Coda: We study the virtual because we believe in the Real

That the strong form of the assertion “We study the virtual because we believe in the Real” could turn out to name the same thought as “Why we should get paid enough to have an iphone” is another way of naming the problem every Smith in the Matrix names, as we have put it before: “We are here because we are not free.”

 

And then: it seems the world’s been reading our blog, while we were busy naming the virtual that which cannot bear to hear its name spoken, speaking of postmodernity runs on modernity’s battery power. We dutifully arrived at the train station this morning in time to purchase the coffee we consider quite biologically necessary for the performance of our job to find our train cancelled due to unspecified “mechanical difficulties,” facts we had to press a clueless conductor to verify with a computer. And so suddenly we are zooming along the freeways again, playing Hiro Protagonist while maneuvering our meaty self among the bimbo boxes at 80 miles per (including one F 350 pulling an RV we were mildly hoping we would actually get to see jack-knife right before our eyes on the way to cyberpunk seminar/postmodernity class (provided no one was injured) but which eventually managed to precariously fight the inertial zig with a noble zag onto the shoulder of the road, after gloriously bringing traffic to a halt behind it so everyone could–what else could we do?–watch) wishing we had an iphone at least to look up the number to phone Sophia’s so we could pick up our meagre rice we won’t have time to eat. During which time at least we were able to make some notes: voila! 

Why we should get paid enough to have an iphone

Or at least still have jobs, along with our friends, while writing our dissertations. Although by we here we frankly mean everyone, this morning we mean graduate students especially. If you haven’t heard yet about the all too real ramifications for us of the budget vote folks who ride the trains to Sacramento with Wi-Fi cards sticking out of their laptops will be casting next week, please read this. Then sign this.

We don’t consider ourselves certain of many things, being good citizens of the Derridean statutes, but we do know this: thinking this shit will stay localized to this or that fan is a rube’s game, and the reality of unlimited and many-handed demands drawing on a limited and dwindling set of funds is only becoming, how do we say? less incredulous by the day. So much so in fact that here we really must cheer (while admitting the tactics might have been better thought through: granny flash mob, anyone?) the apparently still anonymously known 64 year-old woman who “wanted to take a stand” and so voted against oil prices by lighting fire-starter logs in Chevron bathrooms.

 

Meanwhile we are going to attempt to gather some loose threads before vanishing into summer conferences and the assorted duties that pass for “break” here in the mean density, beginning by returning to half-thought remarks suspended among our avatars last week re: the postcyberpunkness of Acker/Stephenson/The Matrices and possible anachronism of the novel as a form for bearing such cultural stuffs. And in this regard it seems to us we flirted with the even then so obvious enough as to be clichéd self-referentiality of those, for lack of better terms, classical and classically “postmodern” texts, compelled by the always-already of generic exhaustion (and, we would hasten to add, the crisis of overaccumulation that funds it, but that is a thesis for another time) fact that such novels need to name hero protagonists “Hiro Protagonist” and plunder existing plots so as to mimic the deformations of history.

 

But it seems to us there is also a sense in which “Hiro Protagonist” has to be the ironic tongue-in-cheek/in your face tag it is not only because the novel recognizes the anachronism of the generic convention of the white male hero protagonist saving the day whilst remaining pale in the darkness of his basement/U-Stor-It (not least in its efforts to rectify the gendering of this narrative by making Hiro dependent on a fifteen year-old female suburanite who can work the streets better than he can); but precisely because at the same time the enabling plot device hinges on a mechanism for corporate re-capturing of profits and retaining of intellectual property rights, per Lagos the Gargoyle cutting a deal to sell his Sumerian know-how to the highest bidder to keep tabs on his employees that sets the mighty wheels of narrative in motion (“Lagos… thought that with a little venture capital, this neurolinguistic hacking could be developed as a new technology that would enable Rife to maintain possession of information that had passed into the brains of his programmers” (403); which very processes of corporate recapturing of profits and property rights robbing them of their potentialities hackers are proof against: “People like L. Bob Rife can’t do anything without us hackers. And even if he could convert us, he wouldn’t be able to use us, because what we do is creative in nature and can’t be duplicated by people running me” (406). In other words Hiro, our hacker protagonist, is in fact a hero, from the novel’s own point of view, quite apart from its cheeky messing around with generic facts thereof; the basic structure of the story hasn’t changed all that much, but our ways of telling it are pretty exhausted–cue witty pastiche.

