The Analog-Digital Border

Bookstore shelves, opines network theorist Alexander R. Galloway in The Interface Effect (2013), overflow with “fluff on digital this and digital that.” If this is true, then it bears asking perhaps why this stuff is “fluff.” What makes the bulk of the literature on the much bandied-about “digital turn” in the humanities and the world at large a cliché-ridden tedium? Might the repetitiveness presumably plaguing the scholarship stem, at least in part, from the quasi-invariably “presentist” approach to digitality, namely, from the widely shared assumption that digital culture—more specifically, the digital imaginary undergirding it—simply and miraculously came about on the heels of recent, post-1970 technological advances? In other words, could it be that critics have been focusing too much on their moment in history, on the “nowness” of digital newness and on the future cyber culture promises? And, if so, what can one see if one looks in the opposite direction? That is to say, in what sense does the digitally enabled future become visible, indeed intellectually inevitable, if one turns to the past instead, if one glances ahead to it?

Developing arguments previously tested in The Aesthetic Contract: Statutes of Art and Intellectual Work in Modernity (1997), Around the Book: Systems and Literacy (2010), and elsewhere, Henry Sussman’s new and highly provocative monograph Playful Intelligence: Digitizing Tradition undertakes precisely this turn. In so doing, it revisits pivotal moments in literary, philosophical, and cultural modernity as allegorizing, anticipating, and at times even formulating the “proto-“ (or “soft”) cybernetic” discourse that paves the way to the post-WW II computational revolution and its “strong” systems theory.

Guided by such cyber-visionaries as Douglass R. Hofstadter (Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, 1979) and Anthony Wilden (System and Structure, 1972), Sussman’s literary-textual genealogy of the digital sets out to heal the historical wound or divide provoked—rather unnecessarily— by too narrowly specialized accounts of the rise and function of computer systems, digital literacy, online communication, and the like. More significant still is, to me, the gap his inquiry fills between the analog-oriented traditional humanities and today’s digitally minded “interdisciplinarity.” This is, in my view, the fault line most responsible for the epistemological, disciplinary, institutional, and even political configuration of our academic world and, no less, for the equally multiple predicaments following from this adversarial setup.

Yet again, this is a schism that we do not need. Nonetheless, we are faced with it. To move forward, we must overcome it. I am glad to report that Sussman provides an intellectually and historically compelling rationale for doing just that.

Laying out this rationale, his book’s chapter makeup foregrounds a personal take on literary-philosophical progress/innovation. This perspective, and the investigative method derived from it, is originally defined as “digitization of tradition.” Admittedly, this critical digitization can be pursued through a range of writers, thinkers, artists, places, and movements. Sussman’s chosen itinerary articulates a consistent, intriguing yet plausible, cultural narrative—a personal but compelling aesthetic prehistory of digitality before its advent proper.

This story could have probably got underway with Romantic literature and its resistance to the Age of Reason’s “Prevailing Operating Systems” (POS), as Sussman’s brief discussion of “interactivity” in E. T. A. Hoffman goes to show. However, in Playful Intelligence, the digital ball really gets rolling with the “platforms” encrypted in the modernist visual arts. A case in point is, as Sussman explains in the first chapter, Wassily Kandinsky, on whose work the critic has dwelt extensively before. In leaving fauvist representationalism behind, Kandinsky’s “compositions” foreground, Sussman maintains, the “strong turn toward the digital at the expense of the analog.” Nothing short of “seismic,” the turn “allow[s]” artists like Kandinsky “a disqualification of prevailing aesthetic contracts and sub-contracts in an astonishing range of media and art-forms.” The sea-change entails practically an overhaul of the “conceptual hardware” of modernity in its more experimentalist embodiments. Thus, it comes as little surprise that the shift...