Abstract
A consideration of the political meaning of software that tries to add greater
philosophical precision to statements about the politics of tools and tool
building in the humanities. Using Michael Oakeshott's formulations of the “politics of faith” and the “politics of skepticism,”[Oakeshott 1996] it suggests
that while declaring our tools be morally or political neutral may be obvious
fallacious, it is equally problematic to suppose that we can predict in advance
the political formations that will arise from our tool building. For indeed (as
Oakeshott suggests), the tools themselves give rise to what is politically
possible.
Zilu said, “If the ruler of Wei were to entrust you
with governance of his state, what would be your first priority?”
The Master said, “Most certainly, it would be to rectify
names.”
Confucius, Analects
To speak of “the politics of tools” is to take the political nature of
technology for granted, and rightfully so. If the generation of historians, literary
critics, sociolinguistis, and philosophers who came up in the academy after Foucault
are united by anything, it is the idea that most things are wrapped up in issues of
power, and therefore cannot be said to stand outside the realm of the political in
any way. Such is the case, therefore, with any sort of technology at all — from
pencils to weapons systems — and it is the business of humanistic inquiry to make
plain the precise ways in which, as Foucault himself put it, “power comes from everywhere”
[
Foucault 1990]
And yet digital humanities has often been accused of violating this central
directive. Alan Liu offered this sobering assessment in 2012.
While digital humanists develop tools, data, and metadata critically [...]
rarely do they extend their critique to the full register of society,
economics, politics, or culture. How the digital humanities advances,
channels, or resists today's great postindustrial, neoliberal, corporate,
and global flows of information-cum-capital is thus a question rarely heard
in the digital humanities associations, conferences, journals, and projects
with which I am familiar. Not even the clichéd forms of such issues — for
example, “the digital divide,”
“surveillance,”
“privacy,”
“copyright,” and so on — get much play.
It is as if, when the order comes down from the funding agencies, university
administrations, and other bodies mediating today's dominant socioeconomic
and political beliefs, digital humanists just concentrate on pushing the
“execute” button on projects that amass the most data for the
greatest number, process that data most efficiently and flexibly (flexible
efficiency being the hallmark of postindustrialism), and manage the whole
through ever “smarter” standards, protocols, schema, templates, and
databases uplifting Frederick Winslow Taylor's original scientific
industrialism into ultraflexible postindustrial content management systems
camouflaged as digital editions, libraries, and archives — all without
pausing to reflect on the relation of the whole digital juggernaut to the
new world order. [Liu 2012]
Called now to be “woke” — in a metaphor that hearkens back to one of humanism’s
more confident eras — digital humanities now struggles to articulate precisely how
its work is properly political, and whether its commitment to “tools” is for
good or ill.
Liu’s essay was hardly the only — or even, in the wider scheme, the most significant
— catalyst for subsequent soul searching.
[1] And in some sense, Liu’s call for a
closer critical alignment with cultural studies has been taken far more literally
than he could have imagined. The cultural studies to which DH now finds itself in
uneasy dialogue is not so much its later refraction in “political readings” of
the artifacts of human history, but in the far more concretized politics of the 1968
academy — a world in which a seminar that could not place itself in clear relation
to the workers’ councils was perhaps not worth holding at all (one is reminded of
earlier scholar-activists like Korsch and Lukács). Stephen Greenblatt recalls a
moment from the immediate aftermath of that period in which he was attempting to
teach Marx with, one assumes, all the nuanced ambivalence one would expect from a
competent scholar. “I remember someone finally got up and
screamed out in class ‘You’re either a Bolshevik or a Menshevik — make up your
fucking mind’”[
Greenblatt 2005]
Liu was not stating the problem so starkly, and yet great swaths of the digital
humanities community now take the questions he posed with an urgency and immediacy
that is entirely palpable. It is now routine to begin a digital humanities
conference with a kind of litany in which the refugee and the immigrant are
welcomed, heteronormativity is denounced, misogyny is rejected, assaults on human
dignity (bullying, harassment) are banned, and (at least in Canada, Australia, and
the U.S.) the stolen lands of the First Nations are acknowledged. Such desiderata
are quite obviously commendable (if only in intention), but that such announcements
might well precede a discussion of machine learning and metadata highlights the
unease. We are haunted by the thought that a “woke coder” or a “leftist web
designer” is simply someone who has not made up their mind whether to choose
between Athens and Palo Alto. We wonder if the “politics of tools” is not an
object of philosophical reflection on the less instrumental aspects of our
endeavors, but, as in the double entendre of my
title, an entirely pejorative description of our own political confusions.
