boundary 2

Tag: deleuze

  • Poetics of Control

    Poetics of Control

    a review of Alexander R. Galloway, The Interface Effect (Polity, 2012)

    by Bradley J. Fest

    ~

    This summer marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the original French publication of Gilles Deleuze’s seminal essay, “Postscript on the Societies of Control” (1990). A strikingly powerful short piece, “Postscript” remains, even at this late date, one of the most poignant, prescient, and concise diagnoses of life in the overdeveloped digital world of the twenty-first century and the “ultrarapid forms of apparently free-floating control that are taking over from the old disciplines.”[1] A stylistic departure from much of Deleuze’s other writing in its clarity and straightforwardness, the essay describes a general transformation from the modes of disciplinary power that Michel Foucault famously analyzed in Discipline and Punish (1975) to “societies of control.” For Deleuze, the late twentieth century is characterized by “a general breakdown of all sites of confinement—prisons, hospitals, factories, schools, the family.”[2] The institutions that were formerly able to strictly organize time and space through perpetual surveillance—thereby, according to Foucault, fabricating the modern individual subject—have become fluid and modular, “continually changing from one moment to the next.”[3] Individuals have become “dividuals,” “dissolv[ed] . . . into distributed networks of information.”[4]

    Over the past decade, media theorist Alexander R. Galloway has extensively and rigorously elaborated on Deleuze’s suggestive pronouncements, probably devoting more pages in print to thinking about the “Postscript” than has any other single writer.[5] Galloway’s most important work in this regard is his first book, Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization (2004). If the figure for the disciplinary society was Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon, a machine designed to induce a sense of permanent visibility in prisoners (and, by extension, the modern subject), Galloway argues that the distributed network, and particularly the distributed network we call the internet, is an apposite figure for control societies. Rhizomatic and flexible, distributed networks historically emerged as an alternative to hierarchical, rigid, centralized (and decentralized) networks. But far from being chaotic and unorganized, the protocols that organize our digital networks have created “the most highly controlled mass media hitherto known. . . . While control used to be a law of society, now it is more like a law of nature. Because of this, resisting control has become very challenging indeed.”[6] To put it another way: if in 1980 Deleuze and Félix Guattari complained that “we’re tired of trees,” Galloway and philosopher Eugene Thacker suggest that today “we’re tired of rhizomes.”[7]

    The imperative to think through the novel challenges presented by control societies and the urgent need to develop new methodologies for engaging the digital realities of the twenty-first century are at the heart of The Interface Effect (2012), the final volume in a trio of works Galloway calls Allegories of Control.[8] Guiding the various inquiries in the book is his provocative claim that “we do not yet have a critical or poetic language in which to represent the control society.”[9] This is because there is an “unrepresentability lurking within information aesthetics” (86). This claim for unrepresentability, that what occurs with digital media is not representation per se, is The Interface Effect’s most significant departure from previous media theory. Rather than rehearse familiar media ecologies, Galloway suggests that “the remediation argument (handed down from McLuhan and his followers including Kittler) is so full of holes that it is probably best to toss it wholesale” (20). The Interface Effect challenges thinking about mimesis that would place computers at the end of a line of increasingly complex modes of representation, a line extending from Plato, through Erich Auerbach, Marshall McLuhan, and Friedrich Kittler, and terminating in Richard Grusin, Jay David Bolter, and many others. Rather than continue to understand digital media in terms of remediation and representation, Galloway emphasizes the processes of computational media, suggesting that the inability to productively represent control societies stems from misunderstandings about how to critically analyze and engage with the basic materiality of computers.

    The book begins with an introduction polemically positioning Galloway’s own media theory directly against Lev Manovich’s field-defining book, The Language of New Media (2001). Contra Manovich, Galloway stresses that digital media are not objects but actions. Unlike cinema, which he calls an ontology because it attempts to bring some aspect of the phenomenal world nearer to the viewer—film, echoing Oedipa Maas’s famous phrase, “projects worlds” (11)—computers involve practices and effects (what Galloway calls an “ethic”) because they are “simply on a world . . . subjecting it to various forms of manipulation, preemption, modeling, and synthetic transformation. . . . The matter at hand is not that of coming to know a world, but rather that of how specific, abstract definitions are executed to form a world” (12, 13, 23). Or to take two other examples Galloway uses to positive effect: the difference can be understood as that between language, which describes and represents, encoding a world, versus calculus, which does or simulates doing something to the world; calculus is a “system of reasoning, an executable machine” (22). Though Galloway does more in Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture (2006) to fully develop a way of analyzing computational media that privileges action over representation, The Interface Effect theoretically grounds this important distinction between mimesis and action, description and process.[10] Further, it constitutes a bold methodological step away from some of the dominant ways of thinking about digital media that simultaneously offers its readers new ways to connect media studies more firmly to politics.

    Further distinguishing himself from writers like Manovich, Galloway says that there has been a basic misunderstanding regarding media and mediation, and that the two systems are “violently unconnected” (13). Galloway demonstrates, in contrast to such thinkers as Kittler, that there is an old line of thinking about mediation that can be traced very far back and that is not dependent on thinking about media as exclusively tied to nineteenth and twentieth century communications technology:

    Doubtless certain Greek philosophers had negative views regarding hypomnesis. Yet Kittler is reckless to suggest that the Greeks had no theory of mediation. The Greeks indubitably had an intimate understanding of the physicality of transmission and message sending (Hermes). They differentiated between mediation as immanence and mediation as expression (Iris versus Hermes). They understood the mediation of poetry via the Muses and their techne. They understood the mediation of bodies through the “middle loving” Aphrodite. They even understood swarming and networked presence (in the incontinent mediating forms of the Eumenides who pursued Orestes in order to “process” him at the procès of Athena). Thus we need only look a little bit further to shed this rather vulgar, consumer-electronics view of media, and instead graduate into the deep history of media as modes of mediation. (15)

