Film-Philosophy
Journal | Salon | Portal (ISSN 1466-4615)
Vol. 7 No. 55, December 2003
Michael Truscello
The Birth of Software Studies:
Lev Manovich and Digital Materialism
Lev Manovich Cambridge, Massachusetts:
MIT
Press,
2002 ISBN 0-262-13374-1 hb;
0-262-63255-1 pb 354 pp. 'I can't imagine that
students today would learn only to read and write using the
twenty-six letters of the alphabet. They should at least
know some arithmetic, the integral function, the sine
function -- everything about signs and functions. They
should also know at least two software languages. Then
they'll be able to say something about what 'culture' is at
the moment'. -- German media theorist Friedrich A. Kittler.
[1] Until recently, there was
a political party in Canada that went by the name
'Progressive Conservative', an oxymoronic moniker that might
also apply to Lev Manovich's seminal work, _The Language of
New Media_, even more appropriately (the party was just
flat-out conservative). 'New media', for Manovich, is at
once old and new, an aesthetic continuation of the modernist
avant-garde and a register of the computerization of
contemporary culture. As he states it late in the book: 'One
general effect of the digital revolution is that avant-garde
aesthetic strategies came to be embedded in the commands and
interface metaphors of computer software. In short, *the
avant-garde became materialized in a computer*' (306-307).
While the guts of new media reflect the reduction of media
objects to their computable foundation in code, the skin of
those objects is cast in the familiar mould of modernist
cinema. Scholars in both film and media studies -- and the
host of disciplines that camp at sites in between -- may
find Manovich's rendering of visual culture to be a
comforting blend of sobering historicization and radical
demarcation, reducing the level of anxiety that has
developed in recent years over the possibility film studies
could be subsumed by media studies. Consider the possible
reconciliation of these disciplines in Manovich's most
barebones declaration of his thesis: 'To summarize, *the
visual culture of a computer age is cinematographic in its
appearance, digital on the level of its material, and
computational (i.e. software driven) in its logic*' (180).
One could argue that what Manovich has done, by arguing that
the aesthetics of new media is ruled by the aesthetics of
modernist cinema, is return new media to the history of
cinema. He does say, provocatively: 'As was the case
centuries ago, we are still looking at a flat, rectangular
surface, existing in the space of our body and acting as a
window into another space. We still have not left the era of
the screen' (115). Problem solved; film studies wins.
However, as we just saw, Manovich suggests (and repeatedly)
that the 'logic' of new media, that which arranges its most
fundamental processes, is a function of its software, and as
such it is the ontology of the computer that imposes itself
onto culture. He admits that software is a product of
culture, and that certainly 'larger cultural patterns' are
reflected in the software, but software is the atomistic
base of Manovich's particulate new-media
universe. Here he is on 'the
projection of the ontology of a computer onto culture
itself': 'If in physics the world
is made of atoms and in genetics it is made of genes,
computer programming encapsulates the world according to its
own logic. The world is reduced to two kinds of software
objects that are complementary to each other -- data
structures and algorithms . . . The computerization of
culture involves the projection of these two fundamental
parts of computer software -- and of the computer's unique
ontology -- onto the cultural space.' (223) Manovich replaces the
primary structuralist and Russian formalist terms of
synchronic and diachronic, selection and combination, and
metaphor and metonymy, with 'data structures' and
'algorithms', to reflect the rule of software logic in the
dialectical tension of his 'digital materialism'. Unlike
Friedrich Kittler, Manovich does not present digitalization
as the endgame of media; instead, he foregrounds the current
dominance of software logic, but casts it in a historical
context. For those anxious over the potential disappearance
of film studies, Manovich's text represents a savvy
compromise: We have not left the 'era of the screen', but we
are now speaking the 'language' of new media. Manovich ranges
impressively from topics in computer science, to net.art, to
the history of visual culture, and back again to
productivity software used in everyday life. One believes by
the end of the book that the reason Manovich so capably
imagines 'software theory' -- what he calls his 'turn to
computer science' to explain programmable media -- is
because he has lived it most of his life. Manovich's
importation of computer science into cultural studies marks
the most important shift in cultural studies in at least a
decade, and makes _The Language of New Media_ the most
important text for media studies, cultural studies, and film
studies scholars in at least the same period of time. The
question now, two years after its original publication, is
not *whether* a scholar from one of these fields must engage
Manovich's ideas, but *how*. Manovich begins by
situating himself and his historicization of new media.
