the snail of history

'A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.' (Benjamin, 1992:249)

the snail is progress

Dear Children: (Grass, 1997:5) This idea of moving at a snail's pace summarises well the critical strategy of slowing down the speed of modernity. What better way of stepped out of pace with the rhetorical claims of new media and its claims for the speed of change and innovation. 'The Future is Stupid' (Holzer) - as opposed to 'The Future moves faster than this' (AMD Athlon processor: a future to look forward to, billboard poster, July 2000); or think of the contradictory nature of the speedy snail race in the recent Guinness adverts (1999). History forms a slimy trail.

In this scenario, 'snail mail' triumphs over the uncritical claims of e-mail and its simultaneous speedy transfer of data. Similar happenings in slow motion are a familiar strategy expressed just as well in the allegorical (but true) image of the C19th century fashion for taking a turtle for a walk. ‘”Around 1840 it was elegant to take turtles for a walk in the arcades, (This gives a conception of the tempo of flanerie)”... taking turtles for urban strolls had become enormously dangerous for turtles, and only somewhat less so for flaneurs. The speed-up principles of mass production had spilled over onto the streets, waging “war on flanerie”. The “flow of humanity... had lost its gentleness and tranquillity”’ (Buck-Morss, 1995: 344, quoting Benjamin’s The Arcades Project). The cyber-flaneur perhaps finds refuge on the Net with snail-like connectivity.

ideas in/on progress

Like Benjamin’s thesis (1993), Hegel's concept of history is predicated on the necessity of progress, that historical change and positive development can take place in the human condition and consciousness. History is no mere accident but happens 'necessarily' (Hegel, 1953). This view is is sharp contrast with recent theorising - the Postmodern/deconstructionist approach that would tend towards a position that history is merely 'his'-'story'; just another ‘totalising narrative’ (Hutcheon, 1991: 63). Postmodernism’s project in this regard was to question this totalising impulse of Enlightenment thinking. However, just like Postmodernism paradoxically developed into its own ‘grand narrative’ - the very thing it sought to undo - similarly, ‘anti-totalising totalisations’ are evident in the approach to historical processes and teleology (the belief that things are best explained in terms of purpose rather than cause). Seemingly, on the one hand, there is a contradictory approach to history exemplified in the title of Manuel De Landa’s study, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (1997), and on the other hand, a Hegelian faith in progress that relies on the reduction of thinking to logical structures - a synthesis of these positions appears to be expressed by computation.

Hegel boldly says: 'The history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom’ (1953:19). This guiding principle is what influenced Karl Marx in the belief that history provides meaning; it is through reflection on the past that the direction of history can be traced. Benjamin puts it more elegantly: ‘History is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogeneous empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now [Jetztzeit]’ (1992:252-3).

Take for example the ways in which Greek city structures have been taken as a way of understanding the democratic potential of the internet. Many commentators are keen to draw an ‘historical analogy’ between the emergence of ‘technically-advanced societies’ (Poster, 1995:24) and what might be characterised as the ‘pre-industrial’ period. Such models, for instance, are derived from the Greek ‘polis’ (city-state) and public life in the ‘agora’ (market-place). These terms are fashionable references for the Internet and its association with the Public Sphere. In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Habermas (1989) traces this evolution as one relatively unregulated by established authority and where society was held in check by popular debate, criticism and protest until the first half of the nineteenth century. After this, he argues the public sphere came to be dominated by state and corporate interests as result of capitalist development, with increased flows of commodities and information across distance (early postal routes, for instance); information that in turn came to be commodified. In this period, Habermas argues the media ceased to facilitate public debate and instead attempted to manipulate/coerce public opinion. In these terms, the Internet is often seen as a utopian zone ‘revitalising the public sphere’, where meaning and community can be recovered and where lost social value can be restored (Rheingold, 1994:12), or where new decentralised subjectivities and political formations are produced in decentralised networks - what Mark Poster calls ‘cyberdemocracy’ (1997:210).