    Galloway’s point here is that the larger contemporary discussion of mediation that he is pursuing in The Interface Effect should not be restricted to merely the digital artifacts that have occasioned so much recent theoretical activity, and that there is an urgent need for deeper histories of mediation. Though the book appears to be primarily concerned with the twentieth and twenty-first century, this gesture toward the Greeks signals the important work of historicization that often distinguishes much of Galloway’s work. In “Love of the Middle” (2014), for example, which appears in the book Excommunication (2014), co-authored with Thacker and McKenzie Wark, Galloway fully develops a rigorous reading of Greek mediation, suggesting that in the Eumenides, or what the Romans called the Furies, reside a notable historical precursor for understanding the mediation of distributed networks.[11]

    In The Interface Effect these larger efforts at historicization allow Galloway to always understand “media as modes of mediation,” and consequently his big theoretical step involves claiming that “an interface is not a thing, an interface is an effect. It is always a process or a translation” (33). There are a variety of positive implications for the study of media understood as modes of mediation, as a study of interface effects. Principal amongst these are the rigorous methodological possibilities Galloway’s focus emphasizes.

    In this, methodologically and otherwise, Galloway’s work in The Interface Effect resembles and extends that of his teacher Fredric Jameson, particularly the kind of work found in The Political Unconscious (1981). Following Jameson’s emphasis on the “poetics of social forms,” Galloway’s goal is “not to reenact the interface, much less to ‘define’ it, but to identify the interface itself as historical. . . . This produces . . . a perspective on how cultural production and the socio-historical situation take form as they are interfaced together” (30). The Interface Effect firmly ties the cultural to the social, economic, historical, and political, finding in a variety of locations ways that interfaces function as allegories of control. “The social field itself constitutes a grand interface, an interface between subject and world, between surface and source, and between critique and the objects of criticism. Hence the interface is above all an allegorical device that will help us gain some perspective on culture in the age of information” (54). The power of looking at the interface as an allegorical device, as a “control allegory” (30), is demonstrated throughout the book’s relatively wide-ranging analyses of various interface effects.

    Chapter 1, “The Unworkable Interface,” historicizes some twentieth century transformations of the interface, concisely summarizing a history of mediation by moving from Norman Rockwell’s “Triple Self-Portrait” (1960), through Mad Magazine’s satirization of Rockwell, to World of Warcraft (2004-2015). Viewed from the level of the interface, with all of its nondiegetic menus and icons and the ways it erases the line between play and labor, Galloway demonstrates both here and in the last chapter that World of Warcraft is a powerful control allegory: “it is not an avant-garde image, but, nevertheless, it firmly delivers an avant-garde lesson in politics” (44).[12] Further exemplifying the importance of historicizing interfaces, Chapter 2 continues to demonstrate the value of approaching interface effects allegorically. Galloway finds “a formal similarity between the structure of ideology and the structure of software” (55), arguing that software “is an allegorical figure for the way in which . . . political and social realities are ‘resolved’ today: not through oppression or false consciousness . . . but through the ruthless rule of code” (76). Chapter 4 extends such thinking toward a masterful reading of the various mediations at play in a show such as 24 (2001-2010, 2014), arguing that 24 is political not because of its content but “because the show embodies in its formal technique the essential grammar of the control society, dominated as it is by specific network and informatic logics” (119). In short, The Interface Effect continually demonstrates the potent critical tools approaching mediation as allegory can provide, reaffirming the importance of a Jamesonian approach to cultural production in the digital age.

    Whether or not readers are convinced, however, by Galloway’s larger reworking of the field of digital media studies, his emphasis on attending to contemporary cultural artifacts as allegories of control, or his call in the book’s conclusion for a politics of “whatever being” probably depends upon their thoughts about the unrepresentability of today’s global networks in Chapter 3, “Are Some Things Unrepresentable?” His answer to the chapter’s question is, quite simply, “Yes.” Attempts to visualize the World Wide Web only result in incoherent repetition: “every map of the internet looks the same,” and as a result “no poetics is possible in this uniform aesthetic space” (85). He argues that, in the face of such an aesthetic regime, what Jacques Rancière calls a “distribution of the sensible”[13]:

    The point is not so much to call for a return to cognitive mapping, which of course is of the highest importance, but to call for a poetics as such for this mysterious new machinic space. . . . Today’s systemics have no contrary. Algorithms and other logical structures are uniquely, and perhaps not surprisingly, monolithic in their historical development. There is one game in town: a positivistic dominant of reductive, systemic efficiency and expediency. Offering a counter-aesthetic in the face of such systematicity is the first step toward building a poetics for it, a language of representability adequate to it. (99)

    There are, to my mind, two ways of responding to Galloway’s call for a poetics as such in the face of the digital realities of contemporaneity.

    On the one hand, I am tempted to agree with him. Galloway is clearly signaling his debt to some of Jameson’s more important large claims and is reviving the need “to think the impossible totality of the contemporary world system,” what Jameson once called the “technological” or “postmodern sublime.”[14] But Galloway is also signaling the importance of poesis for this activity. Not only is Jamesonian “cognitive mapping” necessary, but the totality of twenty-first century digital networks requires new imaginative activity, a counter-aesthetics commensurate with informatics. This is an immensely attractive position, at least to me, as it preserves a space for poetic, avant-garde activity, and indeed, demands that, all evidence to the contrary, the imagination still has an important role to play in the face of societies of control. (In other words, there may be some “humanities” left in the “digital humanities.”[15]) Rather than suggesting that the imagination has been utterly foreclosed by the cultural logic of late capitalism—that we can no longer imagine any other world, that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than a better one—Galloway says that there must be a reinvestment in the imagination, in poetics as such, that will allow us to better represent, understand, and intervene in societies of control (though not necessarily to imagine a better world; more on this below). Given the present landscape, how could one not be attracted to such a position?