 

What interests us is the way in which Hiro Protagonist and the hacker archetype now function as heroes, however, in a world where every suburbanite spends their free time getting their avatar all dressed up to hang out on the Street. (And, incidentally, this is why although we think as we are meant to think sword fights are cool, they are not our favorite scenes, nor do they seem more than further tired generic rules for making Hiro a hero.) Hiro, it seems to us, is a new breed—albeit one importantly hinted at in various ways by Barney, Case, and Mr. Slippery—a new heroic form of consciousness able to access and adeptly negotiate simultaneously both the graphical interface of the Metaverse/Librarian/hypercards and manipulate the machine language of the world with all the information stored in its binary operations, all while also performing samurai acrobatics and/or zooming to Oregon on a motorcycle at 100+mph in the real space of real-time. What makes him a hero, in other words, is not his skills in any one of the novel’s ontological levels we constantly flip (to borrow Gibson’s term) between, toggling along in the narrative world from virtual to real adventure and back again, but the fact that he is the world’s best sword fighter in both worlds at the same time, and a super programmer in both to boot. (The need to try to realize an identical doubling of Neo’s powers in and out of the Matrix is, incidentally, exactly what makes the last two films so shitty: the moment Neo drops the sentinels and goes into a coma is the moment the Matrix, and hence The Matrix, loses all its thrills; we are cast back upon pseudo-philosophizing, juvenile politics and worse romance.)

 

Or rather, Hiro is one form. The principal appeal of Snow Crash is precisely in what seems to us its triangulation of the dream of ubiquitous programming in the forms of Ng, Lagos, and Hiro Protagonist, each of whom represent possible outcomes of a post-humanist (we’ll go ahead and call it that) world in which our habitual differences between body and machine (Ng), corporate and personal (Lagos), virtual and real (Hiro) are collapsed, along with the ontological distinctions upon which they rest. Thus Ng to ever adolescently skeptical but still willing to go along with it Y.T.: “’Your mistake,’ Ng says, ‘is that you think that all mechanically assisted organisms—like me—are pathetic cripples. In fact, we are better than we were before’” (248) leading straight into the feel-good narrative about how pit bulls recovered from city-streets can be re-trained into totally lovable creatures with memories that can’t be erased and just might come in handy as extraordinary plots devices somewhere down the line needed to save the day. Cheeky less than willing suspension of disbelief aside, however, there’s much more to be said on this thread, but we will content ourselves with pointing out that as a casualty of—what else?—“the evacuation of Saigon in 1974” (326), Ng (like Armitage) is a surplus product of an amped-up wartime economy (the glorious dénouements of which as this or that corporate project so many of the prolepses in Gravity’s Rainbow track) that must be put to new and newly profitable use, in this case by—what else?—manufacturing Rat Things to safeguard the property and profits of other Burbclaves and multinationals. Lagos the federal Gargoyle, meanwhile, as a failed hacker cum corporate lackey with too much information in his head for his own good and in need of a few (trillion) dimes, gets pretty quickly and righteously killed off by Hiro’s appropriately ethnic (read: Third World) nemesis Raven—both of whom turn out to be themselvs, psychoanalytically speaking, surplus products of—yep—Hiroshima. Talk about your heroic Oedipal complex, father fighting father while the bright lights flash giving you your unasked for and not be revealed until the final pages name.

 

All of which is to say that Hiro, as neither corporate nor a brain in a vat but a First World surplus war product, pretty clearly emerges as the hero of this narrative-within-the-narrative pastiche of cyberpunk tropes. He’s the dude that can ride a state of the art motorcycle at top speed while effortlessly conversing with the Library in his head courtesy of his self-contained virtual feed, all while being fed real-time data over phone lines by Y.T. off having real-time adventures eventually resulting in the need for real-time rescues by the rest of the ever adolescently skeptical but willing to go along with it Kouriers. Hiro is, in fact, the perfect hacker—which is also to say the perfect employee, if you can keep control of what’s in his head—and its getting awfully hard to tell the difference. (What is the difference after all between Hiro and Y.T.’s dupe of a federal drone Mom, except access to information and the material bases of privilege on which such access rests, give or take the social coding of subjective constitutions making the likelihood of gaining said access a little more or less?) Cue the Sophie’s World/language as wetware interlude.

