“We neither think nor reason. Rather, we work on fragile materials — texts, inscriptions, traces, or paints — with other people.”
Bruno Latour
Programmers and software engineers often lack a wider breadth and scope of how they approach and understand a problem due to their lack of more multi-disciplinary thinking out of the box. And inspiration, insight and ideas come from outside, so it is important to sometimes take the time learn or read something new to acquire a different angle or perspective - since, by definition, the more languages you can acquire and articulate the same thing in, the more ways in which you can see one thing, the better you understand it in all the more of its dimensions.
So, I recently came across Warren Sack’s The Software Arts which pleasantly surprised me in how it proposes that computation and so-called software engineering ought be thought of and rather conceived more as an art form or a craft, rather than purely engineering as such — and therefrom how we think of what might be technically possible and useful in our approach to these abstract machines which form a kind of technological extension to the faculties of our central nervous system, among other things, being an indispensable component of our overall complex socio-technical system of highly interrelated and multi-dimensional entaglements.
Sack reveals how programming languages are the offspring of efforts to describe the mechanical workings of arts, its concepts and things, into the language of the liberal arts — tracing its origins to eighteenth-century French encyclopedists' step-by-step descriptions of how things were made in the workshops of artists and artisans. Sack offers a reading of computational texts and artifacts — code, algorithms, technical papers and specifications, etc. — that emphasizes a continuity between prose and programs. He translates concepts and categories from the liberal and mechanical arts — including logic, rhetoric, grammar, learning, algorithm, language, and simulation — into terms of computer science and then considers their further translation into popular culture, where they circulate as forms of digital life. He invites artists and humanists to see how their ideas are at the root of software and invites computer scientists to envision themselves as artists and humanists.
Computing is seen more as technology of language defined by the pursuit of methods that provide us the means to invent and interrogate statements that can be or already are widely accepted (such as statements of relation, connection, equivalence, identity, etc.) and software is understood as a new lingua franca as when a computer program. A piece of software, can be a theory, it could be said that we have entered the computational episteme — and in the computational episteme software is taken for theoretical insight and meaning is pushed to the margins.
Historian and philosopher of science Michel Serres, in his book Hermès III: La Traduction, developed an approach to studying science and technology by means of translation. Serres’s method was then extended under the rubric of a “sociology of translation,” alternatively, and more commonly, called “actor-network theory” or just ANT.
Philosopher and science studies scholar Bruno Latour regrets the more recent and popular name “actor-network theory”:
"At the time [the late 1970s and early 1980s], the word network, like Deleuze’s and Guattari’s term rhizome, clearly meant a series of transformations —translations, transductions —which could not be captured by any of the traditional terms of social theory. With the new popularization of the word network, it now means transport without deformation, an instantaneous, unmediated access to e very piece of information. That is exactly the opposite of what we meant. What I would like to call “double click information” has killed the last bit of the critical cutting edge of the notion of network. I don’t think we should use it anymore at least not to mean the type of transformations and translations that we want now to explore."
The main methodological contribution of Sack’s work in The Software Arts is this amendment and extension of ANT.
Developers and practitioners of actor-network theory — the sociology of translation — have shown quite definitively why t hese other approaches are inadequate to the task of explaining how ideas become a part of everyday life and common sense. Instead of this pack of metaphors, actor-network theory hypothesizes that the bridge from ideology to everyday life is a set of cognitively, culturally, and materially specific practices of translation that are employed rhetorically and technologically to convince people of equivalences, differences, and identities.
This lack of attention to the texts of software is surprising because actor-network theory is said to combine the concerns of ethnography and ethnomethodology with insights from semiotics, the humanistic study of meaning and meaning making, a set of methods developed especially for textual analysis. I will employ an understanding of translation that is deeply indebted to actor-network theory, but to supplement ANT for the purposes of studying the texts of software, I will need to draw from the even deeper well of translation as it has been practiced in the humanities.
Philosopher and historian of science Michel Serres wrote, “We only understand something according to the transformations that can be performed on it. There are at least four such transformations: deduction in the area of logic and mathematics; induction in fields of empirical experimentation; production in domains of practice; translation [traduction] in the space of texts. It is not unexpected that they all incorporate the same root word. There is no philosophy except for that of “duction” — with a variety of prefixes. A lifetime might be spent trying to clarify this state of affairs.” This quotation is from the beginning of Serres’s book on translation, __Hermès III: La Traduction__, a text that inspired and deeply influenced the developers of ANT. The quotation is difficult to translate into English because the French word for “translation” is “traduction” and Serres’s point in this passage is that all of t hese terms for transformation — deduction, induction, production, and translation (traduction) — incorporate the Latin root “dūcĕre,” a word that means “to lead.”
Each of the prefixes prepended to “dūcĕre” indicate a direction. “De-,” for instance, means “down” or “down from.” So, “deduce” connotes “to lead down.” “In-” means “into” or “in.” Thus, in Latin, “induce” means “to lead into,” and “introduction” is a “leading-into.” “Produce” is “to lead out,” “to lead forth,” “to bring forward.” “Re-” is the prefix for “back” or “again,” so to “reduce” is “to lead back (again).”
“Translate” in English can be unpacked in the same way. Note that “translāt-” is the Latin participial stem of “transferre,” which can be broken into the prefix “trans-,” meaning “across,” and “ferre,” meaning “to carry” or “to bring” (instead of, as is the case in French, “to lead”). The English word “ferry” is a contemporary form of “ferre.” All of t hese terms — deduction, induction, production, reduction, translation — imply movement or travel. Each indicates, however, that the reader or listener will be led or carried in a particular direction: down, into, out, or across.
What Serres does in his book, and what the actor-network theorists (like Bruno Latour and others) do in following him, is to make “translation” the more general term. In this manner, we can understand all of these words as denoting different kinds of translation. Therefore, they differ according to which direction a translation is intended to take us, the reading subjects, or the objects of its operation—down, into, or out.
Once alerted by Serres to four kinds of translation, we quickly find others, since “down,” “into,” and “out” do not exhaust the list of possible prepositions. “Conduction” is a kind of translation that brings two t hings together. “Abduction” is a translation that leads us away. If “induction” leads something into something else, “introduction” brings the reader in. “Seduce” compounds the prefix “se-,” meaning “without” or “away,” with “dūcĕre” meaning, then, that a phrase like “to seduce someone away from someone else” is redundant, since the roots of the word imply that seduction is an act of leading away. Then, if we compound prefixes—like “re-” and “pro-”—the forms of translation multiply. Thus, “reproduce” means “to bring forth again.” “Irreduction” means “to not bring back (again).”
Think of Bitcoin for a moment, but as a social experiment and a performance art/act of sorts, a practical mockery which eventually wakes one up in the process of learning and maybe even subscribing to some of the ever changing ludicrous narratives. Art these days should have such power of influence and affect to be considered as such (that is, useful in any way to have any value as art in what the function of art should be).
Or let’s also remember the earlier computer games before the whole thing grew into an industry with bigger revenues than Hollywood and changing into something else entirely. Mid 1980’s to late 1990’s, computer games development was more of an art and games themselves were mostly original in their concept and idea. From Lucas Arts’ Monkey Island series, Loom and Day of the Tenticle to Syndicate and Populous, etc.
