Oh so inhuman

David Wellbery nail-on-the-heads-it when he claims that Kittler "presupposes post-structuralist thought," that he takes it seriously and uses it as "the operating equipment, the hardware" (viii). While this is subsumed under the heading of post-structuralism, it seems more to the point that it follows directly out of Derrida and deconstructionist thought. This quote itself follows directly from a condemnation of the American academy's own fashionable and fleeting engagement in the sport of deconstruction.

(This next section gets a little rambly and lack some citation, but I want to try to work out the relationship I see between Kittler and Derrida's projects. So I'm going to shoot from the hip a bit and see about the rigour after the dust settles.)

And indeed in Kittler's two introductory sections we see the working of Derrida's foundational speech v writing statements. Kittler is documenting precisely the written word's--in its technological form--move inward to become the transcendent spirit. While Derrida draws the connection back to Plato as the founding moment of Western culture, Kittler attends to the very material shift that he is linking to 1800, the internal voicing of written words in a private study. The focus on this era isn't unique to Kittler however. Derrida too seems to have focused on a dramatic shift that floated seemingly from Descartes until arguably now. Kittler's (intense) attention to media and technology is the marked difference.

In the place of Derrida's abstracted movements of humanism whose sites appear always to be the writing of philosophers, we have Kittler's picture of a solitary, fictional man reading to himself and shifting the words in his translation until they "feel" right. What matter here is the technological apparatus that allows the scene to be constructed and replicated. It doesn't have to be Faust or Goethe. It can be anyone that the new technologies have allowed to fit the scene and internalize the word.

The Nietzschean counterpart then is the end of one technological regime and the beginning of the line of thought Derrida is to inherent. Nietzsche--as he is presented here in is grammar books and then in the demise of his sanity and beyond--takes literally the system he can see. He see the technology that is the human living in the book and he ends up completely severed from it with nothing but inhuman noise he is without tools to decipher (183-4). Again this is a meditation on technology, its tricks and its ruses.

Ending my own perturbed run through of these positions, my own interest is in a better articulation of the distributed network relationship with technology as it finds its home in each person. In Faust and Nietzsche we have the picture of two forms of neurosis. First the failing to grasp the working of technology on the individual (literally misrecognizing its effects). And secondly, the excessive realization of technology that is self-alienating. Can we have a new 2000 discourse network in which we can resolve our relationship to the tech? Or at least have some means of cognizing that relationship (and the relationship to the distributed network in general). This is similar to what I was reacting to last week in Kirschenbaum. He seems close to accounting for the gap between mechanism itself and our screen ideology (though I feel like he never quite got there). Where does the tech end and we begin? And how do these things change?

Excuse me while I go and howl my inhuman wail.

I ain't never been in a clean room / But I've broken down some black boxes

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.

Massive Digital Creep

Electronic literature is great and full of insanely interesting interactions that mutually redefine humans and the computers that love them. For all of Katherine Hayles diligent and incredibly helpful surveying of the field in her Electronic Literature, it seems like she attends only to the very avant-guard. This choice makes sense, especially as regards her primary thesis that humans and "their" technology are co-constitutive, co-evolutionary and currently co-habituating at their fullest in these premiere examples of e-lit. While these works may best give evidence to the heights of this interrelation, there is a vast market-world of what is arguably e-lit circulating out there that she largely ignores.

It is the print books that she gives attention to that prompts me most here. Hayles's three examples of print literature embracing the mark of the digital are fairly heavily circulated works (with the possible exception of People of Paper, tho its publication by McSweeney's guarantees its status as hip). Hayles herself goes as far as calling elements of Foer's novel "gimmicky," tho she argues justifiably so (166). In these works we have a coupling of both mass audience and a sense of tiredness captured in the feeling of gimmickiness. This is a total departure from the earlier chapters' work on electronic literature's exploration of all new human-computer interactions. While Hayles largely praises these works, she uses them primarily as demonstrative of the creep of digitalization and thus places these works as secondary to electronic literature (with the possible exception of House of Leaves which seems to retain a form of innovation well suited to its casing as book). Thinking of their broad(er) appeal then might provide insights into which elements of digitalization have taken the forefront in capturing our attentions.

Returning then to the presumptive market-world of mass electronic literature, it seems that a fruitful study could be done of the many forms of popular electronic literature that exists, from video game to web comics to flash animation. Certainly, these objects too must be doing the work of reeducating our modes of thinking. And they are happening everywhere...all the time. This is all to say that taking a peek into the explosion of creativity that is the internet one might find the modes of co-constitution and reeducation that are the most transformative and have gained the most credence among viewers.

(Check out the Qwantz link especially and read through it / try to. While this was a guest comic, the type of experimentation is not atypical.)

Hayles, N. Katherine.Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary. Notre Dame, IN: U

Notre Dame Press, 2008.

Week 2.1: Neuromancer

First off, I'd like to suggest to those not already doing it to consider scrape each others' posts off into some sort of RSS set-up (I'm using Google Reader to do just that) to make this whole enterprise easier to manage. Conversely, I'm pleased with my header image and wish you all would come and view it live. I digress.

Reading Gibson's Neuromancer for the first time, I'm struck by it as a compendium of ways-to-be-human (or less or more than human; or inhuman). It presents an encyclopedic version of all things we think of as blurring the boundary between the human and the technological. (I'm really into encyclopedias, largely because of the ways in which they attempt to represent totality without achieving it...eg Gibson gives snippets of many different types and levels of cybernetics to give the impression of covering the entire range.)

Armitage and Wintermute (or Neuromancer or whatever comes after them both) form the inverted poles of the human-technological divide and thus reveal it as far less of a divide than we might at first think. Armitage--whose name a quick internet search reveals is a mathematical term for a process that limits variables--is a nearly, fully human shell that houses a personality construct not all too distant from something Pavlovian. In contrast, the AI--even before its fully conscious--seems to have a full range of human behaviors, even if it has to appear in a range of forms.

As a final somewhat unrelated note, it seems that in the midst of all the body manipulation we haven't gotten outside of real gendered positions. It is Molly's body that is a focal point and that we spend most of our time tourist-ing around in. And it is Case that has the liberty to be without body. For all the heteroglossia aren't we still running around with a lot of binaries?