Uncomputable: Play and Politics in the Long Digital Age

“Does not compute” was a line commonly voiced by the computers and robots that populated 1980s and 1990s cinema. It was meant to signal the inability to identify or process human input. Soon, it became a commonplace cry of dissonance with predictable effects: malfunctioning, inaction, or self-annihilation. These were the moments when the numerical logic of the digital failed to render legible the messiness of human communication, reminding viewers of the line separating human from machine. As computers accelerated their passage into the mundanity of everyday life and extended their input capacities, though, the uncomputable slowly began to vanish from cinema screens. It became less the limit, and more the omnipotence, of computation that entered the cultural imagination of robots.

Alexander R. Galloway’s Uncomputable is, first and foremost, a historical return to digital dissonance. The book uncovers a hidden history of the “uncomputable,” presenting us with those moments when rational paradoxes, practical limits, and analog life pose irresolvable problems to computation. Foregrounding the limits of computation often concealed by both theorists and historians of technology, the central aim of the book is “to show how computation emerges or fails to emerge, how the digital thrives but also atrophies, how networks interconnect while also fraying and falling apart” (p. 1). These moments, Galloway convincingly argues, are not hiccups in the otherwise smooth space of the digital. By contrast, they “constitute the real history of machines” (p. 1). Galloway presents thinkers of the digital, including geographers, with a unique provocation: What might it mean to take seriously the premise that computation is defined more by its negative limits than by its positive capacities?

Driving Galloway’s investigation into the uncomputable is a series of fragments from the prehistory of the digital. The historical breadth of the book is remarkable. The book starts in the 1860s with Francois Willème’s use of a circle of twenty-four cameras arranged around a subject to facilitate the production of sculptures with “hitherto unknown fidelity” (p. 17), and moves, in a loosely chronological progression, toward the 1970s when the situationist theorist Guy Debord produced his own board game. Along the way, we pass through rich descriptions of both known (e.g., Lovelace’s analytical engine, the cybernetic science of Wiener and von Neumann) and lesser known (e.g., inventions of chronophotography, early precedents of motion capture, algebraic weaving methods, the creation of bionumeric organisms) episodes in the deep history of the digital. With much empirical depth, Galloway demonstrates how these wide-ranging fragments, which might initially appear ill-assorted, are in fact bound together by a shared commitment to resolving the uncomputable. We encounter, among other endeavors, attempts at sculpting the unsculptable, managing the “wild” cells in a system, weaving the patternless, grasping the infinite complexity of the world, and controlling the uncontrollable.

Although the book is not written for a geographical audience per se, Galloway shows geographers of the digital that what they have theoretically and empirically studied as contemporary “glitches” in fact have an extensive history. This is not a case of simply filling the “gaps” of history, but of recognizing the glitch as being at the heart of computation. The digital, in Galloway’s reading, has at its foundation its own antithesis, one that it has both relied on for its ability to expand and stabilize, and cannot but be threatened by. The most significant argument of the book is the insistence on this paradox of the glitch as neither accidental nor contemporary. To think the digital requires thinking how it has long dealt, and continues to deal, with its own coming apart.

Reading through this history of uncomputation as a geographer, I was also struck by how easily Galloway writes that “[t]here is nothing particularly modern about the digital” (p. 115). Throughout the book, one encounters digital contemporaneity as emergent from a historical set of material-discursive practices, habits of government, and computational logics. In foregrounding the latest digital inventions—everyday and rare, mundane and spectacular—and their spatial, social, and political implications, do geographers run the risk of forgetting that the digital is composed of accumulations of past inventions, laws, and practices, and thereby, of dehistoricizing the digital?

