Hi all,
I didn’t get my blogger permissions worked out until just now, so here’s a belated meditation on how Vannevar Bush’s 1945 essay “As We May Think” often glazed my eyes. I struggled holding my attention to the technical, often gleeful, descriptions of the machines that Bush speculated might emerge from WWII’s military industrial complex. Some reflection on this rhythm of my reading, my slippage into inattention over certain passages, has helped me clarify my historical relation to the essay and raise some questions around how we feel about obsolete (speculative) media today.
I began to reflect on this when I caught myself skimming over Bush’s elaboration of the chain of operations that a simple punchcard computer might speed up at a department store’s point of sale. Here, paper cards are hole punched, slid into place, photographed, and sorted into a filing system that registers customers’ transactions. As Bush speculates loosely on this system, his writing pivots from punched cards to steel sheets bristling with magnetic dots. He flickers between materials and movements with a playfulness that made me think of someone trying to perform an ekphrasis of a Rube Goldberg machine.
Goldberg’s absurd machines try to express, as he himself puts it, “man’s capacity for exerting maximum effort to accomplish minimal results.” Certainly Bush’s descriptions mean to exemplify the opposite of Goldberg’s gimmicky illustrations, but I invoke Goldberg because while Bush is excited about the efficiency of data storage/retrieval that requires minimal effort and maximum results, I found myself reading his descriptions with the kind of disinterested and mildly uneasy eyes I would have scanning one of Goldberg’s pictures. Bush provoked my unease most explicitly when he gestured toward some of the corollaries of his machines’ efficiency, particularly the transformation of women into machines, a trick exemplified by his misogynistic fantasy of a Vocoder replacing a stenotypist girl “with a disquieting gaze.” Basically, I found Bush’s effort to elaborate the wonder of early digital technologies not only of minimal rhetorical or poetic result, but also tinged with violence—that is, gimmicky.
In her 2017 essay “Theory of the Gimmick” Sianne Ngai argues that to call something a gimmick is to try to distance oneself from it and make clear to ourselves and others that we are not fooled or influenced by “the capitalist device’s claims and attractions” (471). Key here is Ngai's claim that the gimmick is an aesthetic category particular to industrial capitalist societies in which, according to Marx’s formula for capital, any labor-saving technologies necessarily intensify rather than reduce work. I draw Ngai into my reflections because her attention to automation anxiety and the genres of self-distancing and recoil it produces are useful for thinking through the structures of feeling tapped into by historical accounts of obsolete and antiquated media like those in Bush’s essay.
So, why my inattention to passages of "As We May Think?" I think it has to do with the desires and assumptions I bring to reading digital media theory, which I understand in two movements whose relation I’m trying to parse out. The first movement is that the complex material processes subtending the digitally mediated ordinariness of our lives today are overwhelmingly unavailable to our perception. They’re blackboxed in circuitry and distributed across global networks and supply chains. Accordingly, much of the digital media theory I’ve read has invested its energies in theorizing the ghostly pictorial/pixelated and ideological effects that are produced by but barely theoretically assimilable to these complex material processes. So I think Bush’s historically necessitated attention to the material intricacies of early digital media—he’s starting from the ground up, literally—lost my attention because, in its sheer contrast to the gulf between the material and the phenomenal that defines our contemporary media situation, I found it, well, beside the point. (Certainly, if my background in digital media theory were more STS oriented and less couched in literary studies, I would have found Bush more engaging.) The second movement of my thinking is that I recoiled from Bush’s essay through the aesthetic structure of the gimmick because his detailed description of speculative machines had, from my historical vantage, a quality of implicit illocution. What I mean by this ( I want to elaborate this further) is that not only did Bush’s text describe these machines to me, it also seemed to perform for me the violent supersession of various past forms of work, regimes of labor, wrought by technological development. So I flinched when Bush quips that a voice controlled document retrieval machine “would certainly beat the usual file clerk.”
There’s something gimmicky about ekphrases of obsolete, forgotten, or abandoned technologies—particularly obsolete speculative technologies—that I want to explore more. Steampunk may have something generic to say about this. I think too of Jacolby Satterwhite’s video and performance work. Here, Satterwhite takes an archive of his mother’s speculative technologies as the infrastructure for queer techno-dystopian worlds rendered in stunning, Boschian green screen decadence. Also (more of a stretch)—I wonder how remediation or “layer” theories of new media—the rather limiting but still provocative historical theory that new media subsume and incorporate old media into an onion-like scheme—might be actualized formally in digital interface design to produce this kind of gimmicky effect? How does Clippy, the Microsoft Office Assistant paperclip make you feel about the labor regime, the gender politics, of pre-digital office culture?
C
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