The Cybernetic Hypothesis

To conclude this ‘method chapter’, I draw on The Cybernetic Hypothesis by Alexander Galloway to address the methodologies and tools of research in the digital era. His hypothesis

‘refers to a specific epistemological regime in which systems or networks combine both human and nonhuman agents in mutual communication and command’ (2014:111). Echoing the research of Franklin and her ‘commands’ of prescriptive technologies, The Cybernetic Hypothesis by the French collective Tiqqun (2001) spelled out this new type of ‘social management involving both human and non-human assets’ that determines human activity through a computational and media-oriented society (ibid). Galloway claims that this ‘digital

universe’ involving the ‘provisional nature of cybernetics’ has shifted the ‘foundations of knowledge and culture’ with the introduction of digital tools (ibid). The challenge of digital humanities then is that ‘we live within a cybernetic universe without necessarily being conscious of it and we use these digital tools without necessarily reflecting on them’ (ibid).

In 2007 the notion of ‘digital methods’ came to the fore ‘as a counterpoint to virtual methods’, e.g. ‘traditional’ research methods such as online surveys or online ethnography, and introduced

‘the social scientific instrumentarium to digital research’ (Rogers 2009 cited by Venturini et al.

2018:4200).⁸⁸ Expressed otherwise, ‘digital methods’ can be defined as the repurposing of the inscriptions generated by digital media for the study of collective phenomena (Rogers 2014).

They are however not as straightforward as they seem. If methods are the ‘path’, or way, derived from the Greek ‘hodos’, with which we actually learn about human-computer interaction with search engines, then the results return to their Greek origin as data––‘a fact given as the basis for calculation in mathematical problems’ (Galloway 2014:108). Although digital methods can ‘capture’ the computational aspect of online platforms, often researchers

‘confuse the phenomena that they investigate from the features of the media in which they manifest’ (ibid).

[M]ethod—the learned and applied activities of measuring appearances—has become the world itself, though through refinement its ubiquity is often concealed. Something is not something until it appears on a radar, is caught in a net, is classified as a member, is staked or buried in a plot, is stored and recalled in a search (Beyes et al. 2019:504).

The ‘circular’ etymology of the word ‘search’ is represented by the cybernetic system of control and feedback loops, where collected data reflects how ‘human and non-human agents are connected in networks’ (Galloway 2014:112). According to Galloway, ‘digital methods are at best a benign part of the zeitgeist and at worst a promulgation of late twentieth-century

computationalism’ (ibid). By promoting computer centric research methods, it is assumed that research follows the ‘trend of normalization’ instead of being opposed to it in regard to

‘intellectual endeavours that value deviation over normalization, heterodoxy over orthodoxy’

(ibid).⁸⁹ Concomitantly these technological devices ‘fragment and reorganise social life around specific economic mandates’ with the very forms of critique (deviation and heterodoxy) that challenge hegemonic infrastructures, part and parcel of the ‘knowledge production’ machine (ibid:108). One example is that of artistic critique, as Simon Sheikh explains in the following:

The knowledge economy as it has been called, is comprised of its own critique, or in the words of Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, the ‘artistic critique’ of capital has been integrated into capital itself, and virtuosity, creativity, performativity and so on, are all the basis of this production, and knowledge itself a type of commodity’ (Sheikh 2009:3).

Drawing on the title of Boltanski’s and Chiapello seminal book, Galloway points out that the

‘new spirit of capitalism is found in brainwork, self-measurement and self-fashioning, perpetual critique and innovation, data creation and extraction’ (2014:110).

88 Digital Methods are computational ‘but written for the web and digital culture’ and they ‘work with natively digital data’, whereas Digital Humanities ‘often use standard computational methods’ and ‘work with digitized material using standard computational methods’ (Rogers 2014).

89 Galloway emphasises that it is ‘obligatory’ to identify the shifting forms of value––either recapitulative or contestational claims––and whether or not the humanities must mirror these societal trends or propose an

‘asymmetrical rethinking of those larger trends’ with an ‘autopositional posture’ (2014:112).