After a series of impressionistic stills from Dziga Vertov's
1929 avant-garde film _Man with a Movie Camera_, accompanied
by theoretical samples from Manovich's text, Manovich
quickly establishes his personal history with new media and
its constituent elements by mentioning his coursework in
calculus, computer programming, and classical drawing in
Moscow in 1975, his work with the burgeoning field of 3-D
computer animation in New York in 1985, and the moment at
the Ars Electronica computer-art festival in 1995 when the
'computer graphics' category was replaced by 'net art'. By
immersing his text in personal and historical details of the
fields of computing and graphic arts, Manovich establishes
some of the contingencies that attend to the formalist
rendering of new media that follows. The formal properties
of new media -- the categories that will no doubt attract
the most speculation and critique from interested observers
-- are not to be read as reductive and universal properties
of new media, but rather part of a historical continuity
that continues to evolve, and one that Manovich observes
from his unique subjectivity as a theorist, programmer, and
artist. The initial 'move' of _The Language of New Media_
embodies the methodology of the text: _Man with a Movie
Camera_ is the structural template for new media's
conventions (a formalist move), and Manovich's personal
history exemplifies the ideological space from which these
conventions are being observed and catalogued (a
postmodernist move). As a methodology, his formalism is
conservative, I would argue, but his historicist sense of
the ways in which forms evolve is progressive, an
interrogation of subject-object relations in the age of
computable machines. Manovich's personal
history also illustrates the functional way in which
Manovich himself is a Gramscian intellectual for the
information age: Manovich is a self-conscious product of the
state's promotion of media technologies (through his
schooling in math and computer science in the former Soviet
Union), but more importantly he is a media theoretician who
*does* media, that rare breed of media studies critic who
programs, designs new media objects, and so on. Gramsci
believed the realm of the intellectual should be grounded in
the practice of everyday life and not simply an effect of
oratory, and Manovich embodies this progressive
creed. By bringing the concepts
of computer science to the interdisciplinary work of media
studies, Manovich has given the attendant disciplines of
film studies, art history, and cultural studies in general
their most important theoretical tools since New Historicism
framed the study of non-literary texts. To ignore the
'programmable' logic of new media and the discourse of
computer science that informs these media objects is to
ignore the most fundamental fact of the network society: the
computational logic of its constituent parts. A perfect example of
Manovich's methodology -- and there are many such examples,
as the book deftly surveys the history of cinema for the
antecedents of new media and its 'various conventions used
by designers . . . to organize data and structure the user's
experience' (7) -- is his use of the term 'object' (instead
of 'artifact' or 'text', for example): 'The term [object]
thus fits with my aim of describing the general principles
of new media that hold true across all media types, all
forms of organization, and all scales. I also use *object*
to emphasize that my concern is with the culture at large
rather than with new media art alone. Moreover, *object* is
a standard term in the computer science and computer
industry, where it is used to emphasize the modular nature
of object-oriented programming languages such as C++ and
Java, object-oriented databases, and the Object Linking and
Embedding (OLE) technology used in Microsoft Office products
. . . In addition, I hope to activate connotations that
accompanied the use of the word *object* by the Russian
avant-garde artists of the 1920s.' (14) Thus the text's most
ubiquitous theoretical term encompasses his formalist
ambitions; extends these formalisms to the larger cultural
context of media production, distribution, and
dissemination; hails the discipline of computer science from
which the term accrues its most salient definition and
pervasive application in the network society; and recalls
connotations from the context of modernist cinema. This
methodological trajectory for the term 'object' is also the
methodological trajectory for _The Language of New Media_
and the birth of software studies. Manovich
writes: 'To understand the logic
of new media, we need to turn to computer science. It is
here that we may expect to find the new terms, categories,
and operations that characterize media that became
programmable. *From media studies, we move to something that
can be called 'software studies' -- from media theory to
software theory*' (48). Manovich outlines five
principles of this 'logic' of new media, which deserve a
brief summary here. These principles are not permanent, but
rather emerge from a historical period that, based on
Manovich's examples of new media objects, seems to primarily
encompass 'new media' as it was in the 1990s. Briefly, the
five principles are as follows: 1. Numerical
representation. The digitization of culture means that new
media objects are quantifiable as discrete sets of data in
digital code; '*media becomes programmable*'
(27). 2. Modularity. Comparable
to fractal self-similarity across scale in complexity
theory, all new media objects possess 'the same modular
structure throughout' (30). 'In short, a new media object
consists of independent parts, each of which consists of
smaller independent parts, and so on, down to the level of
the smallest 'atoms' -- pixels, 3-D points, or text
characters' (31). The analogy with complexity theory may not
be the most appropriate, since complexity theory is
interested in the relational properties of systems, while
Manovich seems to be talking about a reductive, particulate
conception of materiality (i.e. 'down to the level of the
smallest 'atoms''). But clearly modularity is a property of
'structured computer programming' (31), which constructs
software in terms of modular subroutines ('independent
parts') and variables ('smallest 'atoms''?). 3. Automation. As you
search a Web site such as Amazon.com, you may notice how the
'recommended' products begin to conform to the products you
have already viewed and perhaps even purchases you made.