We might overlook, for instance, how contemporary Internet infrastructures cannot be separated from what Galloway, following Tiqqun, calls “the cybernetic hypothesis” (p. 116): the insistence on managing and controlling a system (social, technical, political) by way of intensifying communications among nodes that has its roots in, and was funded by, 1950s U.S. military research centers. The digital, from the perspective of cybernetics, has always been a reinvention of power away from centralized coercion toward a logic of distributed, networked, and asymmetrical measures of control. Much could be gained by tying contemporary technologies to the historical triangulation of state, capital, and control. Widening the historical scope of geographers’ digital scholarship might further enable us to spurn the implicit divide between, on the one hand, “neutral” technologies such as the radio, loom, or mills, and, on the other hand, the exploitative, dispossessive, and discriminatory technologies characteristic of our digital era: “smart,” “Internet-enabled,” “automated,” and “robotic.” Galloway reminds us that technologies preceding the logic of strictly computational binarization haunt, often violently, our digital present.

For all the force of Uncomputable’s arguments, the book does have a tendency to lose track of its central provocation. At times, it turns into a conventional rewriting of historical events not too dissimilar from those of feminist historians of technology. For instance, Galloway seems devoted to uncovering and foregrounding those figures, such as the everyday operators of looms, commonly written out of the history of technology. Likewise, he argues for nineteenth-century looms as digital—enacting a binary logic of warp and weft threads—and thus positions them as forerunners of contemporary computers. Both explicitly and implicitly, Galloway offers nonsystematic “alternative histories” of photography, computer graphics, digital cameras, and the binarism of computation. These are, themselves, interesting historical interventions. Besides, Galloway makes it explicit from the start that his is a historical method not of synthesis or mastery, but instead a dwelling in and refusal to resolve the unpredictability of the archive (p. 9). Uncomputable is perhaps best read then as a “genealogy” (Foucault 1977), or more precisely an “anthology of existences,” (Foucault 1979, p. 76) that stays with the multiplicity and discontinuity of historical lineages. Like the looms Galloway admires, the book has a tendency to unravel and unloosen.

At certain times, this helps generate useful spaces for thinking. At others, however, there is a certain tendency to indulge in empirical obscurity, as when Galloway walks through the entire proceedings of a game played by Debord and his partner, without undertaking the difficult but necessary work of returning to and extending the book’s central premise. What the book overdelivers in empirical description it tends to lack in conceptual depth. For this reason, readers expecting the careful theoretical labor characteristic of Galloway’s other monographs, including Protocol, Laruelle: Against the Digital, and The Interface Effect, might therefore be left feeling somewhat understimulated.

Further separating Uncomputable from Galloway’s previous scholarship is the relative silence on the political implications of the arguments, despite the “politics” in the book’s subtitle. Discussions of the particular functioning of (networked) power, and the possibilities of inventing new political tactics in response to it, appear only sporadically in the majority of chapters, something that is particularly surprising given the reputation of the book’s publisher (Verso) as one explicitly dedicated to radical thought. We are left to wonder: How does starting from uncomputation shift our analysis of digital power? Does it open up to more modest understandings of control where the digital is as much failure as accomplishment? Or does it, by contrast, showcase that even error (human or nonhuman, unintentional or accidental) cannot escape the recuperative reach of the digital? Following either of these two hypotheses, how does one establish “a relation of difference,” to employ a term Galloway (Berry and Galloway 2016) presents elsewhere, to technologies of (un)computation?

Toward the very end of the book, Galloway does start, if a little hastily, to turn his attention to such questions. For Galloway, the capacity of networked power to include even the uncomputable signals the limitation of a liberal politics centered on debate, recognition, and communication. In finishing, the book leaves us with a small constellation of alternative concepts—unreadibility, subtraction, asymmetrical binary—that could have helpfully been introduced much earlier in the book, and been developed in direct relation to the archival finds. For a politics of the digital to hold sway, however—and this is the important lesson Galloway leaves us with—it might well need to refuse revealing its own contents. Perhaps only a shadowy politics, one of secrecy and withdrawal, can escape the expansive urge of (un)computation. By occupying and extending the gaps of digital networks, such a politics finds inspiration in the robots of 1980s cinema, uttering alongside them, “We do not compute.” Whether this commitment, too, will soon be engulfed by the digital is a question only future theorists and practitioners of the uncomputable will be able to answer.