 

And this is why we remain so fascinated with all our literary representations’ fascination with the fact that the information highs are so high, and that the comedowns remain such hell. First, because the fact that there is a comedown in every case already gives away the game, i.e. that after the fun ‘n games confusing ontological levels is not a solution but finally mere gamesmanship; and second, because it is hell. And here we keep returning to those utopian claims for hybridity in general and in particular Alluquere Stone’s reading of David Tomas’ notion of the “technophilic body” as “freedom from the body, and in particular perhaps, freedom from the sense of loss of control that accompanies adolescent male embodiment” (449). We don’t have time to tease out the incredibly suggestive mappings of “male” and “adolescent” there onto the reading we’ve just been weaving of Snow Crash’s version of male fantasy; nor to pursue the fuller argument to which Stone’s thread belongs. But we do want to recall that her claims for de-pathologizing schizophrenia depend upon not just a freedom from the body but upon also retaining a living sense of the body from which such freedom is virtually possible. And it is this doubling that underwrites her notion of “cyborg envy,” the desire she attriibutes to hackers for “an embodied conceptual space like that which cyberspace suggests” (449). To put it crassly, wouldn’t it all be groovy if it was all like it is on the internet everywhere all the time?

 

The trouble, from our point of view, is that it might be but it isn’t, and it doesn’t seem it’s going to be anytime soon. Remember those phone sex workers who afforded Stone such a hopeful example of how we might transcend the mechanical limits of our bodies? And how nary a word was passed concerning who they actually were, or how they came to be sex workers as opposed to, say, hackers or samurai warriors or Kouriers or graduate students? This is why we keep returning to harp on the fact that during all our virtual adventures, which we rather enjoy as we are meant to even in our grouching, we remain rented bodies in rented rooms of real time where they, by which we mean we, remain the very same bodies against which the virtual eventually has to cash in its chips in order to float all the virtual boats to develop the software that will let everybody fly and talk at the same time during the leisure hours that keep looking less and less meaningfully different from whatever we call, uh, not-leisure: work, we guess. Did we mention the petition?

 

Which is finally why we accept, and really rather (alas, we can’t say happily) insist upon being old school. As we said to a friend not long ago on a day when we found ourselves owners of a broken down car and a dead cell phone in a town not the one where we and our friends temporarily live, the trouble with postmodernity is that it still runs on modernity’s (battery) power (cue Matrix metaphors): it burns a lot of petrol to make a little biofuel, which fuels a lot of errant speculation on and about commodities and post-scarcity talk of becoming post-this and post-that, but makes precious little rice. And sooner or later the google bots we love to love and fancy making more love with will gang up with the corporate machines calling in their debts, making virtual compensations appear to be what they are: not even real compensation. Not that we are on the side of the social form compensation takes in the least, but in the meantime where the mean density is constant we feel at least that suffering subjects tethered to suffering bodies ought to get theirs in other than virtual pleasures. Which is why we think we should all be paid enough for rice and an iphone, and why we were so torn about also wanting to call this post we study the virtual because we believe in the real. 

Second Life

While you are at the bar, we can’t help saying we’ve never felt more allegorical, and as a result we are pretty sure that the privilege of blogging about the experience we were just busy having of our avatars is emphatically not what is meant by becoming the subject of history. Nonetheless and still: finding our meaty self (now that the jokes about the plural have really gotten good/paid off) trapped in the real time of a geographical space not only not that virtual region where we were all just sorta hanging out together, but also not that real space where y’all are now, so far as we are equipped to tell; prevented as we are from joining us in the bar by such banal limits as the zip code in which some of us choose to reside and rent our little corners of real estate, courtesy of time leached from our skin by those machines like us we call students in yet another zip code for reasons not unrelated to the state budget presently residing in an account owned by Wells Fargo in transit to our landlord, who at the moment is hacking away the greenery encroaching the sidewalk leading up to the house; just after having gotten to bear witness to all of our avatars growing locked into place by our efforts simultaneously to exercise the virtual right to fly individually proved too many choices for the system to handle, whereupon not merely the failure to coordinate collective action seemingly made possible by the latest constellation of ones and zeroes was dramatized (bearing in mind T’s remarks on such technological glitches and failures in relation to histories we tell thereof and don’t) but so too was the nearly instantaneous breakdown in conversation accompanying that failure, which might otherwise have permitted those efforts to be coordinated; all while feeling never-before-having-been made to feel more the schizophrenic subject we are actually required to happen to turn out to be, sitting in our little if quite lovely rented room of real-time overlooking the neighbors’ roses as we were and are at the desk surrounded by dog-eared papers and flagged books we are currently in need of having condensed yesterday into the talk we are meant to give a little over a week from today before the authors of said books and papers, all sandwiched with us here amidst the multiple and multiplying duties of being an instructor of record at the end of term while all this is going on, somewhere or other, we can’t help asking, for whom? It does not appear to us to be for us, this little moment of in itself we get to be savage and savaged narrators of…

