Our Master's Tools
A review of Dave Mandl's review of Lev Manovich's new book
The question of politics — or rather, its absence — in the work of Lev Manovich has already been posed. It was in a 2011 paper by Alexander R. Galloway that questioned why the Russian-born, US-based theorist and graphical computation pioneer avoided politics in his seminal The Language of New Media. While Galloway maintained that the absence of an explicit discussion of the political aspects of new media was indeed a problem, he also made an ingenious argument regarding it: just like the Russian formalists, for Manovich, who made his upbringing in the politically charged Soviet Union, perhaps not talking about politics was in itself a political statement. To avoid politics was to declare independence from the need to take a previously determined political stance.
Some of the same discomfort with the absence of an explicitly political statement seems to be present in Dave Mandl’s review of the book here for BLARB. Even if he concedes some value to Manovich’s new book, Cultural Analytics, he observes that by emphasizing the “cup half full”, Manovich overlooks the many troubling political issues that come with the contemporary state of new media technologies, such as Big Tech’s complicity with surveillance capitalism; the creation of resonance chambers for hate speech, political extremism, and fake news; the reduction of the palette of taste, while at the same time the exploration of content creators, such as musicians, by platforms like Spotify. Mandl did not have to describe himself as a “luddite”; by now, these are standard arguments shared by those afflicted by the malaise of social media. But is it a useful frame to understand Manovich’s project in this book?
Manovich takes an approach that states that social media and digital technologies have made an irrevocable impact on contemporary society and culture. This is seen in the sheer number of cultural products that are being uploaded to media platforms every day — in fact, every second. For Manovich, this implies that to understand culture nowadays, it is necessary to see differently, that is, it is necessary to deploy computer-assisted techniques to grasp and make sense of the amount of information constantly produced. Here, Manovich constructs from two moves already made in Software Takes Command, published in 2013. The first, that contemporary culture has gained another layer, provided by software. For him, just as the implementation of broadcast did not discontinue the printing press, digital media did not replace previous media configurations; it redistributed them along a new axis of formal properties, technical conditions, and aesthetic usages. Playing both the cards of continuous and discontinuous history, it is easy for him to state that digital culture is ourculture, only revamped through new technical means. The second, his focus on broadly used platforms, and not marginal, opens-source software. This does not make Manovich complicit with Big Tech neither with social media networks; at the contrary, if his intention is to study contemporary cultural practices, it is not possible to overlook what people are really doing. This “populist” approach contrasts with the usual task of criticism — think of New Criticism –, which focuses on outstanding works. Even so, Manovich ends the books asking if this is not the limit of cultural analytics, that is, how to sort the minute from the large.
In fact, Manovich discusses what social media companies do. It’s on the third chapter, where he contrasts cultural analytics and media analytics. While the former is interested in understanding cultural phenomena, is practiced with an eye towards public discussions of it through academic practices, the latter is a part of a highly profitable market that monitor user behavior in real time in order to help brands and companies to better position themselves on social media. Media analytics’ goal is to contribute to a company’s profit, not to make intellectual claims about culture; this shows in the private nature of the tools used by these platforms to monitor social media and sell reports to interested companies. Cultural analytics and media analytics use a similar set of tools, but to different purposes and seeking different audiences.
The question is what the nature of these tools is and what to do with them. Is the identification of patterns through algorithmic analysis of the behavior of millions of users on social media essentially part of surveillance capitalism or can it be used responsibly in an academic setting in order to understand contemporary cultural practices? Manovich opts for the second answer, which sits at the basis of his endeavors. It is possible to take an alternative route, but to assume a luddite position implies the possibility of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. To quote an often-remembered sentence by Audre Lorde, can the master’s tools be used to dismantle the master’s house? For Manovich, it seems so. It’s a bet and although the book assumes an optimistic tone, it offers no easy way out of the conundrum. Instead, it shows that there is a lot of work ahead to place cultural analytics as a default practice for proper cultural analysis.
There are, however, many things that could be objected in the book. Particularly, I find the quotation from Friedrich Hayek and the dismissal of Karl Marx’s philosophy as well as the legacy of communism in the twentieth century a bit unsettling. Besides these few explicitly political statements, the whole point that seeing at scale is the onlyway to understand contemporary cultural practices seems more of a rhetorical trick, especially considering that, on the whole, the same argument is presented in a more nuanced way. Also, to think analytically without using analytical categories — a point often made in the books and explicitly discussed in the conclusion — reminds me of Chris Anderson’s dismissal of theory in favor of Big Data. (The many uncritical mentions of Anderson’s “long tail” relating it to culture also seem troubling). But it is an acute point that the usage of Big Data and computer-assisted techniques in an analytical setting changes the task of criticism. Another issue, not discussed on the book, is the troubling proximity between Big Tech and academic departments, especially in computer science, which puts the methods developed by Manovich’s research group at CUNY and Calit2 at the cusp of being devoured by Big Tech. Those are also political questions, but they go beyond the partisan positions in favor or against the immediate surroundings of North Americans in the 2020’s scared of the monster they created — don’t worry, in Brazil we are scared too.
Perhaps we can agree that Facebook is evil while also recognizing that Facebook Insights is a remarkable piece of software — computationally speaking. This does not mean that we’re overlooking the manifold implications of the impact such a company had on our world. Manovich has a knack for being at the right place and the right time. His new book will probably become a reference, just as his other two books mentioned here. In the meantime, we can praise that he, along with numerous other scholars, activists, independent journalists, data and computer scientists, as well as interested citizens, are engaged in trying to make us more aware and more autonomous with relation to these tools that have been somewhat forcibly imposed upon us. Is there something more political than that?
