"digital media ask a question to which the political interpretation is the only coherent answer"
This book constitutes the final volume of Allegories of Control, a trio of publications on networks, games, and interfaces that examines the politics and aesthetics of information technology.
What this means is that the book is the product of a specific sliver of history when the conditions of the production and distribution of knowledge were rather different than they are today. What was once a subversive medium is now a spectacle playground like any other. The first phase of web culture, one must admit, carried a revolutionary impulse; call it the Saint-Just to today's imperial era.
On the one hand, new virulent ways of looking at the world were forming with unprecedented ferocity-sometimes conveniently labeled the "California ideology" -coalescing around the neoliberal impulse to open source everything (information wants to be free, desire wants to be free, capital wants to be free) and the promise to liberate mankind in ways only dreamed of by our forebears in the new social movements of the 196os. On the other hand, amid this process of leveling, a new Republic of Letters began to form using email and bulletin-board systems that seemed to offer a real intellectual and social community devoted to the exploration and critique of new media. The Language of New Media (Manovich) is a product of this community.
For Manovich the flicker of film was always already a digital flicker.
Manovich's argument in the book about the waning of temporal montage and the rise of spatial montage, or what is often simply called "windowing."
By the early 1930s, Stalin had made socialist realism the only possible style in the Soviet Union. During this period the Russian formalists were criticized for not paying enough attention to social and historical issues, in essence for being apolitical. The power of the Stalinist machine eventually forced many of these formalists to the margins, or worse, into exile or death.
His apparent abdication of the political (and his taking up the question of poetics), then, must not be measured against an Americo-European leftist yardstick, but as a kind of glasnost of the digital. Manovich is saying, in essence: the technological infrastructure may or may not have dubious politics, but let us put the old hobbyhorse of the critique of state-driven ideology behind us and dive into the semiotics of software so that we may first understand how it works.
In an age when Vertov's cinematic principles are embodied in code and bundled as mere filte r effects for desktop movie-making software, as they are today, the revolutionary power of radical aesthetics seems rather deflated. When Jean-Luc Godard becomes a plug-in, we must look beyond the Nouvelle Vague.
"To summarize," he writes in the middle of the book, "the visual culture of a computer age is cinematographic in its appearance, digital on the level of its material, and computational (i.e., software driven) in its logic."