Michael Oakeshott would seem a very unlikely figure in this discussion. The late work
I consider most germane to these matters,
The Politics of Faith
and the Politics of Skepticism, is not obviously a book about politics
and technology at all, but rather a treatise on what he takes to be the
“stylistic” extremes of modernity as enunciated wherever (and whenever) we
find ourselves engaged in political activity.
[2] It is
perhaps wise to let Oakeshott himself speak on the essential nature of these
extremes:
In the politics of faith, the activity of governing is
understood to be in the service of the perfection of mankind. There is a
doctrine of cosmic optimism which, not from observation but as an inference from
the perfection of its creator, attributes an unavoidable perfection to the
universe. And there is, further, a doctrine in which human perfection appears as
a providential gift, assured but not deserved. But the idea of human
perfectibility characteristic of the politics of faith, so far from being
derived from either of these doctrines, is hostile to them both. In the politics
of faith, human perfection is sought precisely because it is not present; and
further, it is believed that we need not, and should not, depend upon the
workings of divine providence for the salvation of mankind. Human perfection is
to be achieved by human effort, and confidence in the evanescence of
imperfection springs here from faith in human power and not from trust in divine
providence. We may, perhaps, be permitted to encourage ourselves by believing
that our efforts have the approval and even the support of providence, but we
are to understand that the achievement of perfection depends upon our own
unrelaxed efforts, and that if those efforts are unrelaxed, perfection will
appear. [Oakeshott 1996]
The politics of skepticism, by contrast, is “in every way the
opposite:”
[I]n the politics of skepticism governing is understood as
a specific activity, and in particular it is understood to be detached from
the pursuit of human perfection. [...] [I]n modern times, the politics of
skepticism (regarded as an abstract style of politics) may be said to have
its roots either in the radical belief that human perfection is an illusion,
or in the less radical belief that we know too little about the conditions
of human perfection for it to be wise to concentrate our energies in a
single direction by associating its pursuit with the activity of governing.
Human perfection (so the argument runs) may be evanescent, and, moreover, it
may be a single and simple condition of human circumstances (though this may
be doubted), but, even on those assumptions, to pursue perfection in one
direction only (and particularly to pursue it as the crow flies, regardless
of what there may be to do in the interval before we embrace it) is to
invite disappointment and (what might be worse than the mortification of
non-arrival) misery on the way. [...] The office of government here is not
be the architect of a perfect manner of living, or (as faith understands it)
of an improved manner of living, or even (as it turns out) of any manner of
living at all. [...] The skeptic in politics observes that men live in
proximity with one another and, pursuing various activities, are apt to come
into conflict with each other. And this conflict, when it reaches certain
dimensions, not only makes life barbaric and intolerable, but may even
terminate it abruptly. In this understanding of politics, then, the activity
of governing subsists not because it is good, but because it is necessary.
Its chief office is to lessen the severity of human conduct by reducing the
occasions of it. [Oakeshott 1996]
Upon these two
very brief extracts from a lengthy argument, several observations must be made.
For Oakeshott, “governance” does not mean the particular establishment of
constitutions, nation states, delineated systems of social order, the credos and
platforms of political parties, or even philosophical meditations on governance as
such. He has in mind not “Who shall rule?” (and by what
warrant), but rather “What shall government do?”[
Oakeshott 1996]
“Political activity” is conceived as the “understanding and
care of public arrangements”[
Oakeshott 1996]. Thus
Oakeshott puts forth these two forms (or better, “styles”) of political
activity as unrealizable ideals (in the Platonic sense) and as extremes that are
neither found in unattenuated form nor without some mixture of the two occurring
either simultaneously or in tension with one another in actual political practice.
That is to say, we cannot locate in history a moment in which either tendency has
entirely prevailed — and indeed, were such extremes to somehow manifest themselves
fully, they would immediately appear as self-contradictory and logically incoherent.