But first, speaking of avatars

we can’t help confessing our incredibly mixed feelings about Snow Crash, which we can’t help feeling are related to what we can only call telling editorial slips. And while we don’t have another edition to compare (we are trusting the Bantam) and assume Stephenson can afford a decent editor, we take the liberty of assuming that these are in fact editorial mistakes, not authorial intentions. Case in point:  Rescued by Raven from Pentecostal zombies slicing fish in Port Sherman (during which time Y.T., at the tender age of fifteen, stumbles upon the epiphany that “this is just like life must be for about 99 percent of the people in the world” (324)), aboard the rafted Third World orbiting The Core (aircraft carrier + oil tanker + a bunch of freight, natch) Y.T. reflects upon her fish slicing days and current plight in the form of a comparison between the utter desexualization of labor and (she hasn’t yet realized everyone on the Raft is actually staring in fear at Raven, not at her with desire) having suddenly become a sexual object for every male aboard the Raft, thereby arriving in the ambiguous resolution that “In that way, it’s a big change from being a slop-slinger for the repressed” (345).

Now,  we could be wrong, but we assume that for “repressed” we are meant to read “oppressed.” (We realize of course this is the speech of a character and not the narrator, and that Stephenson works hard at other moments in the novel to square Y.T.’s impossibly surly understanding of the world with the facts of her fifteen year-old childishness, so we are not immune to the logic that argues the slip is merely representative of confusions endemic to fifteen year-old consciousness; but see the clarity of her insight quoted above, a scant few pages earlier. We are forced to find this argument unlikely to dubious at best.) And while it’s tempting to credit Stephenson with a whole philosophy of history contained in the exchange of consonant and vowel funding that particular conceptual elision, we can’t help feeling it is more than a little related to the employment of “subconscious” for “unconscious” in the speech Juanita (who, so far as arguments of intention go, is surely intended to be presented as more than intelligent enough to know which term names a true concept and which represents its popular corruption) makes to Hiro in her office back in the day (59), when she relates how granny’s “internal wiring” enabled her to nearly instantaneously decipher the code “Pass the tortillas” into the message “I’m pregnant.”

Political unconscious, anyone?

And in that regard, it’s hard not to feel a measure of skepticism toward a novel sporting such slips while leaning so self-consciously on its own bravado in the arena of linguistic theory in order to make its plot run the program for playing the game of gaining control over the means of reproduction. So here we really have to register our incredulity towards the narrative of language as wetware—at least as presented here–where the singularly tired pun on me and fantasy of BIOS (check the afterword) exist in order to make Enki’s mastery of information in the form of his “water of the heart” antidote to Asherah’s deep structures/infrastructure programming consciousness to put out glossalalia and reproduce said structures according to the will of whomever possesses Asherah’s matrix/dictionary/database (395)—all of which is finally an elaborate artifice to make hackers newold gods bearing digital nam-shubs. It’s a nice story (except for the scary if we speak your true name/language we can control your DNA part; and, well, that gendered narrative you won’t need our help to parse about viral reproduction the demi-godding of Juanita in the end as a voluntary antennae-head struggles to subvert, sorta) and has the benefit of making language the mediating term between the subject and the Real, making the Real thereby social and subject to change.