    On the other hand, Galloway’s argument hinges on his claim that such a poetics has not emerged and, as Patrick Jagoda and others have suggested, one might merely point out that such a claim is demonstrably false.[16] Though I hope I hardly need to list some of the significant cultural products across a range of media that have appeared over the last fifteen years that critically and complexly engage with the realities of control (e.g., The Wire [2002-08]), it is not radical to suggest that art engaged with pressing contemporary concerns has appeared and will continue to appear, that there are a variety of significant artists who are attempting to understand, represent, and cope with the distributed networks of contemporaneity. One could obviously suggest Galloway’s argument is largely rhetorical, a device to get his readers to think about the different kinds of poesis control societies, distributed networks, and interfaces call for, but this blanket statement threatens to shut down some of the vibrant activity that is going on all over the world commenting upon the contemporary situation. In other words, yes we need a poetics of control, but why must the need for such a poetics hinge on the claim that there has not yet emerged “a critical or poetic language in which to represent the control society”? Is not Galloway’s own substantial, impressive, and important decade-long intellectual project proof that people have developed a critical language that is capable of representing the control society? I would certainly answer in the affirmative.

    There are some other rhetorical choices in the conclusion of The Interface Effect that, though compelling, deserve to be questioned, or at least highlighted. I am referring to Galloway’s penchant—following another one of his teachers at Duke, Michael Hardt—for invoking a Bartlebian politics, what Galloway calls “whatever being,” as an appropriate response to present problems.[17] In Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire (2000), in the face of the new realities of late capitalism—the multitude, the management of hybridities, the non-place of Empire, etc.—they propose that Herman Melville’s “Bartleby in his pure passivity and his refusal of any particulars presents us with a figure of generic being, being as such, being and nothing more. . . . This refusal certainly is the beginning of a liberatory politics, but it is only a beginning.”[18] Bartleby, with his famous response of “‘I would prefer not to,’”[19] has been frequently invoked by such substantial figures as Giorgio Agamben in the 1990s and Slavoj Žižek in the 2000s (following Hardt and Negri). Such thinkers have frequently theorized Bartleby’s passive negativity as a potentially radical political position, and perhaps the only one possible in the face of global economic realities.[20] (And indeed, it is easy enough to read, say, Occupy Wall Street as a Bartlebian political gesture.) Galloway’s response to the affective postfordist labor of digital networks, that “each and every day, anyone plugged into a network is performing hour after hour of unpaid micro labor” (136), is similarly to withdraw, to “demilitarize being. Stand down. Cease participating” (143).

    Like Hardt and Negri and so many others, Galloway’s “whatever being” is a response to the failures of twentieth century emancipatory politics. He writes:

    We must stress that it is not the job of politics to invent a new world. On the contrary it is the job of politics to make all these new worlds irrelevant. . . . It is time now to subtract from this world, not add to it. The challenge today is not one of political or moral imagination, for this problem was solved ages ago—kill the despots, surpass capitalism, inclusion of the excluded, equality for all of humanity, end exploitation. The world does not need new ideas. The challenge is simply to realize what we already know to be true. (138-39)

    And thus the tension of The Interface Effect is between this call for withdrawal, to work with what there is, to exploit protocological possibility, etc., and the call for a poetics of control, a poesis capable of representing control societies, which to my mind implies imagination (and thus, inevitably, something different, if not new). If there is anything wanting about the book it is its lack of clarity about how these two critical projects are connected (or indeed, if they are perhaps the same thing!). Further, it is not always clear what exactly Galloway means by “poetics” nor how a need for a poetics corresponds to the book’s emphasis on understanding mediation as process over representation, action over objects. This lack of clarity may be due in part to the fact that, as Galloway indicates in his most recent work, Laruelle: Against the Digital (2014), there is some necessary theorization that he needs to do before he can adequately address the digital head-on. As he writes in the conclusion to that book: “The goal here has not been to elucidate, promote, or disparage contemporary digital technologies, but rather to draft a simple prolegomenon for future writing on digitality and philosophy.”[21] In other words, it seems like Allegories of Control, The Exploit: A Theory of Networks (2007), and Laruelle may constitute the groundwork for an even more ambitious confrontation with the digital, one where the kinds of tensions just noted might dissolve. As such, perhaps the reinvocation of a Bartlebian politics of withdrawal at the end of The Interface Effect is merely a kind of stop-gap, a place-holder before a more coherent poetics of control can emerge (as seems to be the case for the Hardt and Negri of Empire). Although contemporary theorists frequently invoke Bartleby, he remains a rather uninspiring figure.

    These criticisms aside, however, Galloway’s conclusion of the larger project that is Allegories of Control reveals him to be a consistently accessible and powerful guide to the control society and the digital networks of the twenty-first century. If the new directions in his recent work are any indication, and Laruelle is merely a prolegomenon to future projects, then we should perhaps not despair at all about the present lack of a critical language for representing control societies.

    _____

    Bradley J. Fest teaches literature at the University of Pittsburgh. At present he is working on The Nuclear Archive: American Literature Before and After the Bomb, a book investigating the relationship between nuclear and information technology in twentieth and twenty-first century American literature. He has published articles in boundary 2, Critical Quarterly, and Studies in the Novel; and his essays have appeared in David Foster Wallace and “The Long Thing” (2014) and The Silence of Fallout (2013). The Rocking Chair, his first collection of poems, is forthcoming from Blue Sketch Press. He blogs at The Hyperarchival Parallax.

    Back to the essay
    _____

    [1] Though best-known in the Anglophone world via the translation that appeared in 1992 in October as “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” the piece appears as “Postscript on Control Societies,” in Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations: 1972-1990, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 178. For the original French see Gilles Deleuze, “Post-scriptum sur des sociétés de contrôle,” in Pourparlers, 1972-1990 (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1990), 240-47. The essay originally appeared as “Les sociétés de contrôle,” L’Autre Journal, no. 1 (May 1990). Further references are to the Negotiations version.

    [2] Ibid.

    [3] Ibid., 179.

    [4] Alexander R. Galloway, Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 12n18.

    [5] In his most recent book, Galloway even goes so far as to ask about the “Postscript”: “Could it be that Deleuze’s most lasting legacy will consist of 2,300 words from 1990?” (Alexander R. Galloway, Laruelle: Against the Digital [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014], 96, emphases in original). For Andrew Culp’s review of Laruelle for The b2 Review, see “From the Decision to the Digital.”

    [6] Galloway, Protocol, 147.