Yet at the same time, Oakeshott detects these two tendencies playing out, as a kind
of
concordia discours of the two styles, in the
actual practice of political life over the course of the last five hundred years, as
well as in the politics of his own day.
[3]
“Faith” and “skepticism” have obvious religious overtones, and Oakeshott
does not deny that religion has been an important factor in modern political thought
and practice (he even, at several points, describes the politics of faith as “essentially Pelagian”
[
Oakeshott 1996]). But close examination of these two passages will
confirm that while a particular religious view might help to enable one or the
other, it is just as important to notice that religious worldviews — even very
insistent and socially totalizing ones — might inform precisely
one or the
other at any given moment. There are as many varieties of the politics of
faith as there are interpretations of the word “perfection,”[
Oakeshott 1996] and there is nothing in either notion that requires an
explicitly religious vision. When New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, in 2012, sought
to ban the sale of sweetened soft drinks that exceeded 16 oz in a serving (as a
matter of public health), he might have been engaging in
something like
the politics of faith. But among the many who accused him of instituting a “nanny
state,” no one suggested that he had spiritual salvation in mind. It is also
not the case that either term falls neatly along the conventional axes of left and
right. At the risk of summoning Godwin's Law, one might say that the Nazis
horrifying vision of “human perfectibility” had much more to do with the
politics of faith than its opposite (though, as Oakeshott would no doubt point out,
the politics of skepticism is by no means absent from the on-the-ground politics of
something like state fascism).
Again, a brief summary hardly does justice to a complex, book-length argument. But it
is perhaps enough to orient us toward the truly provocative idea that Oakeshott
introduces into his discussion of the two poles, which is that no serious form of
the politics of faith can emerge without the enlistment of technology:
[In the early modern period], the power of government was also
being enlarged by the application of more efficient techniques, most of which
had already seen an apprenticeship in some other field of activity, in commerce
or in industry. Indeed, almost the whole apparatus by means of which governments
in our own day are able to exercise a minute control over the activities of
their subjects — the apparatus of banking and book-keeping, the records,
registers, files, passports, dossiers and indexes — was already waiting to be
exploited. Without ease of movement and communication, without a ready supply of
paper and ink, without all those reports and records which spring up whenever
paper, ink and human curiosity are joined, without a literate population,
without ready means of identification, without settled frontiers, without (in
short) a high degree of mastery over men and things, the prospects of the
politics of faith are nugatory; with them, there is little to stand in their
way. [Oakeshott 1996]
The analogy with our contemporary moment could not be more vivid. But Oakeshott's
boldest thesis is that technology does not come to the aid of an emergent politics
of faith, but rather creates the conception in the first place. Those who propose a
new form of political activity do not realize its virtues
and then
seize on the technological power that could bring it about, but instead discover a
politics of faith precisely when, as in the early modern period, there is “a remarkable and intoxicating increase of human power”
borne of technological innovation and expansion [
Oakeshott 1996].
States do not discover the virtues of total surveillance and then look around for
the means by which surveillance might be undertaken, but instead discover the entire
conception of governance as a quest for human perfectibility because the technology
of surveillance has appeared as a new affordance.
At least two objections immediately arise.
First: If it is true that technology is logically and temporally prior to the
politics it enables, does it not therefore become “neutral?” And is this not
like saying that guns are innocent of any ethical association with murder? There are
arguments to this effect, of course, and they are often refuted simply by noting
that while a pistol might well be used to drive a nail, its “intended use”
suggests that ethical intentions are already inscribed in the object itself. Then
again, the idea that technologies define the regime of political activity (as
opposed to serving as the instrumental outcome of political goals) makes some sense
of the numerous occasions in which individual technologists appear innocent of the
horrors with which their inventions come to be implicated. Richard Jordan Gatling
(1818–1903), among the more important figures in the development of the modern
machine gun, offers a classic example. Having noticed that most soldiers in the
American Civil War were dying of sickness and disease (as opposed to gunshots):
It occurred to me that if I could invent a machine gun which
could by its rapidity of fire, enable one man to do as much battle duty as a
hundred, that it would, to a large extent supersede the necessity of large
armies, and consequently, exposure to battle and disease would be greatly
diminished. [Wahl 1965]
Even if one accuses Gatling of outright moral stupidity, we are still left with the
task of providing an account of his role in the creation of the modern screw
propeller. That, after all, is an essential element of every nuclear submarine — a
weapon capable of creating levels of suffering and catastrophe of which Gatling
could not possibly have conceived. One could, indeed, multiply such examples
endlessly. A graduate student with no other purpose save better soybean production
invents Agent Orange. A researcher interested in studying learning, creates a tool
(the IQ test) beloved of crazed eugenicists to this day. The first thing ever played
over a loudspeaker to a crowd were Christmas carols; it wasn't long before Joseph
Goebbels was among the first to realize its far more insidious capabilities. So
while we cannot declare technology neutral, we can — at least in many cases —
proclaim individual technologists to be, at worst, unwitting instruments of forces
of which they are mostly unaware. “Technology is not politically neutral” is,
in all such cases, a statement not about some individual mechanism, but about a
record of instrumental usage pondered with a good deal of hindsight.