Your access to the data is being subjected to on-the-fly
manipulation by the algorithms of 'intelligent' software, an
automated process that mediates between the user and the
data. 'The numerical coding of media (principle 1) and the
modular structure of a media object (principle 2) allow for
the automation of many operations involved in media
creation, manipulation, and access. Thus human
intentionality can be removed from the creative process, at
least in part' (32). 4. Variability. Once
again, because new media are digital code and modular, their
form can change and '*a number of different interfaces can
be created from the same data*' (37). The Amazon site is an
example of this, morphing its appearance to customize its
data according to the information it has about the user.
Manovich cites other scenarios -- hypermedia, periodic
updates, scalability -- as indicative of the principle of
variability. He believes variability agrees with the logic
of postindustrial society, which values customization, over
the logic of industrial society, which valued mass
conformity (41). 5. Transcoding. Manovich
calls transcoding 'the most substantial consequence of the
computerization of media' (45), because it describes the
process in which media objects are translated into other
formats, specifically the digital format, and this
digitalization of culture subjects the culture at large to
the ontology of the computer. Although Manovich maintains
throughout that this influence is not unidirectional -- that
software is created by culture as much as it creates culture
-- _The Language of New Media_ exhibits more interest in the
ways in which the ontology of the computer, its hardware and
software, shapes culture. For example, Manovich
writes: 'In new media lingo, to
'transcode' something is to translate it into another
format. The computerization of culture gradually
accomplishes similar transcoding in relation to all cultural
categories and concepts. That is, cultural categories and
concepts are substituted, on the level of meaning and/or
language, by new ones that derive from the computer's
ontology, epistemology, and pragmatics. New media thus acts
as a forerunner of this more general process of cultural
reconceptualization' (47). Mapping the conventions of
new media, then, presages the mapping of a new
culture. The section that follows
these five principles outlines the comparative media part of
his argument, which situates new media within the historical
continuity of old media, especially cinema. In 'What New
Media Is Not', Manovich explores what he calls 'popularly
held notions about the difference between new and old media'
(49), and attempts to debunk the notion that several aspects
of new media are a radical departure from old media. For
example, Manovich notes that both cinema and new media are
based on 'sampling' reality, and so each create discrete
units of space or time. Cinema prepared us for new media
because cinema sampled time and made discrete units of it on
film; digital media simply quantifies these discrete units.
The harder part, says Manovich, was the initial conceptual
leap 'from the continuous to the discrete' (50). He also
claims that cinema was the original 'multimedia', because it
combined 'moving images, sound, and text' a century before
new media (50) -- indeed, the 1960s, in its flirtations with
smell-o-vision and electrified 'tingler' seats, opened
olfactory and tactile channels for the cinema as well. In
'The Myth of the Digital' Manovich attacks concepts related
to 'digitization' and the ways in which these concepts are
used to segregate new media from old; for example, 'while in
theory, computer technology entails a flawless replication
of data, its actual use in contemporary society is
characterized by loss of data, degradation, and noise'
(55). The most problematic
category being 'debunked' here is what Manovich calls 'The
Myth of Interactivity'. Here Manovich is overzealous in his
attempt to frame new media as an artifact of historical
continuity. Interactivity normally refers to the obvious
fact that new media, as they are commonly identified, often
permit physical manipulation of new media objects by the
user to create or complete or in some way alter the objects.