    [7] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 15; and Alexander R. Galloway and Eugene Thacker, The Exploit: A Theory of Networks (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 153. For further discussions of networks see Alexander R. Galloway, “Networks,” in Critical Terms for Media Studies, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell and Mark B. N. Hansen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 280-96.

    [8] The other books in the trilogy include Protocol and Alexander R. Galloway, Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).

    [9] Alexander R. Galloway, The Interface Effect (Malden, MA: Polity, 2012), 98. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically.

    [10] See especially Galloway’s masterful first chapter of Gaming, “Gamic Action, Four Moments,” 1-38. To my mind, this is one of the best primers for critically thinking about videogames, and it does much to fundamentally ground the study of videogames in action (rather than, as had previously been the case, in either ludology or narratology).

    [11] See Alexander R. Galloway, “Love of the Middle,” in Excommunication: Three Inquiries in Media and Mediation, by Alexander R. Galloway, Eugene Thacker, and McKenzie Wark (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 25-76.

    [12] This is also something he touched on in his remarkable reading of Donald Rumsfeld’s famous “unknown unknowns.” See Alexander R. Galloway, “Warcraft and Utopia,” Ctheory.net (16 February 2006). For a discussion of labor in World of Warcraft, see David Golumbia, “Games Without Play,” in “Play,” special issue, New Literary History 40, no. 1 (Winter 2009): 179-204.

    [13] See the following by Jacques Rancière: The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (New York: Continuum, 2004), and “Are Some Things Unrepresentable?” in The Future of the Image, trans. Gregory Elliott (New York: Verso, 2007), 109-38.

    [14] Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism; or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 38.

    [15] For Galloway’s take on the digital humanities more generally, see his “Everything Is Computational,” Los Angeles Review of Books (27 June 2013), and “The Cybernetic Hypothesis,” differences 25, no. 1 (Spring 2014): 107-31.

    [16] See Patrick Jagoda, introduction to Network Aesthetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, forthcoming 2015).

    [17] Galloway’s “whatever being” is derived from Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).

    [18] Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 203, 204.

    [19] Herman Melville, “Bartleby, The Scrivener: A Story of Wall-street,” in Melville’s Short Novels, critical ed., ed. Dan McCall (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), 10.

    [20] See Giorgio Agamben, “Bartleby, or On Contingency,” in Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, trans. and ed. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 243-71; and see the following by Slavoj Žižek: Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle (New York: Verso, 2004), esp. 71-73, and The Parallax View (New York: Verso, 2006), esp. 381-85.

    [21] Galloway, Laruelle, 220.

  • Flat Theory

    Flat Theory

    By David M. Berry
    ~

    The world is flat.[1] 6Or perhaps better, the world is increasingly “layers.” Certainly the augmediated imaginaries of the major technology companies are now structured around a post-retina vision of mediation made possible and informed by the digital transformations ushered in by mobile technologies – whether smartphones, wearables, beacons or nearables – an internet of places and things. These imaginaries provide a sense of place, as well as sense for management, of the complex real-time streams of information and data broken into shards and fragments of narrative, visual culture, social media and messaging. Turned into software, they reorder and re-present information, decisions and judgment, amplifying the sense and senses of (neoliberal) individuality whilst reconfiguring what it means to be a node in the network of post digital capitalism.  These new imaginaries serve as abstractions of abstractions, ideologies of ideologies, a prosthesis to create a sense of coherence and intelligibility in highly particulate computational capitalism (Berry 2014). To explore the experimentation of the programming industries in relation to this it is useful to explore the design thinking and material abstractions that are becoming hegemonic at the level of the interface.

    Two new competing computational interface paradigms are now deployed in the latest version of Apple and Google’s operating systems, but more notably as regulatory structures to guide the design and strategy related to corporate policy. The first is “flat design” which has been introduced by Apple through iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite as a refresh of the aging operating systems’ human computer interface guidelines, essentially stripping the operating system of historical baggage related to techniques of design that disguised the limitations of a previous generation of technology, both in terms of screen but also processor capacity. It is important to note, however, that Apple avoids talking about “flat design” as its design methodology, preferring to talk through its platforms specificity, that is about iOS’ design or OS X’s design. The second is “material design” which was introduced by Google into its Android L, now Lollipop, operating system and which also sought to bring some sense of coherence to a multiplicity of Android devices, interfaces, OEMs and design strategies. More generally “flat design” is “the term given to the style of design in which elements lose any type of stylistic characters that make them appear as though they lift off the page” (Turner 2014). As Apple argues, one should “reconsider visual indicators of physicality and realism” and think of the user interface as “play[ing] a supporting role”, that is that techniques of mediation through the user interface should aim to provide a new kind of computational realism that presents “content” as ontologically prior to, or separate from its container in the interface (Apple 2014). This is in contrast to “rich design,” which has been described as “adding design ornaments such as bevels, reflections, drop shadows, and gradients” (Turner 2014).

    color_family_a_2xI want to explore these two main paradigms – and to a lesser extent the flat-design methodology represented in Windows 7 and the, since renamed, Metro interface – through a notion of a comprehensive attempt by both Apple and Google to produce a rich and diverse umwelt, or ecology, linked through what what Apple calls “aesthetic integrity” (Apple 2014). This is both a response to their growing landscape of devices, platforms, systems, apps and policies, but also to provide some sense of operational strategy in relation to computational imaginaries. Essentially, both approaches share an axiomatic approach to conceptualizing the building of a system of thought, in other words, a primitivist predisposition which draws from both a neo-Euclidian model of geons (for Apple), but also a notion of intrinsic value or neo-materialist formulations of essential characteristics (for Google). That is, they encapsulate a version of what I am calling here flat theory. Both of these companies are trying to deal with the problematic of multiplicities in computation, and the requirement that multiple data streams, notifications and practices have to be combined and managed within the limited geography of the screen. In other words, both approaches attempt to create what we might call aggregate interfaces by combining techniques of layout, montage and collage onto computational surfaces (Berry 2014: 70).