Second: Do not such technologies serve the politics of skepticism equally? Yes, but
here Oakeschott's identification of these two tendencies as distinctive of modernity
becomes most legible. The ancient empires maintained their vast domains under arms
and with what methods of surveillance they could muster. But in such technologically
“primitive” circumstances, even the politics of skepticism cannot fully
emerge. The Roman Empire (or the Persian, or the Han) could perhaps hope to avoid
strife among a subjected people inconveniently occupying (and in many cases,
constituting) the resources they hoped to exploit, but they could not — and over
time, proved themselves largely unable to — develop a vision of, and a set of robust
institutions for, the prevention of local conflict borne of nothing more than
proximity (the imposition of peace for its own sake, or perhaps “peace as
ideology” or as normative political calculus). As for the politics of faith:
Even if the Roman imperial cult had had any aspirations toward human perfectibility
(and it certainly did not), it is extremely difficult to imagine how that might have
been efficiently maintained by Rome even in the less remote regions of the empire.
Where no obvious means are available, no obvious ends can properly emerge. Yet late
antiquity also sees the rise of Stoicism, Epicureanism, and eventually Christianity
as popular forms of social and religious thought. And while none of these creeds (at
least in their original, ideal forms) ever succeeds in formulating a concrete
political vision, one could scarcely summon more incandescent instances in which the
perfectibility of the human person is assumed.
Finally, it is important to note that the question to which Oakeshott's thesis is
directed is not primarily that to which the two tendencies offer themselves as
solutions (“What shall government do?”), but rather as a way of explaining the
ambivalence and ambiguity of modern political discourse. That we do not possess a
clear scientific vocabulary with such terms as “right,”
“justice,”
“order,”
“freedom,”
“democracy,”
“socialism,” or, for that matter, “governance” (one could extend this list
infinitely) is a function of the fact that all such terms are ever destined to serve
two masters. Each appears — with radically different meanings — in both the politics
of faith and the politics of skepticism. Attempts to specify them further with
supposedly more precise adjectives — “natural rights,”
“democratic socialism,”
“individual freedom” — only serve to deepen the rift. Nowhere is
this more evident than in the term “social justice” as used in contemporary
anglophone political discourse. Those more aligned with the politics of faith would
very much like the adjective “social” to act as a useful clarification, and
even perhaps to render the entire term slightly innocuous (who, after all, could
object to a “just society?”). For those inspired by skepticism, though, the
term is an obvious shibboleth suggestive of an entirely activist and progressive
stance. For some, the term can only be employed with yet another qualification:
“the social justice warrior” who takes up arms against all
that is good and decent in a politics manifestly focused on what is traditional and
sensible.
It should surprise us not at all, though, to discover that our own political
aspirations as academics — our desire to be politically relevant and politically
engaged — is a technologically-enabled manifestation of the politics of faith. The
humanities, and in particular, the humanities as it is practiced and taught in
higher education, has seldom had any other goal than the cultivation of human
“consciousness.” And by “consciousness,” we of course mean, quite
unapologetically, “better” and “higher” consciousness. Other reasons might
be summoned. “Good citizenship” is still frequently mentioned, and preparation
for more concrete endeavors (law, business, medicine, or ministry) remains a sturdy
rationale in some quarters. But all such teleologies only reframe the centrality of
“consciousness” or “awareness” as ends in themselves. Art for art's
sake (we can substitute any humanistic discipline we like for “art” in this
venerable formulation) is perhaps a part of the calculation for some, but even the
most ardent admirers of Shakespeare will surely see the absurdity of spending
enormous sums of money in order to provide their children with four years of
aesthetic rapture. If politics is our goal, the elitism of this proverb becomes
self-refuting. Yet the study of literature and art, culture and history, philosophy
and politics — even in their most narrow and specialized forms — can all be enfolded
into the capacious realm of “consciousness.” If the humanities has a politics,
it is a politics that relies heavily on the idea of human perfectibility. Skeptics
we may be, but we are not practitioners of the politics of skepticism.