Watching a movie is traditionally considered an inherently
passive activity, and the viewer cannot affect the form of
the film through direct manipulation. Manovich discredits
this distinction between old and new media by what seems to
be simply semantic trickery: he claims computer-based media
is 'by definition interactive', and therefore the use of the
term 'interactive' is tautological. If that is what it is
'by definition', why is it tautological to define it as
such? 'When we use the concept
of 'interactive media' exclusively in relation to
computer-based media, there is the danger that we will
interpret 'interaction' literally, equating it with physical
interaction between a user and a media object (pressing a
button, choosing a link, moving the body), at the expense of
psychological interaction' (57). I don't think media
theorists are denying 'psychological interaction' by
promoting physical interaction as a primary means by which
new media may be demarcated from old media. Interactivity by
itself is not a useful category, claims Manovich, because it
is ubiquitous; but this depends on a cognitivist definition
of interactivity, in which all cultural texts require mental
processes to be completed and comprehended. 'Ellipses in
literary narration, missing details of objects in visual
art, and other representational 'shortcuts' require the user
to fill in missing information' (56). He makes interactivity
meaningless by conflating it with cognition in general;
which is not to suggest that the two are necessarily
separate, but rather that physical interactivity -- the
manipulation of a mouse, the wearing of a VR helmet with
motion-sensitive gloves, or the rearranging of scenes in a
film on DVD-ROM -- is not the same as mental cognition, even
though physical interactivity requires mental cognition, and
hermeneutic interpretation requires mental cognition.
'Pressing a button, choosing a link, moving the body': these
are not the same activities as the gestalt activity of
filling in the blanks between discrete units of film.
Defining different kinds of interactivity, as Manovich does
-- 'menu-based interactivity, scalability, simulation,
image-interface, and image-instrument' (56) -- while it
certainly contributes to a more nuanced understanding of
interactivity, does not change the fact that physical
interactivity is almost universally one of the features that
differentiates new from old media. While some of Manovich's
attempts to historicize new media are excessive and lack
compelling argument, for the most part he has performed the
essential task of bridging the two cultures of art and
engineering, and given computer science its deserved place
in the pantheon of cultural studies. In his introduction to
_The New Media Reader_, Manovich boldly contends that the
computer scientists who made the new media revolution
possible -- by creating and developing computer programming,
the graphical user interface, hypertext, and other
technologies -- 'are the most important artists of our time,
maybe the only artists who are truly important and who will
be remembered from this historical period'. [2] It
is hyperbole, certainly, but also perhaps a necessary
corrective for the cultural amnesia that surrounds the role
of computer science in everyday life. Of course, Manovich
can't stop there: 'The articles by Licklider, Sutherland,
Nelson, and Engelbart from the 1960s included in the reader
are the essential documents of our time; one day the
historians of culture will rate them on the same scale of
importance as texts by Marx, Freud, and Saussure'.
[3] I have highlighted in this
review Manovich's emphasis on the impact of transcoding
because he himself suggests its importance; however,
clearly, the role of culture in the shaping of new media
should not be overlooked. Manovich says as much in _The
Language of New Media_: 'to develop a new aesthetics of new
media, we should pay as much attention to cultural history
as to the computer's unique possibilities to generate,
organize, manipulate, and distribute data' (314). Software
studies must not only investigate the ways in which the
computer's ontology shapes culture, it must also analyze the
culture that shapes computer programming. The prejudices
against seeing computer science manifestos and system
prototypes as the cultural equivalents of artistic
manifestos and creations must be removed. As Manovich argues
in _The New Media Reader_: 'Structurally manifestos
correspond to the theoretical programs of computer
scientists, while completed artworks correspond to working
prototypes or systems designed by scientists to see if their
ideas do work and to demonstrate these ideas to colleagues,
sponsors and clients'. [4] Is Eric Raymond's 'The
Cathedral and the Bazaar' the Port Huron Statement of the
Open Source movement, as Steven Johnson once wondered? What
is the impact, if any, of Richard Stallman's 'GNU Manifesto'
on visual culture? Will Tim Berners-Lee's notion of 'the
Semantic Web' transform visual culture like Eisenstein's
notion of montage revolutionized cinema? How do the
post-cyberpunk novels of Neal Stephenson, such as
_Cryptonomicon_, affect the constitution of the code? How
will these seemingly disparate cultural objects from the
culture of computer science shape the aesthetics of new
media? The goal of software studies, as exemplified in _The
Language of New Media_, is not to predict future states of
new media, but to catalogue its emergent properties, and the
objects mentioned above are shaping its current
constitution. New media emerges at the
level of everyday life. Just as the transition to
postmodernism signaled the erasure of the distinction
between high and low culture, the transition from old to new
media hails the technologically mediated transition from
macropolitics to micropolitics; that is, old media were
largely created and deployed in institutionally controlled
settings at the service of large groups (often the military,
but also other segments of government and industry), whereas
new media have been assimilated into everyday life and often
emerge from and are subject to the work of individuals who
remain outside institutional constraints. Manovich says, 'as
we shift from an industrial society to an information
society, from old media to new media, the overlap between
producers and users becomes significantly larger' (119).
