William Miller
SVA MFA
Bob Bowen
Spring 2016
Lev Manovich’s Software Takes Command is the genealogy of software and an account of the effect that it’s had on all of us. This includes what he calls the “softwarization” of media which started with taking existing media and replicating its function using software to “create, store, distribute and access cultural artifacts.” Over the last 30 years our old media technologies such as record/cassette/CD players, film cameras, VHS, DVD, floppy disks have all been replaced by media software and despite this radical shift in our concept of media, we know next to nothing about how we got here. He is also interested in establishing and conveying a vocabulary in which to think about and categorize software.
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For instance. it’s hard to believe that there is no mention of Walter Benjamin in this book. There are some similarities of attitude toward technology in both Benjamin’s “The Work of Art In the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” and Manovich’s “Software Takes Command.” Benjamin, writing in the 1930’s speaks optimistically about the possibilities and benefits of art in the machine age. He was living in a time where it was presumed that revolution was just around the corner and that while industrialization in the service of capitalism was alienating and exploitative, industrialization in a revolutionary society would free art from it’s ancient ritualistic role. “One might subsume the eliminated element in the term “aura” and go on to say: that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art...By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. And in permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced. These two processes lead to a tremendous shattering of tradition which is the obverse of the contemporary crisis and renewal of mankind.” (Benjamin …show more content…
Translated into software, media techniques start acting like species within a common ecology—in this case, a shared software environment. Once “released” into this environment, they start interacting, mutating, and making hybrids.” (Manovich 164)
If the language of science is meant to demystify and enlighten, I feel like this use of a biological metaphor in description of software design and dissemination that he calls “media hybridization, evolution, and deep remix” is obfuscating. Is this biology metaphor in software mean that changes in technology are a kind of social Darwinism?
Manovich seems unconcerned with the idea of capitalism at the center of future technological developments. “If Fredric Jameson once referred to post-modernism as “the cultural logic of late capitalism,” we can perhaps call remix “the cultural logic of networked global capitalism.”(Manovich
The earliest forms of art had made it’s mark in history for being an influential and unique representation of various cultures and religions as well as playing a fundamental role in society. However, with the new era of postmodernism, art slowly deviated away from both the religious context it was originally created in, and apart from serving as a ritual function. Walter Benjamin, a German literary critic and philosopher during the 1900’s, strongly believed that the mass production of pieces has freed art from the boundaries of tradition, “For the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependance on ritual” (Benjamin 1992). This particular excerpt has a direct correlation with the work of Andy Warhol, specifically “Silver Liz as Cleopatra.” Andy Warhol’s rendition of Elizabeth Taylor are prime examples of the shift in art history that Benjamin refers to as the value of this particular piece is based upon its mass production, and appropriation of iconic images and people.
Jameson, Frederick. "Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism" New Left Review. 146 (July-August 1984) Rpt in Storming the Reality Studio. Larry McCaffrey, ed. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1992.
Warrick, Patricia S. "Science Fiction Images of Computers and Robots." The Cybernetic Imagination. N.p.: The MIT, 1980. 53-79. Rpt. in Contemporary Lieterary Criticism. Ed. Jean C. Stine. Vol. 26. Detroit: Gale, 1983. 53-56. Print.
Marx uses the term ‘postcapitalist appropriation’ to denote not theory, but neotheory. However, Lyotard’s analysis of constructivism holds that the media is part of the collapse of art.
---. “Sharing the Software.” Digital Chameleon: The Rise of Computer Emulation. 13 Sep. 1999. Zophar’s Domain. 25 Oct. 2000.
Richard sennet, 2006. The culture of of the new capitalism. Yale university press. Pg 10-14
When it comes to the definition of technology in their articles, both Carr and Cascio have similarities and differences. Both authors are debating about the use of technology in today’s society. Both of their articles touch base on the ideals of “what technology is” in their perspectives. Carr believes that technology is making us want the quick path to information or common knowledge and says the Internet is “a machine designed for the efficient and automated collection, transmission, and manipulation of information”. Cascio also believes th...
Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991.
Denis Noble is a brilliant man and a fantastic scientist, as he tells us in his own book, however; the same may not be said about his style of writing. The main theme of his book is that there is no program for life; the genome cannot simply be used as a blueprint to build an organism on its own. The organization of the book includes ten chapters, each one using a different musical metaphor to describe life, starting from the genome and going all the way up to the brain. Noble attempts to make his views of biology easier to understand to the reader by using current metaphors of biology and then rewriting them. Oddly enough, he states that “… there are of course always limits to the validity of metaphor. They are ladders to understanding. When you have climbed them, you can throw them away.” While Noble seems to know his science, he should probably stick to doing research and not to writing books on the metaphors of biology.
