I'll admit that while reading Hayles "Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers" I kept thinking to myself: There is a material reality here, even if we aren't thinking about it. Reading Kirschenbaum's Mechanisms doesn't so much make me regret that thought as require me to be more articulate about my desires.
Kirschenbaum is doing--it seems self-consciously--his due diligence, articulating in at times excessive nuance the material reality of the hard drive to a lay audience who keep dipping their fingers into digital texts without really getting into the tech. Commendable work and extremely educating. Perhaps I was thinking something more Marxist however. The intense focus on the material seems to run directly into a form of commodity fetishism even as it seeks to probe our cognitive relationship with technical minutia (or lack there of as the case may be). For all the detail and historical situatedness, I can't help but feel that moving further into the black box is moving further away from the real world. Hayles at least turned her attention to the advent of cybernetics through war systems. Kirschenbaum invokes the Air Force in relation to IBM only to address their rather mundane filing concerns. Even in his discussion of the World Trade Center attacks, he is prone to think more of the data and its 'heroic' recovery than any potential connection that data might have with the state of the world.
Kirschenbaum's point might may be, however, that our current mystification (and its presumptive continual increase) at the world's black boxes creates all kinds of unarticulated disconnects between us and our world, disconnects that we are all to content to consign to "virtuality" without further scrutiny. Perhaps Kirschenbaum's legwork allows for the type of connection that could begin to return social materiality to an examinable place. In part, I'm thinking simply about tracking the labour that builds the machine and harvests their elements from the ground. But I'm thinking too about something that better bridges the gap between Hayles sense of the multi-modal connections between person, computer and world at large (often in the form of corporations and programmers) and of Kirschenbuam's shedding of light upon the bits that elude Hayles.
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Hello,
ReplyDeleteThanks for the comments. Two clarifications: "heroic" is a trade word, used to denote above average commitment of resources to a particular task. As far as the Air Force and their filing cabinets go, it's an example in the service of a narrative that attempts to shift the dominant genealogy of human-computer interaction away from screen-based experiences and toward storage media and devices. I'll grant that this isn't as dramatic as the deployment of a system like SAGE, but the military's role in developing RAMAC is made plain in the book, as are the linkages to the popular vogue for worplace automation and cybernetics. I'm a big fan of Paul Edwards' The Closed World, btw.