Digital research is rife with enquiries into the use of tools to capture and analyse large corpora of data and it is the ‘deskilling problem’ or the ‘minimalization of agency’ that lies in the ubiquity of digital tools, with what Galloway characterizes as becoming ‘literate in a digital device rather than a literary corpus’ (ibid). ‘Tooling’ means becoming the master of buttons and apps, thereby reinforcing the power constructs instead of contesting the processes and outcomes of how cultural objects are analysed and interpreted. Rather than valorising these ‘[h]ighly coded interfaces [that] reduce the spectrum of possible input to a few keywords of algorithmic parameters’, Galloway warns that there needs to be a searchlight directed onto the ‘dark side of a dissipated human agency’. His concern is that these ‘low-agency scholars are deskilled scholars, proletarianized thinkers denuded of their authority to make claims (at least claims that haven’t been culled directly from a measurement device)’ (ibid). In this sense a deskilled approach and the fetishisation of tools is juxtaposed against that of human agency in regard to research methodology.

With the increase of habituation to digital technologies there is a decrease in criticality, is there then simultaneously a rise in the power of ideology? (ibid) Galloway’s slogan, ‘critique is foe to ideology’ is a call for criticality and, specifically in regard to my research, the hegemony of Google, where this hidden infrastructure for information discovery is ‘emboldened’ and becomes naturalised (ibid). It then becomes a question of hegemony regarding ‘claims’ made about ‘knowledge or reality’ that are either ‘recapitulative’ or ‘critical’ of these hierarchies that exude domination and subordination (ibid). Rather than be maligned with Google Search ideology, I aim to articulate the components that erode not only the edifices of education with seductive tools, such as APIs and SCIs, but human agency itself.

Or, if I transcribe Galloway’s argument to search engines, ‘can we still use our tools now that the master [Google] has taken them up?’(ibid). The ‘modern regime of critical thought’ defined above, which has enabled ‘criticality’, along with my methods assemblage could provide a means to question the ‘naturalization of technology’ (ibid:127).⁹⁰ More importantly, Law’s

‘heterogeneous engineering’ concerns the (re)configuring of these arrangements or ‘methods assemblage’ in ‘technological discourse and practices’ (Suchman 2012:49), such as human and non-human actors. Returning to the impossibility of an ever-changing habitat, Lucy Suchman emphasises the boundaries between human-machine interfaces and whether the performative is hidden, along with the configuration of agency. It is perhaps then what Françoise Laurelle deems the ‘weak force’ ––a certain kind of agency in ‘generic humanity’ that not only provides access to commonalities of history and society but must rise to the challenge of researching with non-human actants (Galloway 2014).

Thus my approach to ‘digital methods’ is as someone without a background in computing or any definable online skillset and the claims that I make in this thesis are humble ones, based on my methods assemblage that reflects the still, ‘quiet methods, slow methods, or modest methods without imperialism’ (Law 2004:104-105). Although unassuming, this ‘methods assemblage’

attempts to ‘oppose the intransparency, unrepresentability and incommensurability of algorithmic ordering with a different “understanding” of digital media’ (Beyes and Pias 2019:102). In spite of my limited ‘tech savvy’, I hope that my methodological framework is a small contribution to knowledge directed towards a high agency scholarship instead of a low

90 ‘Method, then, unavoidably produces not only truths and non-truths, realities and non-realities, presences and absences, but also arrangements with political implications’ (Law 2004:143).

agency, deskilled scholarship. Either way, The Cybernetic Hypothesis (Tiqqun 2001; Galloway 2014) concerning human/machine interaction presents continual challenges to research and, in particular, to (Post)Digital Cultures. (Figure 31)

Figure 31: Methodological Framework (Post)Digital Cultures

Information is useless if it cannot be found and it is not a coincidence that a search engine like Google has turned into one of the most significant companies of the new century. These engines are never just practical tools to deal with information overload. Such cognitive technologies embed political philosophy in seemingly neutral code (Becker and Stalder 2009).