Perhaps in other times and places, it has been precisely the purpose of higher
education to do nothing more than fecklessly maintain existing structures bent on no
more noble purpose than maintaining order within an eternally defective human
community. But the humanities in particular — understood in as broad a way as
possible — has perhaps never known such an academy, or has known it only as its
natural enemy.
But it is not our “liberalism” that makes this assignation relevant. The
humanities has certainly also known, in prior ages, a politics of faith with
entirely “conservative” ends in mind. Humanistic education has very often been
conceived precisely as a way of policing racial, religious, gender, and class
boundaries with the quite obvious goal of “perfecting” those who are conceived
as worthy of perfection, and who will perforce rule those less enlightened. Even the
apparent move to popularize humanistic knowledge that prevailed in the first half of
the twentieth century in both the U.S. and the U.K. (Great
Books of the Western World, the launch of Penguin Books, The Loeb Classical Library) left no doubt as to who was
properly in charge of perfection.
The trouble, of course, is that the humanities are hardly the only manifestation of
the politics of faith in modern society. For surely, one could not find a more
luminous example of the politics of faith than Silicon Valley and all its works. We
are subjected daily to its inexorable reframing of human desire and human potential
— a torrent of “apps” and “sites” focused not merely on idle pleasures and
diversions, but (more crucially) on “wellness;” on the virtues of being
hyper-informed and aware of whatever occupies the instant; on the transhuman fantasy
of the “quantified” self; on the essential excellence of various
“balances” (work/life, self/other, body/spirit); on happiness in the
fullest, and even the most ancient sense of the word; and, of course,
“productivity” as a morally efficacious activity. Such bids for human
perfectibility are irreducibly voluntarist in almost every sense of the term. In
fact, they are so committed to the idea that our beliefs are entirely ours to choose
without interference, that it is not even clear that those who are manifestly
engaged in the manipulation of our desires and beliefs regard it as manipulation.
Within the totalizing logic of the market, one experiences coercion as merely the
marriage of two freedoms: the freedom to buy and the freedom to sell. That this will
absolutely lead to the purchase of many more iPhones escapes no one at all; the only
question is how to expand this logic further afield, so that more might come to know
the salvation on offer. The anxious ethical dilemmas of former ages can be dispensed
with in a phrase: “Don't be evil.”
Both visions are enabled by the same sources of power: the “banking and book-keeping, the records, registers, files, passports, dossiers
and indexes.”
[
Oakeshott 1996] Or rather, by the “intoxicating
increase”[
Oakeshott 1996] of their digital successors: the
user profiles, digital signatures, and network graphs; the mining and the analytics;
the ability not only to account for the present, but perhaps even to predict the
future (the heretofore unattainable dream of every king). The “corporatization”
of the university is, in fact, precisely this: a conception of the way we undertake
political arrangements within the university now made available by data, metrics, a
concern with measurable outcomes, and the (invariably digital) tools that have
brought these affordances into view.
Still, if the matter of “how one uses the tools” has any intelligibility at all
(as a spectrum of ethical choices and options), that intelligibility lies mainly
with the perfectibility one has in mind. And on this point, Silicon Valley and the
humanistic academy are almost incommensurable paradigms. Where the one posits a
genial and mostly circumscribed “wellness,” the other repeatedly and eternally
offers the same as speculation and question. One has a short attention span; the
other remains irrefragably committed to the longue
durée. One quantifies the self; the other complicates it and
rediscovers it. One loves binary terms; the other approaches them archly and with
suspicion. Voluntaristic conceptions of belief (says Humanitas) are just so many shadows on the wall of the cave; one can
scarcely imagine a class in the humanities that does not begin with the observation
of its fatuousness and propose a journey (however tortuous an inconclusive) upward.