For Hegel, Greek history also provides a model of individual freedom and democratic structures, if rather a underdeveloped one in that freedom in this sense requires forms of exploitation to function. Similarly discussions around ‘electronic agoras’ have tended to avoid detail on the slave economy and that participation in public life correspondingly depended on private freedom from labour. This might easily be translated into more recent manifestations of the public sphere’s bourgeois forms and issues of access to the Net. The citizens of Ancient Greece remained incomplete as they lacked the freedom to oppose the dominant collective view - they could not distinguish between their individual interests and those of the community. Freedom should exist simultaneously at both subjective and objective levels; thus free choice of the individual and the needs of society at large are not, or should not be, in conflict. In ancient Athens, every citizen had the right to take part in public assembly and participate in the decision-making body of the city-state but while other activities were carried out by slave-workers. Herein is the problem of ‘alienated labour’, where through the process of labour the worker externalises consciousness into the object. If as under conditions of slavery, the object of labour is the property of another then the worker is seriously disenfranchised losing their sense of ‘objectified essence’ according to Hegel. Marx, of course, extends this logic to workers enslaved under the forces of capitalism. The abolition of private property becomes one way to throw off the chains (the dynamics of this are echoed on the internet).

A prerequisite for this freedom according to Hegel was the ability to reason, to reflect critically upon the ideological forces at work perhaps. This is no easy matter either though, as when we attempt to observe reality the observations are filtered and mediated (in a scientific experiment, the act of recording and the recording apparatus necessarily interferes with the experiment itself, as well as the subjectivity of the scientist doing the recording). Whether reality is cast in pixels or continuous tones, the crucial point is that it is mediated all the same. There is no such thing as objective knowledge, and accordingly ideas of progress, rationality and scientific objectivity which legitimated western modernity are thrown into doubt - what Sandra Harding calls ‘point-of-viewlessness’ (of male scientists in white coats)(1990). However, the idea here is to supplement these faulty ideas with less-partial, less distorted ones rather than discount them out of hand. My emphasis here is to find better lies or less bad truths as opposed to eventually finding the absolute truth as such.

Hegel's The Phenomenology of Mind (1967) is useful here in pointing to the ways in which the mind itself appears to the observer (and this is inextricably linked to history and making progress towards a consciousness of freedom; in other words, to Hegel, history is the development of the mind). Therefore to study the mind is to study the way the mind appears to itself. To do this, form and content cannot be separated - as mind shapes the perception of the mind. Gregory Bateson’s idea of ‘metalogue’ springs to mind (from cybernetic anthropology); as a term for a conversation in which the form of discussion embodies the subject being discussed (as is the intention of this research) (1972). Once this process is grasped, what appears to the mind is clearly not true knowledge but what appears to be known, adding another level of consciousness, and so on, in a developmental and generative process of learning. Although the goal is absolute knowledge, more importantly it suggests a progressive process of critical reflection, the recognition of inadequacies and the pursuit of new knowledge to make up for these inadequacies - in a spiral-like pattern that alludes to Fredric Jameson’s economic analogies for the way culture advances and the logic of late-capitalism (1992). Not surprisingly, I'm not so much interested in the viability of this idea of reaching absolute knowledge but investigating the process of getting there - through dialectical thinking. This is what Benjamin describes as a ‘tiger’s leap into the past’; for the ‘leap in the open air of history is a dialectical one’, the awareness of which will ‘make the continuum of history explode’ (1992: 253). In other words, the critical impulse is to brush history against the grain.

dialectical rhythm

The dialectical method has a ‘simple rhythm’ of thesis, antithesis and synthesis according to Hegel (1969:65), although it should be noted that this triad of thesis, antithesis and synthesis is attributed to Fichte, in, Raymond Williams’s, Keywords (1988:107). Take for example the earlier discussion of Hegel’s approach to history: a specific example might be quoted from ancient Greece of its citizens committed approach to community. This forms the thesis. The next stage is to prove this inadequate or inconsistent, in revealing the lack of independent thought. This negation of the first position is the antithesis. The next stage proves this to be inadequate too as a sense of social engagement is lost. Both ‘customary harmony’ and ‘abstract freedom’ are inadequate and must be brought together in a more adequate way as the synthesis (here I have summarised the example made in Singer, 1983:78). The dialectic, put simply, is a dynamic, even generative (capable of producing) process by which an argument is posed only to be disputed by another in order to bring about a combinatory resolution. Importantly, the dialectical movement results in the synthesis but this is not simply the conclusion, but part of a critical process. With more reflection the synthesis will reveal itself to be a thesis in some other respect and so require the same dialectical treatment, and so on, in order to continue a chain of knowing better. Hence the dialectical approach to history I have tried to express; and furthermore that culture and technology follow this rhythm too. This is what makes the process generative.

