MemeTracker for the Presidential Campaign '08
In a thought-provoking post on I cite, Jodi Dean describes the proliferation and popularity of ‘tag clouds’ as capturing “the shift from message to contribution characteristic of communicative capitalism”. That is, in place of meaning and context, which in actuality govern discourse, tag clouds display information in terms of repetition, frequency, and intensity.
“The meaning of words is not at stake in tag clouds. Meaning is replaced by frequency, proximity, and duration. Which words are repeated the most and in what combinations? The combination of these elements determine intensity–if something is only present once, it doesn’t count, isn’t counted. Words matter, words and themes. Not sentences and not stories or narratives. People always get the story wrong, anyway. Tag clouds exemplify this loss of a space of meaning, of a language constituted out of sentences that are uttered in contexts according to rules that can be discerned and contested“
While this is no doubt true of certain uses of tag clouds — when used to show, for example, the repetition of key terms in a speech, — other uses — as blog indexes, say — generally predominate. In my experience, tag clouds are used mostly to show, at a glance, the dominant themes or categories of a large, unwieldy database or collection of texts, and are not, generally speaking, used for summarizing or condensing a single text. In this sense, Dean’s claim that “Message force multipliers” — a rhetorical-metaphorical reference to the Pentagon’s embedding of ’specialists’ in mainstream news outlets — “are more important than the message” deserves qualification.
Even so, Dean’s greater point holds — namely, that the application of data visualization techniques to politics, especially, is problematic. The very mission of applications like MemeTracker — i.e. the simplification of a large set of data, which in this case is political discourse, a domain of momentous proportions — remains dubious and theoretically suspect. What, exactly, is to be gained from charts like the one above — which, according to information aesthetics, “represents the daily news cycle of around 900,000 news stories and blog posts per day from 1 million online sources, ranging from mass media to personal blogs”?
Though graphs like the one above ultimately offer little more than an aesthetically pleasing expression of ‘data’, the kind of ‘analysis’ they promote is making a comeback. As Mark Lieberman of Language Log observed in a recent post that begins with a critique of Stanley Fish’s New York Times article on Obama’s inauguration speech, though Fish himself was once “known for attacking attempts to base literary analysis on counting things in texts (e.g. “What is stylistics and why are they saying such terrible things about it?“, in Essays in Modern Stylistics, 1981),” he is now praising “word-counting as a technique of rhetorical analysis (”Barack Obama’s Prose Style“):
One day after the occasion, USA Today offered as an analysis of [Obama's inaugural address] a list of the words most frequently used, words like America, common, generation, nation, people, today, world. This is exactly the right kind of analysis to perform, for it identifies the location of the speech’s energy in the repetition of key words and the associations forged among them by virtue of that repetition.
Dean, you will recall, specifically identified the ‘tag cloud’ with a determination of “intensity” — which, when applied to specifically political contexts indeed seems all the more crude an instrument of analysis. By focusing on repetition at the expense of context and meaning, the possibility of interpretation is automatically foreclosed. “Tag clouds,” she writes, “are indicative of secondary orality.
They are part of a post-literate age, the age of mass, participatory, contributory, combinatory media. They are closer to a podcast than they are to a written text: the conventions of oral speech require repetition, conventional phrases, opposition. Rather than a formation that relies on meaning, signification, and interpretation (and is hence available to deconstruction), secondary orality values the word as image. The image doesn’t stand in for or provide a prosthetic word. It marks a feeling, an intensity. It doesn’t ask that the viewer understand it. All the viewer is expected to do is register that the word has been, that it has appeared. The word become image is a feeling-impulse, like a badge. It’s identificatory, relying on an identity between word and object. The word-image is this impulse-identity.“
This strategy — of repetition, on the one hand, and the labeling of this repetition as the truth of the document, on the other — attempts to build around a word-image a specific bundle of associations, i.e. a feeling and an intensity. However, a second effect contingent to accepting the identification of repetitions as “the right kind of analysis” to perform (as Fish puts it) is not to be overlooked. In the MemeTracker graph, for instance, recent events are made to fall prematurely subject to a kind of flattening effect, a great leveling out, of the sort usually reserved for distant history. Applying the same weight to every instance, with the sole goal of finding identifying repetitions, has the counter-effect of drawing a general equivalence between all points.
