I: The New Science
(of Information):
1: "Virtuality" is defined as (an historically specific) "cultural
perception" (I would say interpretation): that, "material objects
are interpenetrated by information patterns"; this interpretation "finds
instantiation in an array of powerful technologies."
Corollary: Modern information technologies are not a simple
extension of the world, but an "institution": there is a active moment
of instituting them (bringing them out of culture, into existence), but
once they are there, in a reflexive feedback loop, they change
the culture that invented them. This institution is neither "arbitrary"
nor "natural"(inevitable).
Example: molecular biology's 'impossible inversion': DNA is interpreted
as prior to the body that carries it.
2: "It (this form
of science) constructs information as the site iof mastery and control
over the material world." (72)
3: But, "The
efficacy of information depends on a highly articulated material base."(72)
Irony: once that material base is in place, it is often forgotten
(until it breaks down).
Scandalous project (Hans Moravec): Since humans are essentially information patterns, "you" could have your consciousness downloaded to a computer, leaving the body an empty husk, making "you" immortal. (72) Could it work? Would it be good if it could? What effects would it have?
4: "The information/matter
dichotomy maps onto the older and more traditional dichotomy of spirit/matter"(73).
Religious yearnings suggest this is an instituted hierarchy, expressing
a longing for (the soul's) freedom of the body.
Influential
and paradigmatic instance of the formalization
of information as divorced from the messy human matter of "meaning":
Claude Shannon's conceptionalization of information as that which can
be extracted from a message (which is usually implicated in meanings and
embedded in a social context of communication) as a quantifiable signal,
so it can sent through the channel to a reciever. It
is this abstraction of communication from meaning that Hayles finds to
be problematic.
Daniel Chandler's
summary of this process of extraction:
"Shannon and Weaver's work proved valuable for communication engineers
in dealing with such issues as the capacity of various communication channels
in 'bits per second'. ...in making 'information' 'measurable' it gave
birth to the mathematical study of 'information theory'.
Shannon and Weaver's original model consisted of five elements:
- An information source, which produces a message.
- A transmitter, which encodes the message into signals
- A channel, to which signals are adapted for transmission
- A receiver, which 'decodes' (reconstructs) the message from the signal.
- A destination, where the message arrives.
"A sixth element, noise is a dysfunctional factor: any interference with the message travelling along the channel (such as 'static' on the telephone or radio) which may lead to the signal received being different from that sent.
"For the telephone the channel is a wire, the signal is an electrical current in it, and the transmitter and receiver are the telephone handsets. Noise would include crackling from the wire. In conversation, my mouth is the transmitter, the signal is the sound waves, and your ear is the receiver. Noise would include any distraction you might experience as I speak." [See Daniel Chandler, The Media and Communication Studies Site, General Issues, Communication and Media Theory, "Transmission Model of Communication."]
The information/ matter pair is elucidated by linking it to 3 other pairs of terms
- information/ matter (is articulated in Shannon through the difference between)
- signal/ non-signal (makes noise a question/ problem)
- information/ noise
(makes finding the correct pattern out of randomness the goal)
pattern/ randomness
General thesis: these are not "dichotomies" but "dialectics"; not oppositions (where there is nothing of the first term in the second, none of the second term in the first), but mutually constitutive terms. Thus from the point of view of information, noise is not different in substance from information (they are both "blue balls"), and randomness can carry information just as pattern does. Another way to put this, the second term obeys the logic of the supplement (as explained by Derridain Of Grammatology): e.g of daytime reality / night's dream; sex/ fantasy.
A paradigm shift
in modern thought:
effects of the "information" paradigm (i.e. virtuallity) in
terms of the shifts in modern thought (Table 4.1, p. 79):
defining dialectic: from presence/ absence to pattern/ randomness
capitalism: from "possession" to "access"
psychology: from "castration" to "mutation"
theory: from "deconstruction" to "maximum entropy".
Approaching writing through a screen, it is experienced by the reading body as crucially spatial. Hayles accepts Michael Joyce's claim that hypertext is "topographical writing," that is textuality that "writes" a "place" (topo = place; graph = writing). Three traits of writing on the computer screen make this point: 1) writing is elastic 2) the topology of the text is constructed rather than given (e.g. file names divorced from spatial proximity) 3) changes in text are not superficial but structural (e.g. not changes in font, but cut, paste, copy) These are deep-structural features of virtual (digital) writing that change the way we experience, inhabit and feel this writing as fundamentally different than print.
The Physics of
Virtual Writing and the Formation of the Virtual Subject
These new
conditions of writing suggest the grounds for new forms of subjectivity.
Linked to machine, the subject's experience of the virtual topographies
is paced to clock-speed; we are already hybrids of human and machine.
(91)
|
A general history of media history: from "the Oral Subject": fluid, changing, situational, dispersed, conflicting to "the Written Subject": fixed, coherent, stable, self-identical, normalized, decontextualized to "the virtual subject" : formed through dynamical interfaces with computers; when interface is keyboard and screen, space belongs to the computer, temporal flow to the user; body boundaries extended or disrupted through proprioceptive coherence formed in conjunction with computer interfaces; a cyborg. |
Do you accept this account of virtuality?
What is to be Done?
"Literature will not remain unchanged." But literary academics
can make a valuable difference.
Final plea: "If we articulate interpretations that contest the illusion of disembodiment." Just as the disembodiment hypothesis has real effects, so too can a more material and embodied notion of digital technologies enable us to inhabit them in a new way.(94)