That it is not possible to discover “in the tools themselves”
some sort of political meaning that is ontologically prior to these commitments
should perhaps not deter us from declaring them “not politically neutral,” but
it should render a great number of common statements about the politics of tools at
least banal if not tautological. It matters not at all that one might compose either
Mein Kampf
or the Sermon on the Mount using a word processor. It might matter a
great deal that neither one, as a matter of historical fact, was produced with this
particular technology. To speak of such matters is not to locate one means with two
entirely different ends, but rather two means fully and distinctly defined by ends
that are not entirely void of metaphysical similarity.
None of this absolves digital humanities of anything. Even with radically different —
and even opposed — teleologies in view, the fact that so many of our tools and
techniques are handed to us by an industry with its own distinct politics of faith
suggests, at least, a hardy vigilance. That we might merely advance and channel, and
thus fail to resist, “today's great postindustrial, neoliberal,
corporate, and global flows of information-cum-capital”[
Liu 2012] remains a possibility. But the mere use of digital tools
does not automatically forecast that failure, and the adumbration of a supposedly
“activist” form of digital humanities work does not guarantee success. If
that failure were to come, it could only come from a disavowal of the far grander
aims of the humanities itself. Breaking “faith” with that vision, however
ramified in its possibilities and articulations, would be devastating indeed. At the
edge of that event horizon, digital humanities would not even succeed in being what
its most bitter detractors imagine it to be. At that point, no one would be capable
of asking the questions Liu asks, because “digital humanities” will have become
something far worse than a paradox or an oxymoron. It will have become the quaint
term of art once used by a benighted group who still believed that the humanities
had purpose and meaning. On that day, the global flows of information-cum-capital —
pursuing faith or skepticism as they please — will have presumably won.
Oakeshott's formulation is extreme, because it suggests that the “intoxicating increase”[
Oakeshott 1996] of technological
power is not some new affordance toward which the humanities may stand in some
merely practical or instrumental way. On this account, one might say that the
expansion of technological power created the digital humanities — making it not only
possible, but conceivable. And following that thought to its conclusion, we find
that the term “tool” is itself among the ambivalent and ambiguous terms of its
political discourse, ever ready to be taken one way or another as one conceives or
reconceives the nature of the humanities itself. Oakeshott, though, would claim a
virtue in such ambiguity:
Politics is a conversation between diverse interests, in which
activities that circumstantially limit one another are saved from violent
collision; and here, words (words, indeed, which have a continuous range of
meaning in which the extreme meanings are mediated to one another) may sometimes
serve our turn better than a scientific vocabulary designed to exclude all
doubleness. [Oakeshott 1996]
To ask “What is the politics of tools?” is to ask a question as rife with
possibility — and confusion — as “What is justice?” or “What is
democracy?” We sense that there are such things as justice and democracy, and
we likewise suspect that tools “have a politics.” But as with justice and
democracy, one might more profitably ask what underlies our deployment of tools as
political interventions.
Perhaps this is only to restate Liu’s complaint in slightly different terms.
Certainly, nothing in the preceding discussion lessens the urgency of our need to
avoid “just pressing the execute button” on our projects. Still, one must
acknowledge that accurate assessment of the political meaning of our tools is no
easy matter, and certainly not a simple matter of, as Liu put it, “scaling” our thinking about metadata into “thinking critically about the power, finance, and other governance
protocols of the world.”[
Liu 2012] If, in fact, it is true
that our tool-building, while favoring a politics of faith, cannot define or predict
the specific political arrangements that may later arise, we should perhaps be most
circumspect not when we are tempted to imagine our efforts to be neutral, but rather
when we imagine our tools to be acts of “resistance” or outright political
activism. The former indicates a fallacy to which any humanist at all is hopefully
alive; the latter, though, reflects a potentially more dangerous naiveté about the
outworkings of power. Ethical thinking, political responsibility, and critique are
undoubtedly obligations of the present. But thinking critically about the politics
of our tools must surely also mean a certain skepticism toward the essential
goodness of what we are doing. The future that awaits may well realize entire
political formations on the basis of our endeavors; they may also, despite our best
efforts and loudest protestations, turn our efforts to political ends entirely
opposed to those for which we now long.