This overlap of users and producers reflects the model of
power described by poststructuralists and postmodernists,
one in which macropolitical institutions emerge from
micropolitical practices; while cultural studies has focused
on micropolitical practices for some time, it has largely
ignored the computational base of these practices, something
software studies is uniquely positioned to
correct. Digital cameras and
personal computers enable individual filmmakers to create
films outside the studio system while approximating the
production values of studio films (and institutional films
have rapidly assimilated or aped the features of low-cost
video production). Musicians can record entire CDs using
software for PCs that captures the variety and quality of a
corporate studio. Programmers can reconfigure the tools of
the information society using Free or Open Source software,
a capability that has existed for a long time, but one that
only recently, with the emergence of the Internet and the
massive scalability of parallel debugging that it enables,
presented the possibility of qualitatively changing everyday
life. Mark Poster recently argued that: 'the media transform place
and space in such a way that what had been regarded as the
locus of the everyday can no longer be distinguished as
separate from its opposite. This change operates to nullify
earlier notions of the everyday but also opens the
possibility for a reconfigured concept of daily life which
might yet contain critical potentials'.
[5] Software studies signals
simultaneously the ubiquity and normative quality of
'programming' in everyday life, and the revolutionary
potential of computable culture to redefine everyday life;
in other words, as we sit on the precipice of ubiquitous
computing, the practice of programming has moved from the
macropolitical spaces patronized by kings of industry, the
fortified ivory towers of academia, and the cubicle farms of
IT warehouses, to the daily activities of micropolitical
spaces such as the home, the car, and the street. Whether
such micropolitical action involves programming a cell phone
to remind one of an important task, or contributing to the
reconfiguration of an open source operating system such as
Linux, programming can reify the banalities of normal life
or transform the passivity of postmodern subjugation into
political action, but programming is no longer only the tool
of industry, government, or other institutional
forces. Software studies may be
the ideal research praxis for investigating the impact of
the computer's ontology on culture in countless contemporary
and historical objects, and at least two prominent examples
deserve mention here: the Semantic Web, and Open Source
Software. According to Tim Berners-Lee, the next stage of
evolution for the World Wide Web is a cyberspace structured
not only by form (the size, font, colour, and page-location
of some text, for instance) but by meaning (the fact that
the text is a header or an abstract or a product
description); this stage is what he calls 'the Semantic
Web', and is the product of the steady replacement of HTML
(Hypertext Markup Language) by XML (eXtensible Markup
Language) as the standard for data exchange on the Web. HTML
is essentially a formatting language, which allows authors
to determine the look of a Web page using tags that code the
layout of a page; but XML, 1, allows authors to generate
their own set of markup tags, and more importantly, 2, can
generate structured data. Instead of simply identifying
where characters should be bolded or italicized, XML enables
authors to identify what the content 'means'. So, this
review written in XML could have used tags such as
<AUTHOR>, <MEDIA THEORIST>, or <BOOK
REVIEW>. These tagged elements could be compared with
others on the Web based on what they 'mean' and not simply
the text they contain. Berners-Lee and his colleagues, James
Hendler and Ora Lassila, write that: 'The Semantic Web will
bring structure to the meaningful content of Web pages,
creating an environment where software agents roaming from
page to page can readily carry out sophisticated tasks for
users.' [6] Instead of searching for 'Lev Manovich'
as it appears in any context, I might search the Web for
'Lev Manovich' where it is part of an <ABSTRACT>
element. Right now, the Web simply displays information; in
the future, it will 'understand' the information. 'The
challenge of the Semantic Web, therefore', say Berners-Lee
and company, 'is to provide a language that expresses both
data and rules for reasoning about the data and that allows
rules from any existing knowledge-representation system to
be exported onto the Web.' [7] In theory, that is
how it would work. Consider how this
transformation of the Web might be interpreted by software
