N. Katherine Hayles starts with the birth of the modern computer age. Opening the book with a story about the Turing test (and Turing himself), Hayles situates her thesis at the very beginning: the lesson taken away from the test and built upon by others was not that the test proved computers might one day act likes humans, but that humans could and did act like machines. It was the moment, Hayles records, that the overdeterminality of the erasure of embodiment began to take over the conversation. Where, previously, the thought was (and as many writers still do think) that humans would be augmented, the thought turned away from the body and more toward information (what she laters calls the replacement of presence/absence with pattern/randomness).

The materiality was gone, she writes; “information lost its body” (p. 2). Science fiction reflected new trends of bodies being merely sacks of flesh where the “pattern” of a life could be up- or downloaded. It is this idea, Hayles mentions, that became the basis of much of the fiction that would follow shows like Star Trek. With its teleportor technology in the show, bodies could be erased and remade by machines. The consciousness of a person was nothing more than information and the place where that information lived was in “bodies” of the machines themselves. It this this very theme Hayles makes the case against.

We have become seduced by the promise of immortality through machines. “If we can capture the Form of ones and zeroes in a nonbiological medium — say, on a computer disk — why do we need the body’s superfluous flesh?” Hayles writes in summary of this pursuit (13). The chase after the Platonic ideals, now moved away from philosophy and taken up by informatics, is at the very core of the move away from an understanding of an embodied view toward that of worshipping information itself.

Taking up a mathematical approach, Hayles also writes that “information is identified with choices that reduce uncertainty” (p. 31). Information can be understood to be the pattern against a background of randomness. Without understanding what noise is, the signal (in which information is embedded) cannot be determined. Each define each other as the presence and absence of the other: randomness is without pattern, while patterns cannot be found without knowing the concept of randomness.

It is within this greater structure that Hayles also positions “mutation” as “the bifurcation point at which the interplay between pattern and randomness causes the system to evolve in a new direction” (31). Connecting to to a Lacanian framework, Hayles states that mutation is the “rupture of pattern” that marks the castration point where the psycholinguistic “mirror stage” reaches into the posthuman cyborg and severs the connection between man and machine. It is this junction that is identified as the the primary paradox: while it disconnects, it also reaffirms the connection itself.

From this bridge, Hayles builds outward to centering point of view (pov) as the site of subjectivity for the posthuman. Because we are forever ‘looking in‘ to flat screens projecting a virtuality, the pov “literally is the character” (38; original emphasis). That is, narrative arrises, Hayles writes, from the application of a temporal dimension of travel across spatial data. By traversing structured information, we humanize it and thus “subjectivity is computerized, allowing [data and subjectivity] to join in a symbiotic union whose result is narrative” (39). Without a materiality to ground us, we cannot disconnect from the virtuality nor can we, in forging a new connection, be under subjectivity either: we must both be able to act within the informational system and “gaze” from outside of it.

Comments:

Shantal Figueroa, “Week 6 Reading Notes: Rhetoric of Cool and Innovatin Characteristics” (Comment)

Chora is an interesting pull from Aristotle. That we can find connections between different sources, part of a greater theme of being “cool” (participatory, knowledgeable of oppression, and relaxed), is a great lesson in understanding culture and technologies. We draw from so many different sources in our creativity that it behooves us to understand this underlining structure.

Ramona Myers, “Week 6: “Innovation” (Tornatzky and Klein) and 1/2 Remediation (Bolter and Grusin)” (Comment)

The darker edge of remediation, of wanting to be more immersed (lose traces of media) while also dependent on it, strikes a chord with me. Most video games in the AAA space try to be as visually arresting as they can be while also being highly dependent on the interface of the system itself. In trying to be “immersive” (a problematic word), they often reach for immediacy and trip over hypermediacy in the process; they try to be more “real” by raising graphical fidelity and simultaneously cover the screen in all manner of heads-up displays that hook into the complexity of the game’s playable mechanics.