    The “flat turn” has not happened in a vacuum, however, and is the result of a new generation of computational hardware, smart silicon design and retina screen technologies. This was driven in large part by the mobile device revolution which has not only transformed the taken-for-granted assumptions of historical computer interface design paradigms (e.g. WIMP) but also the subject position of the user, particularly structured through the Xerox/Apple notion of single-click functional design of the interface. Indeed, one of the striking features of the new paradigm of flat design, is that it is a design philosophy about multiplicity and multi-event. The flat turn is therefore about modulation, not about enclosure, as such, indeed it is a truly processual form that constantly shifts and changes, and in many ways acts as a signpost for the future interfaces of real-time algorithmic and adaptive surfaces and experiences. The structure of control for the flat design interfaces is following that of the control society, is “short-term and [with] rapid rates of turnover, but also continuous and without limit” (Deleuze 1992). To paraphrase Deleuze: Humans are no longer in enclosures, certainly, but everywhere humans are in layers.

    manipulation_2x

    Apple uses a series of concepts to link its notion of flat design which include, aesthetic integrity, consistency, direct manipulation, feedback, metaphors, and user control (Apple 2014). Reinforcing the haptic experience of this new flat user interface has been described as building on the experience of “touching glass” to develop the “first post-Retina (Display) UI (user interface)” (Cava 2013). This is the notion of layered transparency, or better, layers of glass upon which the interface elements are painted through a logical internal structure of Z-axis layers. This laminate structure enables meaning to be conveyed through the organization of the Z-axis, both in terms of content, but also to place it within a process or the user interface system itself.

    Google, similarly, has reorganized it computational imaginary around a flattened layered paradigm of representation through the notion of material design. Matias Duarte, Google’s Vice President of Design and a Chilean computer interface designer, declared that this approach uses the notion that it “is a sufficiently advanced form of paper as to be indistinguishable from magic” (Bohn 2014). But magic which has constraints and affordances built into it, “if there were no constraints, it’s not design — it’s art” Google claims (see Interactive Material Design) (Bohn 2014). Indeed, Google argues that the “material metaphor is the unifying theory of a rationalized space and a system of motion”, further arguing:

    The fundamentals of light, surface, and movement are key to conveying how objects move, interact, and exist in space and in relation to each other. Realistic lighting shows seams, divides space, and indicates moving parts… Motion respects and reinforces the user as the prime mover… [and together] They create hierarchy, meaning, and focus (Google 2014).

    This notion of materiality is a weird materiality in as much as Google “steadfastly refuse to name the new fictional material, a decision that simultaneously gives them more flexibility and adds a level of metaphysical mysticism to the substance. That’s also important because while this material follows some physical rules, it doesn’t create the “trap” of skeuomorphism. The material isn’t a one-to-one imitation of physical paper, but instead it’s ‘magical’” (Bohn 2014). Google emphasises this connection, arguing that “in material design, every pixel drawn by an application resides on a sheet of paper. Paper has a flat background color and can be sized to serve a variety of purposes. A typical layout is composed of multiple sheets of paper” (Google Layout, 2014). The stress on material affordances, paper for Google and glass for Apple are crucial to understanding their respective stances in relation to flat design philosophy.[2]

    • Glass (Apple): Translucency, transparency, opaqueness, limpidity and pellucidity.
    • Paper (Google): Opaque, cards, slides, surfaces, tangibility, texture, lighted, casting shadows.
    Paradigmatic Substances for Materiality

    In contrast to the layers of glass paper-notes-templatethat inform the logics of transparency, opaqueness and translucency of Apple’s flat design, Google uses the notion of remediated “paper” as a digital material, that is this “material environment is a 3D space, which means all objects have x, y, and z dimensions. The z-axis is perpendicularly aligned to the plane of the display, with the positive z-axis extending towards the viewer.  Every sheet of material occupies a single position along the z-axis and has a standard 1dp thickness” (Google 2014). One might think then of Apple as painting on layers of glass, and Google as thin paper objects (material) placed upon background paper. However a key difference lies in the use of light and shadow in Google’s notion which enables the light source, located in a similar position to the user of the interface, to cast shadows of the material objects onto the objects and sheets of paper that lie beneath them (see Jitkoff 2014). Nonetheless, a laminate structure is key to the representational grammar that constitutes both of these platforms.

    armin_hofmann_2
    Armin Hofmann, head of the graphic design department at the Schule für Gestaltung Basel (Basel School of Design) and was instrumental in developing the graphic design style known as the Swiss Style. Designs from 1958 and 1959.

    Interestingly, both design strategies emerge from an engagement with and reconfiguration of the principles of design that draw from the Swiss style (sometimes called the International Typographic Style) in design (Ashghar 2014, Turner 2014).[3] This approach emerged in the 1940s, and

    mainly focused on the use of grids, sans-serif typography, and clean hierarchy of content and layout. During the 40’s and 50’s, Swiss design often included a combination of a very large photograph with simple and minimal typography (Turner 2014).

    The design grammar of the Swiss style has been combined with minimalism and the principle of “responsive design”, that is that the materiality and specificity of the device should be responsive to the interface and context being displayed. Minimalism is a “term used in the 20th century, in particular from the 1960s, to describe a style characterized by an impersonal austerity, plain geometric configurations and industrially processed materials” (MoMA 2014).

    img-robert-morris-1_125225955286
    Robert Morris: Untitled (Scatter Piece), 1968-69, felt, steel, lead, zinc, copper, aluminum, brass, dimensions variable; at Leo Castelli Gallery, New York. Photo Genevieve Hanson. All works © 2010 Robert Morris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

    Robert Morris, one of the principle artists of Minimalism, and author of the influential Notes on Sculpture used “simple, regular and irregular polyhedrons. Influenced by theories in psychology and phenomenology” which he argued “established in the mind of the beholder ‘strong gestalt sensation’, whereby form and shape could be grasped intuitively” (MoMA 2014).[4]

    The implications of these two competing world-views are far-reaching in that much of the worlds initial contact, or touch points, for data services, real-time streams and computational power is increasingly through the platforms controlled by these two companies. However, they are also deeply influential across the programming industries, and we see alternatives and multiple reconfigurations in relation to the challenge raised by the “flattened” design paradigms. That is, they both represent, if only in potentia, a situation of a power relation and through this an ideological veneer on computation more generally. Further, with the proliferation of computational devices – and the screenic imaginary associated with them in the contemporary computational condition – there appears a new logic which lies behind, justifies and legitimates these design methodologies.

