Human beings, humanists and tinkerers in digital spaces

Marcello Vitali-Rosati

Macerata - 2022-03-09

Being human today

Digital humanities

Questioning the relationship between human and machine.
Questioning the relationship between matter and meaning
Questioning the relationship between meaning and syntax

A particular interpretation of "digital humanities

Informatica umanistica

The notion of Digital Humanities indeed poses in a renewed way the question of the definition of the human and its relationship with technology and machines. The term digital humanities seems at first sight an oxymoron in that it puts together the two poles of the opposition between human and machine. The difficulty of the French translation highlights even more this tension implicit in the locution: des humanités numériques (whereas a more accurate translation should rather refer to “sciences humaines numériques”). The topos of the non-quantifiable human who has feelings and a life that cannot be reduced to a calculation is swept away by this expression that puts the two dimensions back together.

The explosion of the digital fact, more in general, pushes authors like Milad Doueihi to affirm that more than digital humanities we should speak of a true “digital humanism” (Doueihi 2011), because the digital cannot be considered as a simple set of tools, but rather it is a culture in its own right that changes our relationship to the world and finally our way of being human. In a similar direction goes a whole range of reflection on the status of the human in relation to technological developments that we often find grouped under the label of “post-humanism”, a complex and ambiguous label, because it assimilates profoundly different and even often contradictory approaches.

Questioning the relationship between man and machine means at the same time raising several other questions. First of all, the opposition between matter and sense. Indeed: if we say that on the one hand there is the human being and on the other the machine, we presuppose a whole series of other oppositions: the sense on the side of the human beings and the matter on the side of the machines. If we think of Cartesio’s representation of the human being, we typically find this opposition: the human being would only be a machine if it were not for his res cogitans.

And a very Cartesian opposition is found more recently in the writings of an author like Searle, who opposes meaning and syntax in a very strong and clear way.

On the one hand, human beings who understand, on the other hand, machines that calculate, that limit themselves to manipulating signs without understanding their meaning. - it is the e Gedankexperiment of the Chinese room.

Posthuman studies

My posthumanist account calls into question the givenness of the differential categories of human and nonhuman, examining the practices through which these differential boundaries are stabilized and destabilized. Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Second Printing edition. Durham: Duke University Press Books.

We will go here in the direction of Karen Barad who understands posthumanism as a category that allows to think beyond the opposition between human and nonhuman

My posthumanist account calls into question the givenness of the differential categories of human and nonhuman, examining the practices through which these differential boundaries are stabilized and destabilized. (Barad 2007, 66)

The concept of posthumanism is thus not an invitation to go beyond the human to go towards an augmented humanity - which would be the wish of certain interpretations that could be qualified as transhumanist - but to question the very category of human and its relation with the non-human.

In the same sense we can read the work of Cary Wolfe who affirms clearly, supporting the theses of Katherine Hayles (1999) that

Posthumanism in my sense is not posthuman at all - in the sense of being “after” our embodiment has been transcended - but is only posthumanist, in the sense that it opposes the fantasies of disembodiment and autonomy, inherited from humanism itself. (Wolfe 2010, XV)

To go in this direction, I will focus on one manifestation of these oppositions: that between matter and sense. And I will follow Karen Barad in her demonstration.

Matter and meaning

Plotinus and Porphiry

I myself, Porphyry of Tyre, was one of Plotinus’ very closest friends, and it was to me he entrusted the task of revising his writings. Such revision was necessary: Plotinus could not bear to go back on his work even for one re-reading; and indeed the condition of his sight would scarcely allow it: his handwriting was slovenly; he misjoined his words; he cared nothing about spelling; his one concern was for the idea: in these habits, to our general surprise, he remained unchanged to the very end. He used to work out his design mentally from first to last: when he came to set down his ideas, he wrote out at one jet all he had stored in mind as though he were copying from a book. Interrupted, perhaps, by someone entering on business, he never lost hold of his plan; he was able to meet all the demands of the conversation and still keep his own train of thought clearly before him; when he was fee again, he never looked over what he had previously written–his sight, it has been mentioned, did not allow of such re-reading–but he linked on what was to follow as if no distraction had occurred.

