant means of production perpetuates conditions where some human beings are not able to assert their equal rights at all. This is a problem as old as civilisation, and we must hearten ourselves and each other if we earnestly want to confront it, since it is endemic to the way human society has always functioned. The principle of our society are not the practice, and the showdown comes down on our own bodies, limited (finally by mortality) in physical capacity to participate in socially necessary production.(7)

In the liminal space between the limited (0<x>∞) unique human participant and the quasi-unlimited (∞-n) universality of the species, between the universality of the species and the universality of all material, we are struggling with languages which work out epistemologies derived from human experiential limits on this planet. The translation from whatever there is (noumena) to the realm of our grappling (phenomena) is today of political relevance, since the status of the anthropos is in crisis.

Die Liebe ist das Band, das Vermittlungsprinzip zwischen dem Vollkommnen und Unvollkommnen, dem sündlosen und sündhaften Wesen, dem Allgemeinen und Individuellen, dem Gesetz und dem Herzen, dem Göttlichen und Menschlichen. Die Liebe ist Gott selbst und außer ihr ist kein Gott. Die Liebe macht den Menschen zu Gott und Gott zum Menschen. Die Liebe stärket das Schwache und schwächt das Starke, erniedrigt das Hohe und erhöhet das Niedrige, idealisiert die Materie und materialisiert den Geist. Die Liebe ist die wahre Einheit von Gott und Mensch, von Geist und Natur. In der Liebe ist die gemeine Natur Geist und der vornehme Geist Natur. Lieben heißt vom Geiste aus: den Geist, von der Materie aus: die Materie aufheben. Liebe ist Materialismus; immaterielle Liebe ist ein Unding.

• Feuerbach: Das Wesen des Christentums. DB Schüler-Bibliothek: Philosophie, S. 21206

Love is the middle term, the substantial bond, the principle of reconciliation between the perfect and the imperfect, the sinless and sinful being the universal and the individual, the divine and the human. Love is God himself, and apart from it there is no God. Love makes man God and God man. Love strengthens the weak and weakens the strong, abases the high and raises the lowly, idealises matter and materialises spirit. Love it the true unity of God and man, of spirit and nature. In love common nature is spirit, and the pre-eminent spirit is nature. Love is to deny spirit from the point of view of spirit, to deny matter from the point of view of matter. Love is materialism; immaterial love is a chimaera.

• Ludwig Feuerbach, from The Essence of Christianity, Chapter II. God as a Being of the Understanding Translated from the original German by George Eliot

“nun wurde man immer geneigter, das licht wegen seiner ungeheuern wirkungen nicht als etwas abgeleitetes anzusehen; man schrieb ihm vielmehr eine substanz zu, man sah es als etwas ursprüngliches, für sich bestehendes, unabhängiges, unbedingtes an; doch muszte diese substanz, um zu erscheinen, sich materiiren, materiell werden, materie werden, sich körperlich und endlich als körper darstellen”.

• Johann Wolfgang Goethe. Gedenkausgabe der Werke, Briefe und Gespräche. Band 1–24 und Erg.-Bände 1–3, Band 16, Zürich 1948 ff, S. 448-452.

(1) Sylvia Federicci coined the term as an improvement on “affective labour” used by Michael Hardt, extending from Rosi Braidotti. Whereas “affective labour” emphasizes the care and attention which supports labour, Federici’s “reproductive labour” stresses that labour must reproduced daily in the capitalist extraction process, which only recompenses the laborer on the most exploitative terms, the maintenance of the capacity to work which occurs during the full day, parallel to the daily , is tacitly factored into the wage of the labourer. An assembly-line worker may be paid to complete the same task 30 times an hour, but maintaining the psychological wherewithal to carry out the task each time with the requisite attention, is an expected unpaid contribution of the labourer. Environmentalism, and thinkers like Michel Serres, would extend reproductive labour to the “natural” processes of our planet which we depend on to produce what we need to live together.

“We established that capitalism is built on an immense amount of unpaid labor, that it not built exclusively or primarily on contractual relations; that the wage relation hides the unpaid, slave -like nature of so much of the work upon which capital accumulation is premised. “

• “Precarious Labor: A Feminist Viewpoint” Silvia Federici, The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, published from a lecture from October 28th 2006 at Bluestockings Radical Bookstore in New York City, 172 Allen Street as part of the “This is Forever: From Inquiry to Refusal Discussion Series.

(2) Everyday Communism compensates for the alienation and extreme atomisation of individuals under capitalism by providing for social needs in assumed solidarity. Capitalism is not a monolith, it requires unpaid, unquantified Communistic practices which reproduce the capacity to produce value for society. It may be argued that capitalism is in turn required by unquantified Feudalistic ownership and competition strategies.

(3) “On the moral grounds of economic relations: A Maussian approach “ Graeber, David, Journal of Classical Sociology 2014, Vol. 14(1) 65–77

(4) Things are, as Heidegger pointed out, res publica, “not the state but that which, known to everyone, concerns everybody and is therefore deliberated in public” Heidegger (2001) Sein und Zeit. Max Niemeyer, Tübingen p.174, also “that which concerns man is what is real in res” p.176

(5) “Things in this text are always useful because they do not exist independent of a human being’s employment of them in the constitution or maintenance of their world Whatever is beyond human employ, then, is nothing” Gottlieb, B. “A Pollitical Economy of the Smallest Things” ATROPOS, New York,p.46

(6) ibid p.50

(7) The capacity to contribute to an economy of human affects in socially necessary work depends on material conditions. Sound sleep, good nutrition, maintaining minimum social standards of presentability, are all essential to participation and enjoyment of socially produced goods. Each person has a limited time everyday to insure continued affordance of that which they need. This physical effort/time is limited by the available of corporal physical resources. In the contemporary economy based on individualized contributions and allocations of agency (in the form of money) we are all constrained to maximize individual benefit within an economy of limited available resources, both internal and external.