But this remains a mystified mediation, holding out the possibility of mystical powers to the possesers of knowledge of true names: and how then does the immense as usual privilege of access to that knowledge get distributed, do you wanna make a bet? So we don’t see, Mr. Stephenson, why in that case we wouldn’t just see your relativized Chomsky-cum-DNA piercing viruses and call your bluff by raising you a point de capiton? The trouble as it appears to us, then, lies not in the decision to make language the mediating term–we are totally down with that–but with making linguistic intervention into biology the basis of and motor for social change. This makes us more than a little squeamish, in part because it justifies the novel’s fantasy of a hacker aristocracy it’s hard to imagine (in 2008) escaping the historical inertia that threatens to make it isomorphic with, say, corporate media moguls broadcasting from bridges of aircraft carriers converted into yachts the better to tow the brainwashed Third World around and spread the seeds of religion, which are as usual nought but signs of real social inequality in the form of serpents twined round the false cross: $$$. And speaking of the uncanny, that last narrative bit sounds eerily familiar to us here in 2008, by which we mean to suggest that while we insist on registering our gripes, the novel hits more than a few nails on the head. If those nails belong more to coffins than to archigrams, we can’t help feeling the fault lies not in Snow Crash but in the world wherein it circulates.

(We admit we’re not sure we have this account pieced together altogether a-right; corrections or editions are very welcome. We had to read fast and furiously last weekend, and the parts of the novel that go all annoyingly Sophie’s World on us were not our favorites. But neither were the sword fights, if you’re keeping score at home. And there’s plenty here we liked plenty. Including the Librarian, one of which we wish we had right about this time of year. About which more anon.)

unReal Quandry

We have fallen behind the times beneath the reign of constancy, leaving us looking and thinking a little right-of-the-box, but hoping to surface from the quarter ending crush of things-to-be-done long enough to note a thought or two thus far eluding us during our unscheduled hiatus. But for what it’s worth this is what we’ll look like if we manage to make it to the meeting on the other plane Monday.

 

 

However we must confess we find ourselves feeling more than a little ambivalent about our wan adventures in the digital fields of Second Life. It is virtually impossible not to call upon the uncanny to explain our experience although we are trying, because it really is after all not the wanness of our adventures there but the success with which they echo the wanness of our adventures everywhere else (if anything with greater transparency) quixotically pursuing our asymptotic approach to the Real that leaves us creeped out. People are nice enough most of the time though some have guns and like to use them in spite of signs directing otherwise, and the real trouble starts from the fact that the former turn out be as much (or more) of a problem than the latter. To wit: we have a hard time getting around once we leave Help Island—and please note, our initial trip was unceremoniously brought to an abrupt end by a timed logout for grid maintenance, which somehow banished us to a remote but densely populated sector of the mainland upon re-entry where we were mostly ignored for being a rube and our screen kept freezing due to the surplus of fantastic prims, so that our time in the womb was predictably enough cut short due to forces beyond our control—where the main activity seems to be avatars standing around with postures we can only describe as lifeless in small groups chatting one another up. Fair enough, we agree, except that watching our avatar join these groups and assume an equally lifeless stance among them, papery things spun from pixels searching for words in hopes of contact, for once, beyond mere verbs and things we exchange to be kept or discarded in an eerily vacuous world nonetheless cluttered up with stuff other avatars have made, we cannot escape the dread that this is, after all, really what life really looks like most of the time. And inside that dread lurks the dread that attends the thought we can’t stop thinking, thinking as we are of the inert bodies off somewhere in the rented rooms of real-time whose avatars seem to be having such a good time here in the virtual fields: they may not be us but we sure are them.

And this, shocking exactly no one, follows from the fact that while we find immensely intriguing and truly admire the sleek inversions of the thought behind Uploaded Mind’s terrific formulation “what must really be going on… is the human minds provide for the machines a cyberspace in which to interact socially,” and like even more the uncertainty of the referent by the time we hit the pronoun in “Machines need humans to provide a playground for their minds” muddying up just those waters in which we like to swim, we fear we are still stuck finding it all too easy, alas, to believe the idea of machines sucking energy from human bodies is anything but ludicrous:

“Capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks… Capital asks no questions about the length of life of labour-power. What interests it is purely and simply the maximum of labour-power that can be set in motion in a working day… when [the worker’s] place can at once be supplied from foreign preserves, the duration of his life becomes a matter of less moment than its productiveness while it lasts.”