A Porphyrian anecdote clearly manifests this ideology: in the Life of Plotinus, Porphyry tells how Plotinus wrote his Enneads while he was doing something else: he was talking, he was busy with other matters and at the same time he was writing down the complex thought that he had already developed. The act of inscribing his thought on a medium was considered trivial, it had no importance in itself and therefore no particular dignity. It is manual work, which could eventually be delegated to an individual without any competence, who just mechanically transcribe what has already been developed. To quote other conversations that took place around Marcello’s blog post, several colleagues - always men - stressed that the work of formatting and tagging the contents should be left to “a secretary” (feminine in French). The superior man thinks and creates the content. The woman, mechanically, inscribes this content in a “delivery channel”, thus carrying out a trivial, neutral and uninteresting work.

Women and computers

Deconstructing Plato?

Jacques Derrida, « La pharmacie de Platon », Tel Quel, nᵒ 32,33 (1968).

New materialisms and Karen Barad

Christopher N. Gamble, Joshua S. Hanan, et Thomas Nail, « What Is New Materialism? », Angelaki 24, nᵒ 6 (2 novembre 2019): 111‑34
Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2007).

Double slit

Thomas Young, 1801: is the light a wave or a set of particles?

The experiment is used to determine whether the phenomenon being analyzed is a wave or a particle and was first performed by Thomas Young in 1801. Young used it to demonstrate that light behaves like a wave. The experiment consists in sending a beam of light to a support with two slits and then watch its behavior. In classical physics we consider that a phenomenon is either made up of a series of particles or it is a wave. Now, if we throw field hockey pucks against this support, for example, and then look behind where the pucks arrived, we expect to find two concentrations of pucks, one behind each slit. In effect, some of the pucks will be blocked by the bracket, some will go through one of the slots, and some will go through the other slot. The washers thus behave like particles. If they are waves that pass through the two slits, they will produce interference. If we position a screen behind the support and look at the places with a greater density, we will see not, as in the case of the washers, two lines, but a series of lines of different thickness. This is called an interference pattern.

However, if we carry out the experiment by throwing electrons against the two slits, the result is surprising: the electrons - which would seem to be similar to small balls - do not behave like particles, but like waves and they produce an interference pattern. It seems that electrons “interfere” with each other.

To try to understand the phenomenon we can find a trick: we can throw the electrons one by one, thus preventing them from interacting with each other. But, again, the results are surprising: each electron arrives in fact at a precise point of the screen, but if we look at the pattern produced at the end, after having launched separately all the electrons, we find an interference pattern. Since the electrons are thrown one by one they cannot interfere with each other: it seems that they interfere with themselves. It seems that each electron passes through both slits and interferes with itself.

To verify this strange idea, we can modify the device in such a way that we are able to observe through which slit an electron passes. We send one electron at a time and for each electron we note through which slit it passes. The experiment is identical to the previous one except for one detail: our device has been modified to allow us to know through which slit the electron passes. And still a surprising result awaits us: the interference pattern disappears!

Bohr argued that if we were to perform a two-slit experiment with a which-path device (which can be used to determine which slit each electron goes through on its way to the detecting screen), we would find that the interference pattern is destroyed. That is, if a measurement is made that identifies the electron as a particle, as is the case when we use a which-path detector, then the result will be a particle pattern, not the wave pattern that results when the original unmodified two-slit apparatus is used. Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe halfway, p. 103

Concepts are specific physical arrangements

Bohr’s argument for the indeterminable nature of measurement interactions is based on his insight that concepts are defined by the circumstances required for their measurement. That is, theoretical concepts are not ideational in character; they are specific physical arrangements. Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe halfway, p. 109

Matter matters

Editorialization

A particular context

French notion of édition
Bridging an old tradition with new practices
Publishing in digital environments
Many theories focusing on the “support” (Jeanneret, Souchier, Bachimont, Zacklad)

This detour through Bohr, Barad and quantum physics should have shown us how urgent it is to go beyond the oppositions we mentioned at the beginning.

How to do it concretely in the sphere of digital reflection? The theoretical track that I propose is that of the theory of editorialization.

In this presentation I would like to propose to you a short introduction to the theory of editorialization, a concept that has an important theoretical role in the francophone reflection on digital culture. This theory emerged as a way of understanding publishing in digital environments and became more and more a general and philosophical theory of the digital turn and culture.

The notion of editorialization has emerged in a particular francophone context. To understand this concept we should start from the french idea of “édition” : l’édition is at the same time publishing and editing. It means all the field of publication in a very broad sense: everything which is linked to the production and dissemination of content.

