lewis levenberg
Documentary and the Visual Cultures of Late-Capitalism
Dr. Tim Kaposy
6 December 2010
Theorization: First Person and "We Live in Public"
Beyond Binary
This week's readings and documentary address the problems of both vision and culture for humans in a digital era. Our ways of seeing and of conceptualizing images, let alone relating to or using them meaningfully in a social and economic context, approach a drastic change. I speak, that is, of "the coming technological singularity" (Vernor Vinge), the point of a radical futurity in which humans no longer hold primacy over our creations, machines. Defined variously, and giving rise to myriad speculative interpretations, the idea of a singularity beyond which artificial intelligence outstrips and subsumes human understanding nevertheless affects every facet of the conversations in First Person and "We Live in Public." The concept of singularity, then, provides an ideal opportunity to work backwards. We proceed from digital poetics, to the representations and witnessing of social conflicts, to the paradigm of technological reproducibility inherited from Benjamin, and finally to an originary provocation for our course, the question of a line.
John Cayley and the authors who respond to him in First Person (and online) take up the question of how digitization and poetics affect one another. Beginning from the relationship between pixel and line, Cayley distinguishes between manipulation of pixels or lines as an aesthetic creative intervention, and manipulation of letters as a semantic intervention. He pursues a "programmatology" that extends Foucault's and Derrida's concepts of how language enfolds, materializes, and abstracts concepts, all at the same time. However, he focuses on the practice of algorithmic recombination and manipulation as literal poetics. In championing "literal rather than digital art," he calls attention to the material machinations of language itself in digital writing, including (and through) algorithmic poetics. 
Johanna Drucker remembers, on the other hand, that saturation of phatic communication paralyzes both affective and effective communication. That is, she points out that a poetics whose constitutive and problematic grounds require that the interface between communicators constantly be troubled by the instability of meaning can collapse in on itself, agreeing to the need to situate discussions of technology in their cultural and social contexts. She also introduces new questions, such as how to "read the materiality of binarism," and calls for the critical "distance" required for "theory." In his related response, Nick Montfort joins in to call for increased attention to the role of numbers alongside and in distinction from letters as semantic units. 
As Cayley turns "our attention from lines of verse to the letters of literal art," and as his respondents explicate the logical and cultural interplay with poetics and digitization, their conversation (taking place, it should be noted, in a printed book about digital media, whose contents also appear online) sits between screen shots of an example of Cayley's poetic work. That work appears as a printed reproduction of digital poetics; it is so marked by its use of black space containing white letters, rather than the other way around. It also uses the serif font Courier, a typewriter-style font distinct from the Adobe Chapparal font used for the book's typeset. Finally, although the book and the screen shot boxes follow similar rectangular proportions (since the book's layout mimics a computer screen), the screen shots' arrangement in discrete units rather than as a continuous black-background sidebar distinguish it from the continuous white background of the printed (or laser-inscribed) page. In this way, the editors and printers of First Person join the discussion on what constitutes poetics and creativity in both print and digital media. What's more, all five humans taking part in that discussion agree (implicitly if not explicitly) that creative agency is located exclusively in humans. 
All of these positions reject the notion that machines possess such capacity for poetics. The power of abstraction - literal, visual, musical, and/or intermediate - however, approaches the point of transfer from human to machine consciousness. The concept of machine creativity, of a uniquely digital (rather than literal) poetics, also impacts how we conceive of witnessing to social conflicts. Last week, the Twitter feed for WikiLeaks invoked its users' role in what it called the world's first "info-war." That short message misrepresented the parties involved in the brewing conflict that promises protraction and devastation in addition to uncertainty and systemic change. The enmity and existential threat posed by the concept of Singularity, to which we all will soon bear witness, does not take place among differently-minded humans, but precisely between humans as a species, and a machine species-consciousness to which our development of digital intelligence gives rise. Scary, certainly, and unpredictable - a science fiction writer's wet dream. But the ergodic chain of our own evolution should not only scare us, but thrill us - we have seen the other, and it was us. 
"We Live in Public" illustrates the difference between our current, loose conception of "postmodernity," and the radical futurity that actually existing post-modernity would indicate: the world of the unrationalized surveillance state prefigured by "Quiet." The master of that universe, however, cannot be thought of as the all-too-human dot.com kid represented by Josh Harris, but rather the documentarian, figured by Ondi Timoner. Before I am accused of utopianism (or, more accurately, of dystopianism or of technological determinism... *gasp*!), consider that the phase change from pre- to post-Singularity consciousness involves neither massive explosion nor even and total distribution of some abstract machine mind. Rather, the rate at which innovations are adopted will simply occur faster than the measurement of capital flows to which we are so accustomed. In other words, the constitutive and conditioning power of capital will be undermined by the ability of non-capitalist systems, that is, machine systems, to develop themselves. Such a transition requires a witness - and that witness is the human, not the superhuman: the documentarian, not the millionaire. Only through recording and disseminating information about such a transition could "the rest of us" even become aware that a qualitative change in dominant modes of production will have occurred at all. Life, in other words, continues apace, despite its imminent ontological restructuring. 
Consider me a doomsday sayer if you will, but we are about to witness a futurity of qualitative difference from Benjamin's modernity. The Singularity represents obsolescence for humanism as such, and rather than gibbering or denying an almost-inevitable occurence, it behooves students of culture like ourselves to consider what culture means and what it does when it cannot be defined strictly on human terms. The age of technological reproducibility approaches an age of technological consciousness and generativity. We must conceive of a machine language, for example, that is neither numerical nor binary, but primarily visual. We must hold in our minds the contradiction of a human creation that humans might not understand any longer. The line between pixel and letter that we draw when we express an idea digitally might not represent a boundary between humans and machines; instead, it might represent our fundamental interconnection, the tying of our destiny to that of the machines that write themselves.