    It seems to me that these new flat design philosophies, in the broad sense, produce an order in precepts and concepts in order to give meaning and purpose not only in the interactions with computational platforms, but also more widely in terms of everyday life. Flat design and material design are competing philosophies that offer alternative patterns of both creation and interpretation, which are meant to have not only interface design implications, but more broadly in the ordering of concepts and ideas, the practices and the experience of computational technologies broadly conceived. Another way to put this could be to think about these moves as being a computational founding, the generation of, or argument for, an axial framework for building, reconfiguration and preservation.

    Indeed, flat design provides and more importantly serves, as a translational or metaphorical heuristic for both re-presenting the computational, but also teaches consumers and users how to use and manipulate new complex computational systems and stacks. In other words, in a striking visual technique flat design communicates the vertical structure of the computational stack, on which the Stack corporations are themselves constituted. But also begins to move beyond the specificity of the device as privileged site of a computational interface interaction from beginning to end. For example, interface techniques are abstracted away from the specificity of the device, for example through Apple’s “handoff” continuity framework which also potentially changes reading and writing practices in interesting ways and new use-cases for wearables and nearables.

    These new interface paradigms, introduced by the flat turn, have very interesting possibilities for the application of interface criticism, through unpacking and exploring the major trends and practices of the Stacks, that is, the major technology companies. I think that further than this, the notion of layers are instrumental in mediating the experience of an increasingly algorithmic society (e.g. think dashboards, personal information systems, quantified self, etc.), and as such provide an interpretative frame for a world of computational patterns but also a constituting grammar for building these systems in the first place. There is an element in which the notion of the postdigital may also be a useful way into thinking about the question of the link between art, computation and design given here (see Berry and Dieter, forthcoming) but also the importance of notions of materiality for the conceptualization deployed by designers working within both the flat design and material design paradigms – whether of paper, glass, or some other “material” substance.[5]
    _____

    David M. Berry is Reader in the School of Media, Film and Music at the University of Sussex. He writes widely on computation and the digital and blogs at Stunlaw. He is the author of Critical Theory and the Digital, The Philosophy of Software: Code and Mediation in the Digital Age , Copy, Rip, Burn: The Politics of Copyleft and Open Source, editor of Understanding Digital Humanities and co-editor of Postdigital Aesthetics: Art, Computation And Design. He is also a Director of the Sussex Humanities Lab.

    Back to the essay
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    Notes

    [1] Many thanks to Michael Dieter and Søren Pold for the discussion which inspired this post.

    [2] The choice of paper and glass as the founding metaphors for the flat design philosophies of Google and Apple raise interesting questions for the way in which these companies articulate the remediation of other media forms, such as books, magazines, newspapers, music, television and film, etc. Indeed, the very idea of “publication” and the material carrier for the notion of publication is informed by the materiality, even if only a notional affordance given by this conceptualization. It would be interesting to see how the book is remediated through each of the design philosophies that inform both companies, for example.

    [3] One is struck by the posters produced in the Swiss style which date to the 1950s and 60s but which today remind one of the mobile device screens of the 21st Century.

    [4] There is also some interesting links to be explored between the Superflat style and postmodern art movement, founded by the artist Takashi Murakami, which is influenced by manga and anime, both in terms of the aesthetic but also in relation to the cultural moment in which “flatness” is linked to “shallow emptiness.”

    [5] There is some interesting work to be done in thinking about the non-visual aspects of flat theory, such as the increasing use of APIs, such as the RESTful api, but also sound interfaces that use “flat” sound to indicate spatiality in terms of interface or interaction design. There are also interesting implications for the design thinking implicit in the Apple Watch, and the Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality platforms of Oculus Rift, Microsoft HoloLens, Meta and Magic Leap.

    Bibliography
  • From the Decision to the Digital

    From the Decision to the Digital

    Laruelle: Against the Digital

    a review of Alexander R. Galloway, Laruelle: Against the Digital

    by Andrew Culp

    ~
    Alexander R. Galloway’s forthcoming Laruelle: Against the Digital is a welcome and original entry in the discussion of French theorist François Laruelle’s thought. The book is at once both pedagogical and creative: it succinctly summarizes important aspects of Laruelle’s substantial oeuvre by placing his thought within the more familiar terrain of popular philosophies of difference (most notably the work of Gilles Deleuze and Alain Badiou) and creatively extends Laruelle’s work through a series of fourteen axioms.

    The book is a bridge between current Anglophone scholarship on Laruelle, which largely treats Laruelle’s non-standard philosophy through an extension of problematics common to contemporary continental philosophy (Mullarkey 2006, Mullarkey and Smith 2012, Smith 2013, Gangle 2013, Kolozova 2014), and such scholarship’s maturation, which blazes new territory because it takes thought to be “an exercise in perpetual innovation” (Brassier 2003, 25). As such, Laruelle: Against the Digital stands out from other scholarship in that it is not primarily a work of exposition or application of the axioms laid out by Laruelle. This approach is apparent from the beginning, where Galloway declares that he is not a foot soldier in Laruelle’s army and he does not proceed by way of Laurelle’s “non-philosophical” method (a method so thoroughly abstract that Laruelle appears to be the inheritor of French rationalism, though in his terminology, philosophy should remain only as “raw material” to carry thinking beyond philosophy’s image of thought). The significance of Galloway’s Laruelle is that he instead produces his own axioms, which follow from non-philosophy but are of his own design, and takes aim at a different target: the digital.