Talking about editorialization and using this radical “edit” means to try to bridge the old tradition of “édition” with the new emerging practices of producing and disseminating contents online.

So the first need to which the concept of editorialization tried to answer is to understand what “édition” or publishing was becoming after the explosion of digital environments - and especially the web.

Between the end of the nineties and the first years of the two thousands many theories emerged in France trying to address the impact of a specific material form of inscription - or media - and the meaning of a content. We could cite the theory of enonciation editoriale aiming that the meaning of a content is in part produced by the very material form the content takes - a book, a journal, but also which kind of book, with which special format and so on. This material aspect seemed more and more important probably because of the fact that new delivery channels were emerging. The theory of documentarisation and redocumentarisation tried to figure out how a content conceived for the printed medium changed its own meaning when it was adapted to a digital environment.

First narrow definition

Editorialization may be defined as a set of technical devices (networks, servers, platforms, CMS, algorithms of search engines), structures (hypertext, multimedia, metadata), practices (annotation, comments, recommendations via social networks) that can produce and organize content on the web

Vitali-Rosati, Marcello. « Les revues littéraires en ligne : entre éditorialisation et réseaux d’intelligences ». Études françaises 50, nᵒ 3 (2014): 87.

Characteristic 1: open

multiplicity of actors
multiplicity of intentions

Content and objects are merged

There is no more difference between content and things

a function organising relationships between objects on the web

Vitali-Rosati, Marcello. « Auteur ou acteur du web ? » Implications philosophiques, 10 juillet 2012. https://papyrus.bib.umontreal.ca/xmlui/handle/1866/12980.

Characteristic 2. Ontology

architecture of Being
merging knowledge and Being

2016 definition

Editorialization is the set of dynamics that produce and structure digital space. These dynamics can be understood as the interactions of individual and collective actions within a particular digital environment.

Vitali-Rosati, Marcello. Qu’est-ce que l’éditorialisation?, Sens public 2016

Who is the subject of editorialization?

“individual actions”?
“digital environment”?

A new definition

Editorialization is the set of dynamics that constitute digital space and that allow the emergence of meaning. These dynamics are the result of different forces and actions that subsequently determine the appearance and the identification of particular objects (people, communities, algorithms, platforms …) Marcello Vitali-Rosati, _Toward a prehuman thinking: Digital humanities, editorialization and metaontology, Amodern, forthcoming

Today, in view of the above considerations, I would tend to revisit the second part of this definition. Indeed, while I attempted to avoid the opposition of human-machine, I chose only to refer to an interaction of actions with an environment. We could interpret this definition by saying that there are finally human beings who interact with machines. This is not what the theory of editorialization intends to express. There are no individuals, communities and digital environments that interact and give rise to the digital space. Rather, there is a space that is the dynamic result of a set of interactions between different dynamic forces. From these interactions emerge individuals, communities and digital environments. We may therefore revise the definition as follows:

Editorialization is the set of dynamics that constitute digital space and that allow the emergence of meaning. These dynamics are the result of different forces and actions that subsequently determine the appearance and the identification of particular objects (people, communities, algorithms, platforms …)

Editorialization can thus be interpreted as the set of material conditions of mediation that determine the emergence of a world. Editorialization is an access to the world that comes with the world itself.

An example may clarify the definition. An individual X is the result of a series of dynamics that define this individual and make him appear. X is what emerges from an ever-changing process that involves different forces and actions: algorithms, clicks, data structures… All these forces determine, for instance, that the query “X” on Google Search gives some particular results, that the profiles of X on different platforms are more or less visible, displayed one way or another and that, finally, X is that particular person. These dynamics are inscribed, they are material mediations: if I can think about X, this means that digital environments can think about X in the same way. X exists via this thinking. Access to X and his being are the same thing. The only exception here is that this access is not human, it is present, inscribed, recorded, concrete, material, even without us.

Editorialization: what for?

Questioning the space

Who makes the space we inhabit?
Immaterial? Neutral?
The fonctional imperative

How can we produce public spaces?

Dysfunctional tools
Multiple environments
Tinkerers!
Publishing sphere
Journals as public spaces

A humanist is a tinkerer

Matter matters
Multiplicity of wordviews
Dysfonctionality

Cultivate our garden

“All that is very well,” answered Candide, “but let us cultivate our garden.” Voltaire, Candide