So far I have introduced the Hegelian sense of the dialectic but the term itself has a rich history and varied application. Its etymological root derives from the Greek diálektos as the art of discussion (and is closely related to dialogue), but by the C14th becomes synonymous with logic and the investigation of truth by discussion (Hoad, 1993:123). Raymond Williams’ Keywords charts its use more carefully and appropriately in historical context (1988:106-8). He begins with Plato and the dialektike meaning the art of defining ideas and related method of determining the interrelation of ideas (logic and metaphysics respectively), proceeding through a chain of influences to mediaeval English usage quoting Stanley in 1656: ‘Dialectick is the Art of Discourse, whereby we confirm or confute any thing by Questions and Answers of the Disputants’. Perhaps more significantly, it is within German idealist philosophy that the notion of contradiction is extended not only to the process of discussion but to reality itself. For Hegel, this contradictory principle is central to the dialectical process in the ‘continuous unification of opposites, in the complex relation of parts to a whole’ (Williams, 1988:107). This principle of ‘progressive unification’ is grounded by Engels by emphasising matter and materiality in the concept ‘dialectical materialism’; or the more usual Marxist definition of ‘historical materialism’ that stops short of applying the concept as widely (ie. to nature). For Marx, the dialectical process of contradictory forces are accounted for in history itself. This teleological approach, like a progress bar, sets the goal as utopia (not spiritual transcendence, as Hegel would have it).

Like silence in John Cage’s ‘Lecture on Something’: ‘every something is an echo of nothing’ (Dyson, 1992:131), a determinate negation is not simply negative. For instance in mathematics a zero is a definite negative number. In this way, it might be possible to extend the Hegelian logic of being as thesis and nothing as antithesis - to the binary structures of 1’s and 0’s - and end up with the synthesis of becoming - in other words, as the execution of computer code. In a sense, it is the inherent dialectic itself that sets its rhythm. Hegel would go further and claim that the dialectical method works because the world works dialectically. I am merely saying that it is an appropriate critical method for the study of computer functionality because at a fundamental level of operation, it works dialectically.

Like the teleological description of continuous time or history, analogue systems use continuously variable representational relationships of tone and pressure. In contrast, all digital input is translated into rigid binary structures and code. Time that was once marked by the smooth moving hands of an analogue clock have for the most part been upgraded to the jerky moves of the digital clock. But history has always been a complex mechanism whether seen in terms of cogs and wheels, ticks or switches. The suggestion here is that this is a productive way of looking at history - not as a continuous upward slope but as a series of jerky steps - like a motor engine, or even walking in which it is not possible to proceed with out moving your back foot forwards (or expressed in Ivor Cutler’s recommendation for effective walking: ‘put you best foot forwards [thesis], but don’t forget the other one [antithesis]’); of ‘spiral-like’ patterns and ‘screw-turns’ (Foster, 1996). Benjamin’s ‘Thesis on The Philosophy of History’ would add more detail here, given the time to process it.

In this way, a digital/dialectical method might operate as both a description of a system and critical method? Peter Lunenfeld in his introduction to The Digital Dialectic (2000) is cautious of this easy conflation of the digital and the dialectic (and this is what he seeks to address with the book of course). He claims that the on/off switching of cybernetic calculation does not create a synthesis and merely reflects the contradictory condition of thesis and antithesis. Yet Lunenfeld sees this as a potential advantage in not uncritically imagining a digital utopia. I’m not so sure. I think what Lunenfeld describes as merely impelling the regeneration of the system is part of the dialectical process itself. This would be consistent with Hegel’s view in describing the dynamic social relations of history; a process of back and forth movement that I am preferring to regard as continuous - therefore not with utopia in mind but a series of more modest improvements. However, Lunenfeld is not rejecting the dialectical method out of hand merely drawing attention to its limitations (and after all he has a book to proffer). He is keen to point to its strength in the central dialectic of theory/practice and in its application to detail in pursuit of the general - this is with reference to a quote by Adorno that the dialectic unfolds ‘the difference between the particular and the universal’ (2000:xviii). In the spirit of historical materialism, this approach brushes the recent (amnesiac) history of new media criticism against the grain.

There are plenty of detractors of the dialectical method who are more systematic (and less sweeping). Some commentators simply see the method as too crude to account for the ways in which communications are organised and dispersed in complex systems. Detractors of the dialectical method see it as far too crude and hierarchical, with Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari preferring rhizomic patterns to describe networks and nodal root structures (1984). It is this approach that informs Manuel De Landa’s appropriately titled A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (1997). Undoubtedly, dialectical thinking has its limitations, but a synthesis of these opposing positions would suggest that the overall structure of the Internet lends itself to rhizomic patterns (universal), but the generative code sitting on a server (the particular) operates in a quite different way through action and response. Even on a network, the individual computer is fundamental to the controller switch.