    The Laruellian Kernel

    Are philosophers no better than creationists? Philosophers may claim to hate irrationalist leaps of faith, but Laruelle locates such leaps precisely in philosophers’ own narcissistic origin stories. This argument follows from Chapter One of Galloway’s Laruelle, which outlines how all philosophy begins with the world as ‘fact.’ For example: the atomists begin with change, Kant with empirical judgment, and Fichte with the principle of identity. And because facts do not speak for themselves, philosophy elects for itself a second task — after establishing what ‘is’ — inventing a form of thought to reflect on the world. Philosophy thus arises out of a brash entitlement: the world exists to be thought. Galloway reminds us of this through Gottfried Leibniz, who tells us that “everything in the world happens for a specific reason” (and it is the job of philosophers to identify it), and Alfred North Whitehead, who alternatively says, “no actual entity, then no reason” (so it is up to philosophers to find one).

    For Laruelle, various philosophies are but variations on a single approach that first begins by positing how the world presents itself, and second determines the mode of thought that is the appropriate response. Between the two halves, Laruelle finds a grand division: appearance/presence, essence/instance, Being/beings. Laruelle’s key claim is that philosophy cannot think the division itself. The consequence is that such a division is tantamount to cheating, as it wills thought into being through an original thoughtless act. This act of thoughtlessly splitting of the world in half is what Laruelle calls “the philosophical decision.”

    Philosophy need not wait for Laruelle to be demoted, as it has already done this for itself; no longer the queen of the sciences, philosophy seems superfluous to the most harrowing realities of contemporary life. The recent focus on Laruelle did indeed come from a reinvigoration of philosophy that goes under the name ‘speculative realism.’ Certainly there are affinities between Laruelle and these philosophers — the early case was built by Ray Brassier, who emphasizes that Laruelle earnestly adopts an anti-correlationalist position similar to the one suggested by Quentin Meillassoux and distances himself from postmodern constructivism as much as other realists, all by positing the One as the Real. It is on the issue of philosophy, however, that Laruelle is most at odds with the irascible thinkers of speculative realism, for non-philosophy is not a revolt against philosophy nor is it a patronizing correction of how others see reality. 1 Galloway argues that non-philosophy should be considered materialist. He attributes to Laruelle a mix of empiricism, realism, and materialism but qualifies non-philosophy’s approach to the real as not a matter of the givenness of empirical reality but of lived experience (vécu) (Galloway, Laruelle, 24-25). The point of non-philosophy is to withdraw from philosophy by short-circuiting the attempt to reflect on what supposedly exists. To be clear: such withdrawal is not an anti-philosophy. Non-philosophy suspends philosophy, but also raids it for its own rigorous pursuit: an axiomatic investigation of the generic. 2

    From Decision to Digital

    A sharp focus on the concept of “the digital” is Galloway’s main contribution — a concept not in the forefront of Laruelle’s work, but of great interest to all of us today. Drawing from non-philosophy’s basic insight, Galloway’s goal in Laruelle is to demonstrate the “special connection” shared by philosophy and digital (15). Galloway asks his readers to consider a withdrawal from digitality that is parallel to the non-philosophical withdrawal from philosophy.

    Just as Laruelle discovered the original division to which philosophy must remain silent, Galloway finds that the digital is the “basic distinction that makes it a possible to make any distinction at all” (Laruelle, 26). Certainly the digital-analog opposition survives this reworking, but not as one might assume. Gone are the usual notions of online-offline, new-old, stepwise-continuous variation, etc. To maintain these definitions presupposes the digital, or as Galloway defines it, “the capacity to divide things and make distinctions between them” (26). Non-philosophy’s analogy for the digital thus becomes the processes of distinction and decision themselves.

    The dialectic is where Galloway provocatively traces the history of digitality. This is because he argues that digitality is “not so much 0 and 1” but “1 and 2” (Galloway, Laruelle, 26). Drawing on Marxist definitions of the dialectical process, he defines the movement from one to two as analysis, while the movement from two to one is synthesis (26-27). In this way, Laruelle can say that, “Hegel is dead, but he lives on inside the electric calculator” (Introduction aux sciences génériques, 28, qtd in Galloway, Laruelle, 32). Playing Badiou and Deleuze off of each other, as he does throughout the book, Galloway subsequently outlines the political stakes between them — with Badiou establishing clear reference points through the argument that analysis is for leftists and synthesis for reactionaries, and Deleuze as a progenitor of non-philosophy still too tied to the world of difference but shrewd enough to have a Spinozist distaste for both movements of the dialectic (Laruelle, 27-30). Galloway looks to Laruelle to get beyond Badiou’s analytic leftism and Deleuze’s “Spinozist grand compromise” (30). His proposal is a withdrawal in the name of indecision that demands abstention from digitality’s attempt to “encode and simulate anything whatsoever in the universe” (31).

    Insufficiency

    Insufficiency is the idea into which Galloway sharpens the stakes of non-philosophy. In doing so, he does to Laruelle what Deleuze does to Spinoza. While Deleuze refashions philosophy into the pursuit of adequate knowledge, the eminently practical task of understanding the conditions of chance encounters enough to gain the capacity to influence them, Galloway makes non-philosophy into the labor of inadequacy, a mode of thought that embraces the event of creation through a withdrawal from decision. If Deleuze turns Spinoza into a pragmatist, then Galloway turns Laruelle into a nihilist.

    There are echoes of Massimo Cacciari, Giorgio Agamben, and Afro-pessimism in Galloway’s Laruelle. This is because he uses nihilism’s marriage of withdrawal, opacity, and darkness as his orientation to politics, ethics, and aesthetics. From Cacciari, Galloway borrows a politics of non-compromise. But while the Italian Autonomist Marxist milieu of which Cacciari’s negative thought is characteristic emphasizes subjectivity, non-philosophy takes the subject to be one of philosophy’s dirty sins and makes no place for it. Yet Galloway is not shy about bringing up examples, such as Bartleby, Occupy, and other figures of non-action. Though as in Agamben, Galloway’s figures only gain significance in their insufficiency. “The more I am anonymous, the more I am present” Galloway repeats from Tiqqun to axiomatically argue the centrality of opacity (233-236). There is also a strange affinity between Galloway and Afro-pessimists, who both oppose the integrationist tendencies of representational systems ultimately premised on the exclusion, exploitation, and elimination of blackness. In spite of potential differences, they both define blackness as absolute foreclosure to being; from which, Galloway is determined to “channel that great saint of radical blackness, Toussaint Louveture,” in order to bring about a “cataclysm of human color” through the “blanket totality of black” that “renders color invalid” and brings about “a new uchromia, a new color utopia rooted in the generic black universe” (188-189). What remains an open question is: how does such a formulation of the generic depart from the philosophy of difference’s becoming-minor, whereby the liberation must first pass through the figures of the woman, the fugitive, and the foreigner?