What we find truly uncanny, in other words, is the doubled result of seeing how truly ghost-like the apparitions our consensual hallucinations produce really appear once conjured as such; the flipside of which is the inescapability of the image of the battery fields of the Matrix, fueled by our imaginary encounter in the digital fields of Second Life with those life-like avatars of avatar-like people we assume are slumped over keyboards as we are, typing this. The attendant dread finds its origin of course in knowing that Marx’s remarks come from his account of why slavery is, from the point of view of Capital itself, not the most efficient means of vamping surplus value from otherwise valueless bodies, so that by the end of the nineteenth century it can (courtesy in part of that other Just War) be permitted to “die out,” as we say: “the unnatural extension of the working day, which capital necessarily strives for in its unmeasured drive for self-valorization, shortens the life of the individual worker, and therefore the duration of his labour-power, [so that] the forces used up have to be replaced more rapidly, and it will be more expensive to replace the labour-power, just as in the case of a machine, where the part of its value that has to be reproduced daily grows greater the more rapidly the machine is worn out.” Slavery is simply too expensive for capital to be very good at being capital, in other words, so we wind up with an eight hour working day and what is generally described as “decent” health care.[1] Which is, lucky for us, precisely the problem to which the battery fields of the Matrix provide a twenty-first century solution, where “living” is summarily drained from the equation of living-labour (variable capital) versus dead labour (constant capital) with frightening efficiency, the human body finally become nothing but value, where labor itself is reduced to elemental exchanges of chemical reactions for a few watts of power; as compensation for which we get a virtual playground that looks a lot like our world, plus flying and cool special effects.

So that what we find so eerie in the pleasantness of Second Life is, we suspect, identical with what puts the bleakness in the bleakness of the Matrices versions of the Real: by immersing us within virtual experiences of, and simultaneously distancing us from our own world, both lay bare the naked logic structuring our experience. (This is also to say we suspect more than a little our childhood’s preparation of us for just those male samurai/hacker fantasies The Matrix cashes in on, and our nascent adulthood’s preparation of us for skepticism towards spectacular fantasies on the order of Second Life, pretty much sum up our differing relations thereto in two words: nostalgia and farce.) And here we find ourselves curiously returning to Sherry Turkle’s distinction between “transparent algorithms” and “opaque simulations,” because whereas in the Matrix it is the transparent narrative investment in getting us to what is in Snow Crash truly named “The machine language of the world,” in Second Life it is the total graphical opacity of the interface itself that constantly reminds us that—however free our spectacular experience of the hallucination of freedom seems to be—our experience and its possibilities are nonetheless the products of algorithms we do not control. And so paradoxically, the greater the seeming freedom from the underlying Real—call it the body, call it economy—our experience acquires, the more viciously real the Real turns out be in naming the virtual the virtual.

And yet if that were all there were to it this too would finally seem just another iteration of the negative admitting what we all habitually admit we are habituated too: money makes the (virtual) world go round. What seems so compelling in this pairing, that is, is not merely the fact that the machined logic of the Matrix (like the “lattices of logic” in Neuromancer before it), as transparently allegorical of the situation of life under Capital as it turns out to be, and the logic whereby the machines making possible the experience of Second Life are made to disappear into the seemingly machine-less experience of being there as much as possible, turn out to be one and the same. It is rather the embodied synthesis of these two points of access, and the triangulated approach to the Real via equal and equally free access to both transparency and opacity that Snow Crash in its best moments seems to dream in the forms of Gargoyles, Ng, and Hiro Protagonist—a dream we’ve seen previously dreamt variously in the forms of Barney, Case, and Mr. Slippery—that seems to us what is most at stake in the archives of avatars and matters cyborg and cyber…

---

[1] Not for nothing do we who are more or less immune to its immiseration casually refer to wage-labor as wage-slavery: wage labor is, from this perspective, neither more nor less than slavery graduated to a form acceptable to and attuned to the laws of liberal bourgeois consciousness.

