The Digital Condition

Felix Stalder, Valentine A. Pakis

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781509519606, 9781509519590
• eBook ISBN: 9781509519637
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Popular Culture
• Index: Social Sciences

Our daily lives, our culture and our politics are now shaped by the digital condition as large numbers of people involve themselves in contentious negotiations of meaning in ever more dimensions of life, from the trivial to the profound. They are making use of the capacities of complex communication infrastructures, currently dominated by social mass media such as Twitter and Facebook, on which they have come to depend. Amidst a confusing plurality, Felix Stalder argues that are three key constituents of this condition: the use of existing cultural materials for one's own production, the way in which new meaning is established as a collective endeavour, and the underlying role of algorithms and automated decision-making processes that reduce and give shape to massive volumes of data. These three characteristics define what Stalder calls 'the digital condition'. Stalder also examines the profound political implications of this new culture. We stand at a crossroads between post-democracy and the commons, a concentration of power among the few or a genuine widening of participation, with the digital condition offering the potential for starkly different outcomes. This ambitious and wide-ranging theory of our contemporary digital condition will be of great interest to students and scholars in media and communications, cultural studies, and social, political and cultural theory, as well as to a wider readership interested in the ways in which culture and politics are changing today.

II
Forms

With the emergence of the internet around the turn of the millennium as an omnipresent infrastructure for communication and coordination, previously independent cultural developments began to spread beyond their specific original contexts, mutually influencing and enhancing one another, and becoming increasingly intertwined. Out of a disconnected conglomeration of more or less marginalized practices, a new and specific cultural environment thus took shape, usurping or marginalizing an ever greater variety of cultural constellations. The following discussion will focus on three forms of the digital condition; that is, on those formal qualities that (notwithstanding all of its internal conflicts and contradictions) lend a particular shape to this cultural environment as a whole: referentiality, communality, and algorithmicity. It is only because most of the cultural processes operating under the digital condition are characterized by common formal features such as these that it is reasonable to speak of the digital condition in the singular.

“Referentiality” is a method with which individuals can inscribe themselves into cultural processes and constitute themselves as producers. Understood as shared social meaning, the arena of culture entails that such an undertaking cannot be limited to the individual. Rather, it takes place within a larger framework whose existence and development depend on communal formations. “Algorithmicity” denotes those aspects of cultural processes that are (pre-)arranged by the activities of machines. Algorithms transform the vast quantities of data and information that characterize so many facets of present-day life into dimensions and formats that can be registered by human perception. It is impossible to read the content of billions of websites. Therefore we turn to services such as Google's search algorithm, which reduces the data flood (“big data”) to a manageable amount and translates it into a format that humans can understand (“small data”). Without them, human beings could not comprehend or do anything within a culture built around digital technologies, but they influence our understanding and activity in an ambivalent way. They create new dependencies by pre-sorting and making the (informational) world available to us, yet simultaneously ensure our autonomy by providing the preconditions that enable us to act.

Referentiality

In the digital condition, one of the methods (if not the most fundamental method) enabling humans to participate – alone or in groups – in the collective negotiation of meaning is the system of creating references. In a number of arenas, referential processes play an important role in the assignment of both meaning and form. According to the art historian André Rottmann, for instance, “one might claim that working with references has in recent years become the dominant production-aesthetic model in contemporary art.”¹ This burgeoning engagement with references, however, is hardly restricted to the world of contemporary art. Referentiality is a feature of many processes that encompass the operations of various genres of professional and everyday culture. In its essence, it is the use of materials that are already equipped with meaning – as opposed to so-called raw material – to create new meanings. The referential techniques used to achieve this are extremely diverse, a fact reflected in the numerous terms that exist to describe them: re-mix, re-make, re-enactment, appropriation, sampling, meme, imitation, homage, tropicália, parody, quotation, post-production, re-performance, camouflage, (non-academic) research, re-creativity, mashup, transformative use, and so on.

These processes have two important aspects in common: the recognizability of the sources and the freedom to deal with them however one likes. The first creates an internal system of references from which meaning and aesthetics are derived in an essential manner.² The second is the precondition enabling the creation of something that is both new and on the same level as the re-used material. This represents a clear departure from the historical–critical method, which endeavors to embed a source in its original context in order to re-determine its meaning, but also a departure from classical forms of rendition such as translations, adaptations (for instance, adapting a book for a film), or cover versions, which, though they translate a work into another language or medium, still attempt to preserve its original meaning. Re-mixes produced by DJs are one example of the referential treatment of source material. In his book on the history of DJ culture, the journalist Ulf Poschardt notes: “The remixer isn't concerned with salvaging authenticity, but with creating a new authenticity.”³ For instead of distancing themselves from the past, which would follow the (Western) logic of progress or the spirit of the avant-garde, these processes refer explicitly to precursors and to existing material. In one and the same gesture, both one's own new position and the context and cultural tradition that is being carried on in one's own work are constituted performatively; that is, through one's own activity in the moment. I will discuss this phenomenon in greater depth below.