From this methodological error, a number of false moves naturally follow. It would be a mistake, for instance, to interpret the pronounced repetition of recognizable phrases, which this graph succinctly discovers, as the caught reflection of a real world dissemination of ideas through the popular mind. The graph, it must be reminded, reveals an after-effect, not an underlying cause, of a political climate. The key phrases of the 2008 election are not some kind of x-ray image of the skeleton of a singular national consciousness; they are the symptoms of a much more lively struggle, which this graph is resolved to hide from view, as so much “noise”. It shows what we already know, without explaining the importance of why or how we know it.
But does the tag cloud or meme graph otherwise cultivate avant-garde impulses? Isn’t the word-image of today strangely comparable to surrealist experiments from the early twentieth century? Anticipating this objection, Dean takes care to distinguish, in a parenthetical aside, the contextual strategies of the surrealists from word-counting techniques uninterested in argument and “performative efficacy”.
“(This word-image was prefigured in the avant garde art from the late 19th and early 20th century. I have in mind the wonderful word-images of the Russian communist and Soviet revolutionary artists. On the one hand, this word-art was effective precisely because of its revolutionary impulse, its challenge to the status quo of late Russian painting. It performed the revolution, disrupting prior meanings. On the other, precisely because it depended on its context for its performative efficacy it reinforced the fact of symbolic meaning in order not just to disrupt it but to bring about a new meaning, a new world, a new man. The point wasn’t just to destroy meaning. It was to change it. Tag clouds aren’t revolutionary. They are elements of communicative capitalism, elements that reinforce the collapse of meaning and argument and thus hinder argument and opposition. Any words are part of a tag cloud. You can make a new one out of speeches from Kennedy and Khrushchev, Ann Coulter and Coretta Scott King.)”
The distinction is crucial. In one, repetition and juxtaposition are arbitrary, having little or no effect on the meaning of the terms involved; in the other, similar strategies are deployed, but with decisive effect. In a review of Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz: Die Geschichte von Franz Biberkopf [Berlin Alexanderplatz: The Story of Franz Biberkopf], Benjamin indeed made just this distinction.
“Petty-bourgeois printed matter, scandalmongering, stories of accidents, the sensational incidents of 1928, folk songs, and advertisements rain down in this text. The montage explodes the framework of the novel, bursts its limits both stylistically and structurally, and clears the way for new, epic possibilities. Formally, above all. The material of the montage is anything but arbitrary. Authentic montage is based on the document. In its fanatical struggle with the work of art, Dadaism used montage to turn daily life into its ally. It was the first to proclaim, somewhat uncertainly, the autocracy of the authentic. The film at its best moments made as if to accustom us to montage. Here, for the first time, it has been placed at the service of narrative. Biblical verses, statistics, and texts from hit songs are what Döblin uses to confer authenticity on the narrative. They correspond to the formulaic verse forms of the traditional epic.” (Benjamin “Crisis of the Novel” 301)
Word-counting procedures pursue the opposite effect. They eliminate subtlety, affection, irony — in short, the whole expressive and communicative dimension of discourse — for an inexplicable, mathematical reduction. Montage and remix works, by contrast, play upon the document and source to masterful effect. In this regard, if we are looking for contemporary counterparts to the Surrealist experiments with language, which were at once political and aesthetic, we should perhaps turn to net-artists like Christophe Bruno.
In a recent interview with We-Make-Money-Not-Art, Bruno explained succinctly his work in relation to the commodification of language, as facilitated by Google AdSense and other web monetization practices. His “AdWords Happenings”, for instance, strategically disrupts, or inverts, the intended use of sponsored links. By writing little “spam poems” in the ad boxes that appear to users who search for his name, he was able to collect data from visitor clickthrus and “draw tables rendering the values of a number of keywords: their price relatively to their use (you click, he pays).” Once Google rebuked Bruno “for not playing the game of advertisement, [...] some of the rules of what he calls a ‘generalized semantic capitalism’” were revealed in a new, harsh light. Bruno, for his part, summed up this new economic reality perfectly: “One of the most interesting fact is that we have reached a situation in which any word of any language has its price, fluctuating according to the laws of the market.”
Bruno's Spam Poems
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