    Actually Existing Digitality

    One could read Laruelle not as urging thought to become more practical, but to become less so. Evidence for such a claim comes in his retreat to dense abstract writing and a strong insistence against providing examples. Each is an effect of non-philosophy’s approach, which is both rigorous and generic. Although possibly justified, there are those who stylistically object to Laruelle for taking too many liberties with his prose; most considerations tend make up for such flights of fancy by putting non-philosophy in communication with more familiar philosophies of difference (Mullarkey 2006; Kolozova 2014). Yet the strangeness of the non-philosophical method is not a stylistic choice intended to encourage reflection. Non-philosophy is quite explicitly not a philosophy of difference — Laruelle’s landmark Philosophies of Difference is an indictment of Hegel, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Derrida, and Deleuze. To this end, non-philosophy does not seek to promote thought through marginality, Otherness, or any other form of alterity.

    Readers who have henceforth been frustrated with non-philosophy’s impenetrability may be more attracted to the second part of Galloway’s Laruelle. In part two, Galloway addresses actually existing digitality, such as computers and capitalism. This part also includes a contribution to the ethical turn, which is premised on a geometrically neat set of axioms whereby ethics is the One and politics is the division of the One into two. He develops each chapter through numerous examples, many of them concrete, that helps fold non-philosophical terms into discussions with long-established significance. For instance, Galloway makes his way through a chapter on art and utopia with the help of James Turrell’s light art, Laruelle’s Concept of Non-Photography, and August von Briesen’s automatic drawing (194-218). The book is over three hundred-pages long, so most readers will probably appreciate the brevity of many of the chapters in part two. The chapters are short enough to be impressionistic while implying that treatments as fully rigorous as what non-philosophy often demands may be much longer.

    Questions

    While his diagrammatical thinking is very clear, I find it more difficult to determine during Galloway’s philosophical expositions whether he is embracing or criticizing a concept. The difficulty of such determinations is compounded by the ambivalence of the non-philosophical method, which adopts philosophy as its raw material while simultaneously declaring that philosophical concepts are insufficient. My second fear is that while Galloway is quite adept at wielding his reworked concept of ‘the digital,’ his own trademark rigor may be lost when taken up by less judicious scholars. In particular, his attack on digitality could form the footnote for a disingenuous defense of everything analog.

    There is also something deeper at stake: What if we are in the age of non-representation? From the modernists to Rancière and Occupy, we have copious examples of non-representational aesthetics and politics. But perhaps all previous philosophy has only gestured at non-representational thought, and non-philosophy is the first to realize this goal. If so, then a fundamental objection could be raised about both Galloway’s Laruelle and non-philosophy in general: is non-philosophy properly non-thinking or is it just plain not thinking? Galloway’s axiomatic approach is a refreshing counterpoint to Laruelle’s routine circumlocution. Yet a number of the key concepts that non-philosophy provides are still frustratingly elusive. Unlike the targets of Laruelle’s criticism, Derrida and Deleuze, non-philosophy strives to avoid the obscuring effects of aporia and paradox — so is its own use of opacity simply playing coy, or to be understood purely as a statement that the emperor has no clothes? While I am intrigued by anexact concepts such as ‘the prevent,’ and I understand the basic critique of the standard model of philosophy, I am still not sure what non-philosophy does. Perhaps that is an unfair question given the sterility of the One. But as Hardt and Negri remind us in the epigraph to Empire, “every tool is a weapon if you hold it right.” We now know that non-philosophy cuts — what remains to be seen, is where and how deeply.
    _____

    Andrew Culp is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Rhetoric Studies at Whitman College. He specializes in cultural-communicative theories of power, the politics of emerging media, and gendered responses to urbanization. In his current project, Escape, he explores the apathy, distraction, and cultural exhaustion born from the 24/7 demands of an ‘always-on’ media-driven society. His work has appeared Radical Philosophy, Angelaki, Affinities, and other venues.

    _____

    Notes

    1. There are two qualifications worth mentioning: first, Laruelle presents non-philosophy as a scientific enterprise. There is little proximity between non-philosophy’s scientific approach and other sciences, such as techno-science, big science, scientific modernity, modern rationality, or the scientific method. Perhaps it is closest to Althusser’s science, but some more detailed specification of this point would be welcome.
    Back to the essay

    2. Galloway lays out the non-philosophy of generic immanence, The One, in Chapter Two of Laruelle. Though important, Galloway’s main contribution is not a summation of Laruelle’s version of immanence and thus not the focus of this review. Substantial summaries of this sort are already available, including Mullarkey 2006, and Smith 2013.
    Back to the essay

    Bibliography

    Brassier, Ray (2003) “Axiomatic Heresy: The Non-Philosophy of François Laruelle,” Radical Philosophy 121.
    Gangle, Rocco (2013) François Laruelle’s Philosophies of Difference (Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press).
    Kolozova, Katerina (2014) Cut of the Real (New York, USA: Columbia University Press).
    Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri (2000) Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).
    Laruelle, François (2010/1986) Philosophies of Difference (London, UK and New York, USA: Continuum).
    Laruelle, François (2011) Concept of Non-Photography (Falmouth, UK: Urbanomic).
    Mullarkey, John (2006) Post-Continental Philosophy (London, UK: Continuum).
    Mullarkey, John and Anthony Paul Smith (eds) (2012) Laruelle and Non-Philosophy (Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press).
    Smith, Anthony Paul (2013) A Non-Philosophical Theory of Nature (New York, USA: Palgrave Macmillan).