Today in class, while discussing Tara McPherson’s “Why Are the Digital Humanities So White?,” we encountered a problem of causality. McPherson's claim that the logics of "modularity" we find in postwar racial politics and software design are related—and that this relation is important— traverses so much disciplinary/epistemological space that the problem basically poses itself: if this is a relation, why? While Patrick brought up this problem of causality briefly and our discussion circled it in interesting ways, we didn’t have time to take it on directly. I want to try to do something like this now—first, by putting this problem as a question: Can we causally relate the histories of race and computation so provocatively juxtaposed in McPherson's essay?
McPherson takes a strategically oblique position on this in a moment when she recapitulates her argument:
I have here suggested that our technological formations are deeply bound up with our racial formations and that each undergo profound changes at midcentury. I am not so much arguing that one mode is causally related to the other but, rather, that they both represent a move toward modular knowledges, knowledges increasingly prevalent in the second half of the twentieth century.
What is McPherson's aim here in steering her argument away from a direct engagement with causality? On the one hand, I think that she is more interested in relating ostensibly disparate histories/objects to produce interdisciplinary questions in an accessible way than in pursuing a logical or historical account of causality. This explanation seems consonant with her essay’s publication in the anthology Debates in the Digital Humanities. Indeed, I think she bracket scausality in order to avoid limiting the diversity of projects that she intends her essay to provoke at the intersection of digital humanities and cultural studies. That said, the problem of causality remains, looming behind the homology McPherson posits between U.S. postwar software design and racial in a common "lenticular" or "modular" logic: "a mode of seeing the world as discrete modules or nodes, a mode that suppresses relation and context… manages and controls complexity.”
McPherson notes that the "modular" or "lenticular" logics shared by software design and neoliberal multiculturalism have a strong resonance with post-Fordist relations of production. Further gesturing toward the economic, McPherson concludes her description of this late-twentieth-century racial-technological-economic homology by acknowledging that early-twentieth-century Fordist relations of production might also be assimilable to her logic of the "modular" or "lenticular." While this acknowledgement reveals an obstacle to her historical argument McPherson manages to dodge by suggesting that the "modularity" of the 1920s is different than the "modularity" of the 1960s onwards. This is a valid and important point that—despite pointing to the essay’s tropological ambiguity—McPherson takes as an opportunity to stage a cluster of questions about what exactly "modularity" means and, in a conclusion exemplary of her open-ended position on causality, to ask: “Why does modularity emerge in our systems with such a vengeance across the 1960s?” That this rhetorical dodge and causal question emerge out of a detour through the economic is what compels me to suggest that an ambivalently economic model of causality may illuminate McPherson's argument.
An ambivalently economic causality would account for the homologies McPherson posits between seemingly disparate cultural/political/institutional realms of neoliberal racial politics and software design while shoring up her glancing references to sources of economic determination like post-Fordism. I want to suggest that the model of "structural causality" Fredric Jameson elaborates in his 1981 book The Political Unconscious—a model he developes in dialogue with Louis Althusser—can do this kind of work.
For Jameson, “structural causality” is Althusser’s rebuttal to the classical (for Jameson, “vulgar”) Marxist model of base/superstructure “expressive causality.” This base/superstructure model assumes a mode of production, an economic base—comprised of relations of production and forces of production—that determines a superstructure comprised of levels of culture, ideology, the legal system, and the political institutions of the state. Within this model all of the superstructural levels, at all levels of abstraction, are “somehow ‘the same’ and so many expressions and modulations of one another” as they each and altogether express the logic of the economic base (Jameson 36-37). Jameson diagrams the base-superstructure model of “expressive causality” like this:
Against this model and its “expressive causality" of a singular economic-infrastructural logic unfolding across levels of socio-cultural superstructural abstraction, Jameson contends that Althusser theorizes a “structural causality” in which all of the levels of the base and the superstructure fuse into structure. In this model, the mode of production is still the ultimately determining instance. However, “structural causality” does not identify the mode of production exclusively with the economic level of relations and forces of production. Instead, “structural causality” identifies the mode of production with the structure as a whole, within which the economic is a privileged but not ultimately determining level within the structure. Althusser’s “structuralist Marxist” model therefore looks like this, according to Jameson:
Jameson helpfully sums up the force of this model:
Althusser's Marxism is a... structuralism for which only one structure exists: namely the mode of production itself, or the synchronic system of social relations as a whole. This is the sense in which this ‘structure’ is an absent cause, since it is nowhere empirically present as an element, it is not a part of the whole or one of the levels but rather the entire system of relationships among those levels. (36)
Interpreted according to this model of causality (with the proviso that I've presented it in an abbreviated form severed from important specifications of Jameson's argument), McPherson's essay seems to locate the "lenticular" logic of "modularity" within the "absent cause" of a particular mode of production—the structure of an historically bounded social totality. This mode of production is emergent in the postwar U.S. and perhaps dominant by the 80s or 90s—the historical conjuncture that witnesses a stunning coincidence of fragmentary and deranging cultural, economic, and institutional shifts in which multiculturalism, financialization, and privatization (e)merge to constellate the paradigms of the neoliberal and the postmodern in which we arguably still live.
The force of McPherson's argument lies in the way it affords us a fleeting and refracted glimpse of the "absent cause" of postwar U.S social transformations in a theoretical place—a site of mediation between levels in the mode of production—that has not been adequately articulated. McPherson is able to create this theoretical place between racial politics, software design, and economic relations/forces of production through a rhetorical poetics of the "modular" and the "lenticular." These terms let her mediate between political, ideological, and economic levels that would otherwise remain incomprehensible together. As McPherson acknowledges throughout her essay, further specification of these rhetorical-poetic terms is crucial if we want to develop this theoretical space and develop a fuller map of the causality at work within it.