In this chapter, I look at the implications of the distinction between reason and emancipation for both material and intellectual culture in relation to the digital.
Following critical theory, the aim is to develop a notion of software being able to be interpreted as ‘a code language for processes taking place in society', but which nonetheless is able to function relatively autonomously.
Clearly one of the most important tasks of a critical theory in relation to the digital is to understand what has become an enormous technical system far in excess of that described by the founding members of the Frankfurt School. While they attempted to identify trends and trajectories from the beginnings of the media systems and the culture industry they observed, events have in many cases moved beyond their initial descriptions and analysis. For this reason an urgent task for critical theory is to rethink the new technological forms created by computation, especially the phenomenon of computational devices.This means a new kind of literacy is required for a new kind of critical theory, including what I call iteracy, and which needs to draw back the screens and interfaces, and develop a deeper critical disposition to the underlying materiality and agency of the computational.This includes the notion of political economy as labour clearly remains an important mediator in computational economies; however, we remain limited in our analysis if we do not follow the lead of the critical theorists in rethinking the relationship between base and superstructure beyond a purely determinate relationship. That is, to appreciate how software is now culture and culture is rapidly becoming softwarized. Borgmann argues:
An important part of genuine world citizenship today is scientific and technological literacy. Here one may hope that an appreciation of the force of technology, nourished by metatechnological practices, would inspire the attention and dedication needed to appropriate the scientific and engineering principles on which the technology rests.
Neither the resentful if dutiful, service to the technological machinery that we discharge in labour nor the distracted pleasure of consumption are conducive to the study of technology. But the voluntary discipline... and the desire to join the two in order to regain the cosmopolitan franchise may be helpful to the pursuit of scientific and technological education. (1984: 248)Throughout this book there has been the aim to provide a pathway towards which a critical praxis could be actuated in relation to the computational. The broad contours of such an approach are realized in a commitment to some form of political praxis, critical theorizing and development of a constellation of concepts for thinking about the computal and its inherent contradictions. Added to this is the urgent need for a critical literacy of the digital. As Kellner and Share argue, critical literacy ‘gives individuals power over their culture and thus enables people to create their own meanings and identities and to shape and transform the material and social conditions of their culture and society' (Kellner and Share 2005: 381). Lash too argues that this must be ‘theoretically infused hands-on work in new media, art, architecture, cultural policy and politics' (Lash 2007: 75). As Horkheimer explained, ‘let the sentence that tools are extensions of men's organs be turned around, so that organs are also extensions of men's tools' (Jay 1973: 81). Indeed, computation and its related ontology is a historical condition, and as computation exaggerates the present at the expense of the past, it conforms to Horkheimer and Adorno's claim that this is ‘loss of memory as the transcendental condition of science. All reification is forgetting' (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002: 191). The challenge for critical theory is to adjust to the movement of history and contest computation as the ‘multiplicity of forms is reduced to position and arrangement, history to fact, things to matter.... Formal logic [as] a schema for making the world calculable' (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002: 4).
Part of this approach is to think about how the arrival of computational devices, which on the whole remain opaque to us as black boxes in our societies, is beginning to have such profound impacts. It is hardly surprisingly anymore that they do so; indeed, with the greater sophistication of software and hardware, the delegation of extremely complex cognitive activities is a fact of our societies. This indeed offers a unique opportunity for critical theorists as computational devices manifest a possibility of a material site for the analysis of the contradictions of computational and cognitive capitalism. This involves a greater awareness of how power is manifested in technical systems, and how we increasingly find we are mediated and sometimes directly controlled by writings (software) that we can no longer read, and yet which constantly breaks down, fails, glitches and demonstrates the profound stupidity of computation as mere calculation. The increased reliance on computational systems, and the inherent trust placed with them, particularly by what Boltanksi (2011) calls the ‘dominant class', offers an important site for critique, but requires a critical praxis that includes their hacking, interrupting and reconfiguration into new pathways and possibilities. Indeed, if critical theory is dedicated to a project of emancipation, then it seems clear that there will be an increasing need for critical theories of software, and critical approaches to the application of rationalization within these systems and their inherent contradictions. Adorno (2005a) wrote in 1951 about the effect of ruthless rationalization on the norms of a society and their communicative interactions:
If time is money, it seems moral to save time, above all one's own, and such parsimony is excused by consideration for others. One is straightforward. Every sheath interposed between men in their transactions is felt as a disturbance to the functioning of the apparatus, in which they are not only objectively incorporated but with which they proudly identify themselves.
That, instead of raising their hats, they greet each other with the hallos of indifference, that, instead of letters, they send each other inter-office communications without address or signature, are random symptoms of a sickness of contact. Estrangement shows itself precisely in the elimination of distance between people. (Adorno 2005a: 41)The computal in its own way is producing new forms of rationalized communication of estrangement and alienation while paradoxically making it easier than ever to be in constant communication and contact. Today the condition of everyday life is represented by constantly turned down faces glancing at notifications on mobile phones, or distraction from hidden computational devices and wearable technologies. This sense of distraction and its contribution to the heteronomy of the individual raise important questions about our being-in-the-world when we are constantly pulled out of the world. Indeed, this connects to wider questions about how the digital can be reconfigured to contribute to emancipation rather than rationalization. Indeed a crucial part of this has to be moving beyond the commodity layer, the surface of the technology and opening these so-called black boxes, as both technologies and metaphors, that so demand our attention today.
For example, through an analysis of the financial black boxes, placed within the context of a computational society, we can see how in the institution of market exchange antagonism is created and reproduced that could at any time bring organized society to ultimate catastrophe and destroy it. Even as class consciousness remains weak today, it still exists, and particularly in times of financial uncertainty and crisis, such as the 2008-13 financial crisis, the differences between classes become a new site of contestation. Indeed, one of the possible means of such critique is the very disturbing ability of computation to record everything, to create logs and inscriptions that map the very contradictions in the machinery of computation that need to be brought to the surface - and these records are located in databases, computer algorithms and interfaces in addition to documentation.
Computation in its classificatory and material effects creates and prescribes categories and classes upon individuals which can be made manifest in the contradictory implementations of what is claimed to be a universal system of rationality. In other words computational domination plays out very differently for the leader of the multinational corporation than it does for the shop-floor worker or teacher. For example, computational systems may be brought into an institution to address the needs of 'austerity' and 'doing more with less' but play out in the creation of prescriptive algorithms whose monitoring functions at differing levels of intensity creates inequalities, conflicts and new forms of solidarity. Indeed, communities of practice can be built around reflexively creating and deconstructing such tools, and the realization that such systems are fragile and open to contestation, change and revision, but also that such systems can create new epistemic knowledges, such as through computational reflexivity, and new structures of power. In other words, computation is intrinsically linked to the question of logistics and the capacity to become organized (Rossiter 2007) and the questions of 'how are we constituted as subjects of our own knowledge? How are we constituted as subjects who exercise or submit to power relations? How are we constituted as moral subjects of our own actions?' (Foucault 1984). The aim then is to explore some of these questions in relation to new circuits of power that are produced within computationality, where moments of conflict occur and how they can form part of a critical praxis of the computational to contribute to a critical interrogation of the present.