Also in The Digital Dialectic, Michael Heim describes cyberspace as in a ‘cultural limbo’. He describes this limbo as characterised by a ‘zigzag holding pattern’ between ‘utopian fantasy and hateful cynicism’ (2000:25). The technophile and technophobe stand in dialectical tension; he crudely characterises these standpoints as ‘Network Idealists’ and the ‘Naïve Realists’ accordingly that he collapses as the paradoxical ‘virtual realism’ (2000:41). The argument maybe dialectical in style but is rather limited in disregarding the internal dialectical conflicts in any one position; he avoids the particular and sees only generality and the universal - for instance, rather than recognising progressive plural syntheses as part of the process, he concludes that synthesis is not yet possible offering up his notion of ‘virtual realism’ in support of an inconclusive dialectic and therefore rejecting progress as such - for in his view class conflict is a thing of the past. Even if this were true, which it is clearly not, the rejection of history in itself is anti-dialectical.

The dialectic is often conflated with negative associations around ideology. Yet, even ideology is a ‘generative matrix’ (Zizek, 1997) that sustains itself in a dialectical rhythm. The dialectic resists stability but so does ideology itself. One of the fundamental dialectical principles springs to mind from Terry Eagleton’s The Ideology of the Aesthetic, in that: ‘All “oppositional” identities are in part the function of oppression’ (quoted in Gigliotti, 2000:52); and in other words, keep the system operational. Nevertheless even those sympathetic to the continued use of the dialectical method in some fashion, remain unsure of how it should be recoded for the digital age. However, amd in conclusion for now, critical work on the nature of digital culture (like the execution of code) is always in progress.

‘In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it’ (Benjamin, 1992).

GC

References:

Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, New York: Ballentine Books, 1972.

Walter Benjamin, (1992) ‘Thesis on the Philosophy of History’ in Illuminations, London: Fontana.

Susan Buck-Morss, (1995) The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and The Arcades Project, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. See, Walter Benjamin, (1999) The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland & Kevin McLaughlin, Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press.

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, (1984) Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley et al, London:Athlone.

Frances Dyson, (1992) ‘The Ear That Would Hear Sounds in Themselves’ in Douglas Kahn and Gregory Whitehead, eds., Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio and the Avant-Garde, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Hal Foster, (1996) The Return of the Real, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Carol Gigliotti, (2000) ‘The Ethical Life of the Digital Aesthetic’, in Lunenfeld, ed., The Digital Dialectic: New Essays on New Media, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Günter Grass, (1997) From the Diary of a Snail, trans. Ralph Manheim, London: Minerva.

Jürgen Habermas, (1989) The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger, Cambridge: Polity.

Sandra Harding, (1990) ‘Feminism, Science and Anti-Enlightenment Critiques’ in Linda Nicholson, ed., Feminism-Postmodernism, London: Routledge, pp.83-106.

George W. F. Hegel, (1953) Reason in History: A General Introduction to the Philosophy of History, trans. R.S. Hartman, New York: Library of Liberal Arts.

George W. F. Hegel, (1967) The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J.B. Baillie, New York: Harper & Row.

George W. F. Hegel, (1969) Hegel’s Science of Logic, vol. 1, trans. A.V. Miller, London: Allen & Unwin.

Michael Heim, (2000) ‘The Cyberspace Dialectic’, in, Lunenfeld, ed., The Digital Dialectic: New Essays on New Media, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

T. F. Hoad, ed., (1993) The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Linda Hutcheon, (1991) The Politics of Postmodernism, London: Routledge.

Frederic Jameson, (1992) ‘The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’ in Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late-Capitalism, London: Verso, pp.1-54.

Manuel De Landa, (1997) A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, New York: Zone Books.

Peter Lunenfeld, ed., (2000) The Digital Dialectic: New Essays on New Media, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Mark Poster, (1995) The Second Media Age, Cambridge: Polity.

Mark Poster, (1997) ‘Cyberdemocracy: Internet and the Public Sphere’, David Porter ed, Internet Culture, London: Routledge.

Howard Rheingold, (1994) The Virtual Community: Finding Connection in a Computerised World, Secker & Warburg.

Peter Singer, (1983) Hegel, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Raymond Williams, (1988) Keywords: A vocabulary of culture and society, London: Fontana.

Slavoj Zizek, ed., (1997) Mapping Ideology, London: Verso.