Tara McPherson’s argument in “Why Are the Digital Humanities So White?” is that the 1960’s moments in racial politics and computer software development “coconstitute one another, comprising not independent slices of history but instead related and useful lenses into the shifting epistemological registers driving U.S. and global culture in the 1960s and after.”
In another part of her essay, she puts it like this:
“I will argue that the difficulties we encounter in knitting together our discussions of race (or other modes of difference) with our technological productions within the digital humanities (or in our studies of code) are actually an effect of the very designs of our technological systems, designs that emerged in post-World War II computational culture. These origins of the digital continue to haunt our scholarly engagements with computers, underwriting the ease with which we partition off considerations of race in our work in the digital humanities and digital media studies.”
A bit later, in moving from a discussion of the UNIX operating system to “modularity in the social field,” she reframes the argument like this:
“The push toward modularity and the covert in digital computation also reflects other changes in the organization of social life in the United States by the 1960s. For instance, if the first half of the twentieth century laid bare its racial logics, from ‘Whites Only’ signage to the brutalities of lynching, the second half increasingly hides its racial ‘kernel,’ burying it below a shell of neoliberal pluralism.”
I want to start with a summary of McPherson because her argument illustrates an interesting problem in theorizing computation—in effect, theorizing a machine. Her argument relies on a very complicated set of analogies and metaphors situated somewhere between the notions of causality and correlation. She goes to lengths to head off objections that she’s offering a causal argument. At one point she claims merely to be “highlighting the ways in which organization of information and capital in the 1960s powerfully responds—across many registers—to the struggles for racial justice and democracy,” saying “it seems at best naïve to imagine that cultural and computational operating systems don’t mutually infect one another.”
But at other times McPherson seems to tip her hand with a kind of metaphorical/symbolical equation between a computer’s operating system, humanist critical philosophies, and socioracial zeitgeist, muddying her disavowals of causal argument. Here are a couple examples:
“UNIX is widely understood to embody particular philosophies and cultures of computation, ‘operating systems’ of a larger order that we will return to.” [Referring to the “philosophies and cultures of computation” embodied in UNIX as “operating systems.”]
“Critical theory and postructuralism have been powerful operating systems that have served us well…They are also software systems in desperate need of updating and patching. They are lovely, and they are not enough. They cannot be all we do, but that is not to say that they are not of any value.”
[And, from the earlier example, implicitly equating digital computing’s basis of discrete mathematical logic to the 20th century “logics” of “‘Whites Only’ signage and the brutalities of lynching,” referring to racist policy/violence as a “racial ‘kernel’”—the most basic component of an operating system.]
Okay, my goal is not to hate on McPherson—trying to pin down what I found confusing about her article has opened up the area I want to explore in my paper. My goal will be to explore exactly what can be meaningfully said or discovered by examining computers—as both engineered objects and social tools—in light of a particular idea, theory, etc.
The problem, at one level, has to do with the validity of metaphor. It’s sort of metaphysical. Bridging the gap from apparent similarities in complexity and hierarchy (such as those between an operating system and a society) to concrete realities/outcomes requires a lot of heavy lifting. In a 2003 essay, Nick Bostrom made the argument that, most likely, humans are living in a computer simulation; part of his argument relied on the concept of “substrate independence.” He states:
“Provided a system implements the right sort of computational structures and processes, it can be associated with conscious experiences. It is not an essential property of consciousness that it is implemented on carbon-based biological neural networks inside a cranium: silicon-based processors inside a computer could in principle do the trick as well.”
In other words, the concept of “thought” is not a priori fused to the concept of “carbon.” We might justifiably call the electrical transactions of a silicon processor—one sufficiently similar to a brain—“thought.” The substrate—the material conducting the electric impulses—is, maybe, not the point.
McPherson seems to subscribe to a similar idea. She implies that the different substrates—whatever you call them—of the abstractions “operating system” and “theory” and “society” are immaterial, and that by observing trends, functions, operations, etc., of these structurally similar systems, we can draw useful observations—and that, moreover, the systems themselves do share a kind of substrate, not a physical one, but a more abstract, ideological one. In short, McPherson seems to say, these systems occupy one substrate—you could call it human conception, or a socially constructed worldview—and that changes in these structures/substrates “mutually infect on another.”
Okay. Whether you believe this is valid or not, it would seem that really connecting these substrates would require a whole bunch of finely-tuned, dense arguing. You would have to be clear about what aspect of what structure is doing what to which other aspect, and so on. Part of what I found frustrating about McPherson’s article was the implication of causation without anything beside, what seemed to me, vague gestures toward specificity. She gave isolated examples of computing software and what certain people wrote at certain points and by innuendo linked them to very broad trends in 1960’s culture and called it a day. Which brings me, finally, to the subject of my paper. Proposal: I want to find a concrete way of linking the structures and uses of computing to a theory about how and why they work in the world.
One possible way I’ve found of making this jump is in Gerd Gigerenzer’s (great name) concept of tools-to-heuristics. Gigerenzer talks about theories of discovery in cognitive psychology. He argues that accounts of discovery as probabilistic induction (from data), lucky guesses, and eureka! moments do not suffice in explaining where discovery comes from. He proposes a model where scientist’s tools “shape theories of mind”—how “analytical and physical tools” turn into “metaphors of mind.” Gigrenzer states it outright:
- New scientific tools, once entrenched in a scientist’s daily practice, suggest new theoretical metaphors and concepts.
- Once proposed by an individual scientist (or a group), the new theoretical metaphors and concepts are more likely to be accepted by the scientific community if the members of the community are also users of the new tools.
I see this as both (a) fairly reasonable on its surface and (b) a crucial theoretical link that can help organize thinking about the concrete aspects of computing and their theoretical implications. I think McPherson was really using this kind of logic, but didn’t do it in a very clear way. Further, I think she was guilty of at least a little reverse engineering—taking her theoretical prejudices and trying to cram notions of computational development into a shape that would support her views. (Not to say that her observations, hunches, and insights weren’t necessarily valid.) My goal in my paper will be to try a little more of a materialist (in the Marxist sense) progression from the physical realities of computer architecture to a theory of what they are and what they do. Since this is such an admittedly large and complex vista, I’ll proceed in the form of a few isolated case studies of particular digital structures and concepts to see what they imply and how they affect what the engineer, programmer, and end-user think/feel/do.
I, of course, have my own prejudices and areas of interest, and I won’t try to hide what my ideological goals are. I believe computers are an extremely complex manifestation of underlying capitalist logic. And while I will try to be more forthright and clear than McPherson (at least as I understood her), I do nonetheless have an axe to grind.
All that being said, the most clear and concise summary of what I hope to be up to is:
I want to perform a few theoretical case studies of digital-computational concepts—possibly including the structure of digital memory, the “slave/master” nomenclature of computer peripherals, the functions of registers and caches, and the reality of vertical software abstraction—in the context of Marx’s critique of capital. The goal will be seeing to what extent, and in what ways, computers represent, reflect, and enforce capitalist logic.
If you have read this far, I bow respectfully.