 

 

eXistenZ: One More Try

It’s a game everybody’s already playing alright, including us, which is why we can’t help but begin this week by noticing what you’ll already have noticed, dear enemies of reality: we are as guilty as the machines of replicating structures. In fact, as a new friend said to an old friend in our car the other night zipping past the freeway construction on the way back from the latest talk (albeit more optimistic than usual, sorta) about the inevitable restructuring of everything North into everything South, “You’re totally old school!” By which we mean, if we mean hung up on value, we suppose we all are. So while we enjoy a good ontological puzzle and can’t resist quoting “I don’t think I want action, me I mean, the bearer of the excited body-port!” next to “I can’t get me in or it out!” for the pure pleasantries of dorm-room humor, we confess we’re about to get grouchy again on the fantasy that asks “How could truth hide inside a game forever?” as though box office sales weren’t the answer to its cheeky tongue-in-cheek self-parody. (Oh but what the hell, we admit we giggled over the faux innocence of “Are you friendly or not?” and rather appreciated the moxy of Jennifer to Jude in the exchange naming that special “psychosis” produced by blending Ethos into Mythos: “your nervous system is fully engaged with the architecture of the game.”

 

So schematics: In the beginning and the end there was a Church, inside which smitten customers assist the manufacturer of a new game/system with working out the bugs, in exchange for which they will receive a certificate to purchase back their labor at, um, a discounted rate. Sound familiar? In between, bracketed by what we initially assume is reality and the next level (Transcendenz), the content of eXistenZ Hegel knew as the game-itself likewise turns out to consist of supplying the necessary labor to produce the system (now known as Trout Farm) that supports the experience of, yep, being in the game itself—merely to get into which involves purchasing the gear the labor of game play makes in the store that is, sigh, the portal to the other plane. Plus sex, the new (body-port) old (y’know) compensation of the tired fantasy of biological interface that is now hardware (ditto: body-port), software (part of the programmed experience of the game content itself), and—we’re sorry but we are compelled by our analysis to say so—wetware (hello saliva, chapstick, motel rooms on dark and stormy nights!). eXistenZ, or the game itself, is just the most recent version of the perfect product, as always more perfect than ever before, this time because the weaponry and food is people. The content of the game, in other words, is the labor of producing the system that manages the game, performed in a world that looks a lot like ours (with a few touches of vaguely Ewok-like scenery strained through the Orientalized Tokyo hash dreams of Blade Runner) where no compensation is desired in exchange other than the pleasure of playing, with the option to pause (what we call vacation, or for the privileged among us, “summer break”) just long enough to resurface with the meat of the body in a drab motel where even the sex isn’t as good as the memory of virtual wetdreams, now that play and labor, pleasure and wages have become identical. Mean density is constant indeed.

 

Here is where our old friend Perky Pat enters center stage as more than a twice lingered lovingly upon bag of name-checked potato chips for our self-congratualtory viewing pleasure (aside to David C: dude, really), since it affords the very structural layout whereupon ontological tomfoolery-cum-corny special-effects meets the matter and machinations of value production. It isn’t just, in other words, that eXistenZ uses the compensation of sex to seduce players into the game where play equals maintenance of the game itself. It’s that the game also consists of the labor of reproducing oneself as a subject who plays the game where it doesn’t even need to be Saturday everyday anymore but can openly be declared Monday in the factory of manufactured dreams built of animal parts, hooked as we are on our administered doses of just enough free will “to keep it interesting,” as J says to J on the way back from lunch to blow the whole works up and get to the next level–where we finally get to be the customers testing the product we just made for its market-run, albeit a bit confused about whether there is an inside or an outside here and whether we’re it or it’s us. But at least there’s that certificate supposedly somewhere in the mail for buying back a portion of our labor, reminding us free will is the freedom to trick ourselves into thinking we’ve chosen to take pleasure in such ontological niceties.

 

So while we readily admit what we’ve said here before in saying that the formal discourse of free will clouded by real virtual-becoming-real virtual experiences troubles us (when it doesn’t bore us) insofar as it obscures the real exploitation and immiseration that is its sole content, what we find truly troubling is what is always least interesting in the games/films/novels themselves. And least interesting, we suspect, because it is most real and least desirable: the comedown’s still a bitch. Coming to in Cheap Country Motel where even sex is better without the body is a case in point, but consider the following passages, in the context of what precedes them. As Nathaniel Hawthorne’s descendant Anne Hathaway put it in a not so distant past of a future near us, then, “If the map is not the territory, the pot is not the potter. So don’t talk ontology, Barney; don’t say is.” Except it’s worse than that, really, since the pot is the potter, and the map is the territory, insofar as the one can be exchanged for the other. And thus all our talk is as of is, since what bleeds back and forth between eXistenZ and transCendenZ is nothing other than value, in all its homogenous glory reproducing itself for its own sake as the end-game that that which Palmer Eldritch became (or that which became Palmer Eldritch?) announced is marked by -Z:

 

“I’d like to know,” Barney said, “what you were trying to do when you introduced Chew-Z to our people.”