studies, given what Manovich says about 'the flat structure
of the Web': 'Art historians and
literary and film scholars have traditionally analyzed the
structure of cultural objects as reflecting larger cultural
patterns (for instance, Panofsky's reading of perspective);
in the case of new media, we should look not only at the
finished objects but first of all at the software tools,
their organization and default settings. This is
particularly important because in new media the relation
between production tools and media objects is one of
continuity; in fact, it is often hard to establish the
boundary between them. Thus we may connect the American
ideology of democracy with its paranoid fear of hierarchy
and centralized control with the flat structure of the Web,
where every page exists on the same level of importance as
any other and where any two sources connected through
hyperlinking have equal weight.' (258) Is this still true of the
Semantic Web and its 'structured data'? Once data are
structured, they have a definitive relationship to each
other (relations partially defined by something called the
Resource Description Framework, or RDF, which I will not
discuss here). Is this a betrayal of the 'flat' structure of
the Web? Isn't the Semantic Web hierarchical, even if the
structure of the hierarchy is subject to change? Berners-Lee
talks about 'ontologies', or sets of information that define
the relations among terms, the ideology of the markup, if
you will. Perhaps a software studies project could examine
the relationship of the Document Type Definition (DTD), the
file that enumerates the allowable elements in an XML
document, to the XML documents? Or perhaps an ontology
editor such as Protege could be the object of analysis? What
ideology does this 'cultural interface' (70)
betray? The Semantic Web, along
with the googlization of the Web and the relative
regulability of its architecture, suggest that the Web is
quickly becoming other than, or maybe never really was, a
'flat' structure reminiscent of American democracy.
(Actually, maybe the commercialization of the Web and its
infrastructure sounds very much like American
democracy.) The second potentially
significant topic for software studies and its investigation
of the new cultural logic at work in a computerized society
is Open Source Software. As I have argued elsewhere,
[8] cultural and media studies have neglected the
study of software engineering texts and manifestos as
legitimate object texts, ignoring what Manovich rightly
invokes: the pervasion of the principles of computer science
into everyday life. Open Source Software development, the
method by which the source code for operating systems and
applications is created collectively and distributed freely,
directly addresses so many discourses of everyday life --
legal battles over copyright laws, Open Source's intimate
development alongside bionomics and other neo-liberal
economic theories, and the general questions it raises about
social organization -- that it just might be the exemplary
case study for software studies. If Free Software guru
Richard Stallman is correct, and 'free software' is the
central enabler in a 'free society' (he explicates the
defining adjective this way: 'free' as in 'free speech', not
as in 'free beer'), then Open Source Software connects the
technical base of new media (its source code) with its
cultural expression in various provocative ways yet to be
explored by new media theorists. As Tarleton Gillespie
writes: 'A look to the [technological] artifact must
quickly look beyond, to see its engagement with communities
of people, cultures of practice, institutional and social
contexts, and discursive landscapes'. [9] Open
Source and Free Software have been embraced by governments
in South America, Asia, and Europe as an alternative to
costlier proprietary software, and as a response to American
cultural and economic imperialism. Early widespread adoption
in North America has been based primarily on the quality of
Open Source Software and the potential cost savings it
represents; however, the cultural implications of Open
Source Software for the network society are significant, and
many Open Source advocates in North America are now doing
what Gillespie urges, looking 'beyond' the artifact of
quality code to the 'communities of people, cultures of
practice, institutional and social contexts, and discursive
landscapes' affiliated with Open Source. For instance, in Manuel
Castells's seminal study, _The Rise of the Network Society_,
the logic of 'place' is superseded by the ahistorical space
of 'flows': 'the network of communication is the fundamental
spatial configuration: places do not disappear, but their
logic and their meaning become absorbed in the network'.