Adorno found this position to be naïve. As Richard Wolin describes, Adorno “criticizes Benjamin’s unqualified and uncritical acceptance of technically reproduced art as well as the essay’s complementary rejection of all autonomous art as being inherently ‘counterrevolutionary.’” Benjamin does not exactly ignore the control and manipulations of what Adorno and Max Horkheimer would later, in The Dialectic of Enlightenment, call the “culture industry.” He argues, for instance, that there can be “no political advantage” from the mechanical reproduction of film “until film has liberated itself from the fetters of capitalist exploitation” (113). However, the space Benjamin devotes to this threat is much more modest than the space he gives to its revolutionary qualities, which he finds intrinsic in technology itself. An example of this faith in the intrinsic mechanisms of technologies of reproduction is his concept of “reception in distraction”: “A person who concentrates before a work of art is absorbed by it; he enters into the work, just as, according to legend, a Chinese painter entered his completed painting while beholding it. By contrast, the distracted masses absorb the work of art into themselves” (119). For Benjamin, film is like architecture: we come to understand it “not so much by way of attention as by way of habit” and “in the form of casual noticing, rather than attentive observation”
In his book, Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Fredric Jameson drawing from the work of another Marxist theoretician Ernest Mandel, divides capitalism into three distinct periods post “the ‘original’ industrial revolution of the later 18th century” [emphasis in original](Jameson 35). Closely linked to the improvement in the means of production, i.e. technological development, the three stages of evolution of capitalism according to Jameson and Mandel are: ‘Market or competitive capitalism’ driven by the steam motors introduced in 1848; ‘Monopoly capitalism’ backed by the huge corporations using electric and combustion motors at the turn of 19th century; and the nuclear and electronic-powered machinery of ‘late capitalism’ that comes to fore in the wake of World War II (Jameson 35-36). Adding nuance to this last phase of late capitalism, David Harvey suggests that late capitalism and its guiding economic logic- Fordism culminates post World War II, but is able to push through for another a decade or so till it falls into crisis during the recession of 1973 (Harvey 124). This crisis of Fordism leads to the development of a more robust strain of capitalism, sometimes called postindustrial or post-Fordist. Harvey refers to this new brand of capitalism as ‘flexible accumulation’ which is characterized by a new, more global and m...
Towards the end of the nineteenth century, around 1860 after man had considerably conquered the machine, a new reality became prevalent in the lives of the newly industrialised world. “Modernism includes more than just art and literature. By now it includes almost the whole of what is truly alive in our culture”(Greenberg 1982:5) This quote can be applied to the earlier days of modernism When jobs had changed from agricultural based employment to corporate and menial based labour. Housing situations had too changed, from rural to urban, as people began to follow the money trail the industrial revolution had left behind. All this change had brought a new way of life for the western world, as things became automated and products were readily available to the con...
While critical social theorists have included discussion of technology as part of their frameworks of analysis, historically, one must look to the philosophical tradition for exhaustive thought pertaining to technology. Feenberg, trained as an academic philosopher, seeks to bridge this divide between social theory and philosophy. In giving credence to both the philosophical perspectives of Heidegger and Husserl and the critical sociological approaches of Marcuse and others at the Frankfurt School, Feenberg offers a perspective on technology unparalleled within contemporary discourse. This blending of social theory and philosophy is very much in line with the tradition of German intellectual thought and indicative of the impact Marcuse had as mentor during Feenberg’s graduate studies at the University of California, San Diego.
Many believed that Modernist works were not “art” because they did not always look like real life. But what is “real life”? A new outlook on reality was taken by Modernists. What is true for one person at one time is not true for another person at a different time. Experimentation with perspective and truth was not confined to the canvas; it influenced literary circles as well.
Most of us would agree that computers have become an integral part of society. We can touch them and see the results of their incredible capabilities. But a computer does nothing until directed to do so. Computers are able to perform many different tasks. These tasks are not made by the computer itself, but they are performed following a series of predefined instructions that conform what we call a program. The computer programs that run on a computer are referred to as software. A computer does not have enough creativity to make tasks for which it is not programmed, so it can only follow the instructions of the programs that it has been programmed for. The ones in charge to generate programs so that the computers may perform new tasks are programmers.