To work with existing cultural material is, in itself, nothing new. In modern montages, artists likewise drew upon available texts, images, and treated materials. Yet there is an important difference: montages were concerned with bringing together seemingly incongruous but stable “finished pieces” in a more or less unmediated and fragmentary manner. This is especially clear in the collages by the Dadaists or in Expressionist literature such as Alfred Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz. In these works, the experience of Modernity's many fractures – its fragmentation and turmoil – was given a new aesthetic form. In his reference to montages, Adorno thus observed that the “negation of synthesis becomes a principle of form.”⁴ At least for a brief moment, he considered them an adequate expression for the impossibility of reconciling the contradictions of capitalist culture. Influenced by Adorno, the literary theorist Peter Bürger went so far as to call the montage the true “paradigm of modernity.”⁵ In today's referential processes, on the contrary, pieces are not brought together as much as they are integrated into one another by being altered, adapted, and transformed. Unlike the older arrangement, it is not the fissures between elements that are foregrounded but rather their synthesis in the present. Conchita Wurst, the bearded diva, is not torn between two conflicting poles. Rather, she represents a successful synthesis – something new and harmonious that distinguishes itself by showcasing elements of the old order (man/woman) and simultaneously transcending them.

This synthesis, however, is usually just temporary, for at any time it can itself serve as material for yet another rendering. Of course, this is far easier to pull off with digital objects than with analog objects, though these categories have become increasingly porous and thus increasingly problematic as opposites. More and more objects exist both in an analog and in a digital form. Think of photographs and slides, which have become so easy to digitalize. Even three-dimensional objects can now be scanned and printed. In the future, programmable materials with controllable and reversible features will cause the difference between the two domains to vanish: analog is becoming more and more digital.

Montages and referential processes can only become widespread methods if, in a given society, cultural objects are available in three different respects. The first is economic and organizational: they must be affordable and easily accessible. Whoever is unable to afford books or get hold of them by some other means will not be able to reconfigure any texts. The second is cultural: working with cultural objects – which can always create deviations from the source in unpredictable ways – must not be treated as taboo or illegal, but rather as an everyday activity without any special preconditions. It is much easier to manipulate a text from a secular newspaper than one from a religious canon. The third is material: it must be possible to use the material and to change it.⁶

In terms of this third form of availability, montages differ from referential processes, for cultural objects can be integrated into one another – instead of simply being placed side by side – far more readily when they are digitally coded. Information is digitally coded when it is stored by means of a limited system of discrete (that is, separated by finite intervals or distances) signs that are meaningless in themselves. This allows information to be copied from one carrier to another without any loss and it allows the respective signs, whether individually or in groups, to be arranged freely. Seen in this way, digital coding is not necessarily bound to computers but can rather be realized with all materials: a mosaic is a digital process in which information is coded by means of variously colored tiles, just as a digital image consists of pixels. In the case of the mosaic, of course, the resolution is far lower. Alphabetic writing is a form of coding linguistic information by means of discrete signs that are, in themselves, meaningless. Consequently, Florian Cramer has argued that “every form of literature that is recorded alphabetically and not based on analog parameters such as ideograms or orality is already digital in that it is stored in discrete signs.”⁷ However, the specific features of the alphabet, as Marshall McLuhan repeatedly underscored, did not fully develop until the advent of the printing press.⁸ It was the printing press, in other words, that first abstracted written signs from analog handwriting and transformed them into standardized symbols that could be repeated without any loss of information. In this practical sense, the printing press made writing digital, with the result that dealing with texts soon became radically different.

Information overload 1.0

The printing press made texts available in the three respects mentioned above. For one thing, their number increased rapidly, while their price significantly sank. During the first two generations after Gutenberg's invention – that is, between 1450 and 1500 – more books were produced than during the thousand years before.⁹ And that was just the beginning. Dealing with books and their content changed from the ground up. In manuscript culture, every new copy represented a potential degradation of the original, and therefore the oldest sources (those that had undergone as little corruption as possible) were valued above all. With the advent of print culture, the idea took hold that texts could be improved by the process of editing, not least because the availability of old sources, through reprints and facsimiles, had also improved dramatically. Pure reproduction was mechanized and overcome as a cultural challenge.

According to the historian Elizabeth Eisenstein, one of the first consequences of the greatly increased availability of the printed book was that it overcame the “tyranny of major authorities, which was common in small libraries.”¹⁰ Scientists were now able to compare texts with one another and critique them to an unprecedented extent. Their general orientation turned around: instead of looking back in order to preserve what they knew, they were now looking ahead toward what they might not (yet) know.

In order to organize this information flood of rapidly amassing texts, it was necessary to create new conventions: books were now specified by their author, publisher, and date of publication, not to mention furnished with page numbers. This enabled large numbers of texts to be catalogued and every individual text – indeed, every single passage – to be referenced.¹¹ Scientists could legitimize the pursuit of new knowledge by drawing attention to specific mistakes or gaps in existing texts...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Preface to the English Edition
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: After the End of the Gutenberg Galaxy
• I: Evolution
• II: Forms
• III: Politics
• End User License Agreement