[10] Castells argues that the 'coming of the space
of flows is blurring the meaningful relationship between
architecture and society', and he reconceptualizes
postmodernism around this point: 'In this perspective,
postmodernism could be considered the architecture of the
space of flows'. [11] Stanford Law School professor
Lawrence Lessig also gazes beyond the artifact, insisting
from a legal perspective that Open Source Software
contributes to the openness of the network society because
its proliferation reduces the regulability of the
architecture of cyberspace, the 'space of flows': 'Put too simply,
everything I have said about the regulability of behavior in
cyberspace -- or more specifically, about government's
ability to affect regulability in cyberspace -- crucially
depends on whether the application space of cyberspace is
dominated by open code. To the extent that it is,
government's power is decreased; to the extent that it
remains dominated by closed code, government's power is
preserved. Open code, in other words, can be a check on
state power.' [12] In Lessig's view, and more
prominently for the past twenty years in the essays of Free
Software activist Richard Stallman, a software development
model and the ethics and engineering principles it embodies
are mirrored in the society at large. Manovich echoes this
sentiment: 'A code may also provide its own model of the
world, its own logical system, or ideology; subsequent
cultural messages or whole languages created with this code
will be limited by its accompanying model, system, or
ideology' (64). The centrality of software
studies to film studies and media studies remains untested;
much work needs to be done in this field. A host of recent
texts that qualify as 'software studies', such as Matthew
Fuller's _Behind the Blip: Essays on the Culture Of
Software_ and Geert Lovink's _My First Recession_, make
significant contributions to the cultural study of software;
however, Lev Manovich has produced the most comprehensive
and foundational study of the formal properties that
separate programmable from non-programmable culture, in his
panoramic study of new media and visual culture, _The
Language of New Media_. The computerization of culture has
not only introduced a new set of cultural objects that
embody the logic of software, it has also redefined old
media such as cinema and photography. Cinema, for example,
'can no longer be clearly distinguished from animation'
(295) because of its reliance on 'digital compositing';
digital cinema is, in fact, 'a subgenre of painting' (295).
Such, Manovich argues, is the result of pervasive
transcoding that has been central to North American culture
since at least the 1960s (331). To understand the cultural
'output' of emerging media objects, then, we must first
understand the programmable 'input' of the everyday life of
the computer. University of
Waterloo Waterloo, Ontario,
Canada Notes 1. Friedrich Kittler,
'Technologies of Writing/Rewriting Technology'
<http://www.emory.edu/ALTJNL/Articles/kittler/kit1.htm>,
p. 12. 2. Manovich, 'New Media
from Borges to HTML', in Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick
Montfort, eds, _The New Media Reader_ (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 2003), p. 15. 3. Ibid., p. 24.
4. Ibid., p.
15. 5. Mark Poster, 'Everyday
(Virtual) Life', _New Literary History_, vol. 33, 2002, p.
743. 6. Tim Berners-Lee, James
Hendler, and Ora Lassila, 'The Semantic Web', _Scientific
American_, 17 May 2001 <http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=00048144-10D2-1C70-84A9809EC588EF21>. 7. Ibid. 8. See Michael Truscello,
'The Architecture of Information: Open Source Software and
Tactical Poststructuralist Anarchism', _Postmodern Culture_,
vol. 13 no. 3, May 2003 <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern_culture/v013/13.3truscello.html>. 9. Tarleton Gillespie,
'The Stories Digital Tools Tell', in Anna Everett and John
T. Caldwell, eds, _New Media: Theories and Practices of
Digitextuality_ (New York: Routledge, 2003), p.
111. 10. Manuel Castells, _The
Rise of the Network Society_, 2nd. ed. (Oxford: Blackwell,
2000), p. 443. 11. Ibid., p.
449. 12. Lawrence Lessig, _Code
and Other Laws of Cyberspace_ (New York: Basic, 1999), p.
100. Copyright ©
Film-Philosophy 2003 Michael Truscello, 'The
Birth of Software Studies: Lev Manovich and Digital
Materialism', _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 7 no. 55, December
2003
<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol7-2003/n55truscello>. Join the _Film-Philosophy_
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