“Perpetuate myself,” the creature opposite him said quietly. 

He glanced up, then. “A form of reproduction?”

“Yes, the only way I can.”

With overwhelming aversion Barney said, “My God, we would all have become your children.”

“Don’t fret about that now, Mr. Mayerson,” it said, and laughed in a humanlike, jovial way. “Just tend your little garden up top, get your water system going…”

 -The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (224)

Further Cases in Point: the Comedown

“He spent the bulk of his Swiss account on a new pancreas and liver, the rest of a new Ono-Sendai and a ticket back to the Sprawl.

He found work.

He found a girl who called herself Michael” (270).

-Neuromancer

 

“Barney said, ‘I’ll live here. As a colonist. I’ll work on my garden up top and whatever else they do. Build irrigation systems and like that.’ He felt tired and the nausea had not left him… ‘Earth,’ Barney said, ‘I’ve had.’ He too had meant what he had said, his anticipations for his own life which lay ahead here on Mars… After a time he climbed the steps to the cab of the dredge which he had been using and started the creaky, sand-impregnated mechanism. It howled mournfully in protest. Happier, he decided, to remain asleep; this, for the machine, was the ear-splitting summons of the last trumpet, and the dredge was not yet ready” (210, 211, 220).

-The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch

 

“He listened to the tiny voice that still leaked out of Providence. It didn’t make too much sense. She sounded hysterical, panicked. He was surprised that she could speak at all; she had just suffered—in losing all her computer connections—something roughly analogous to a massive stroke. To her, the world was now seen through a keyhole, incomplete, unknown, and dark… (297)

The spaces around him, once so rich with detail and colors beyond color, were fading now, replaced by the sensations his true body straining with animal fear in its little house in California… (297)

As per their temporary agreements, he closed off first one and then another of the capabalities that he had so recently acquired. It was like stopping one’s ears, then blinding one’s eyes, but somehow much worse since his very ability to think was being deliberately given up. He was like some lobotomy patient (victim) who only vaguely realizes now what he has lost. Behind him the Federal forces were doing their best to close off the areas he had left, to protect themselves from any change of heart he might have… (302)

He went from day to day feeling a husk of what had once been and trying to imagine what he could barely remember” (305).

 -True Names

 

Further Cases in Point I: Information Euphoria

“And here things could be counted, each one. He knew the number of grains of sand in the construct of the beach (a number coded in a mathematical system that existed nowhere outside the mind that was Neuromancer). He knew the number of yellow food packets in the canisters in the bunker (four hundred and seven). He knew the number of brass teeth in the left half of the open zipper of the salt-crusted leather jacket that Linda Lee wore as she trudged along the sunset beach, swinging a stick of driftwood in her hand (two hundred and two)” (258).

-Neuromancer

 

“With vast trailing arms he extended from the Proxima Centaurus system to Terra itself, and he was not human; this was not a man who had returned. And he had great power. He could overcome death” (202).

-The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch

 

“they were experiencing what no human had ever known before, a sensory bandwidth thousands of times normal. For seconds that seemed without end, their minds were filled with a jumble verging on pain, data that was not information and information that was not knowledge. To hear ten million simultaneous phone conversations, to see the continent’s entire video output, should have been a white noise. Instead it was a tidal wave of detail rammed through the tiny aperture of their minds… (285)

Mr. Slippery looked around him, using all his millions of perceptors. The Earth floated serene. Viewed in the visible, it looked like a thousand pictures he had seen as a human. But in the ultraviolet, he could follow its hydrogen aura out many thousands of kilometers. And the high-energy detectors on satellites at all levels perceived the radiation belts in thousands of energy levels, oscillating in the solar wind. Across the oceans of the world, he could feel the warmth of the currents, see just how fast they were moving. And all the while, he monitored the millions of tiny voices that were now comng back to life as he and Erythrina carefully set the human race’s communication system back on its feet and gently prodded it into function. Every ship in the seas, every aircraft now making for safe landing, every one of the loans, the payments, the meals of an entire race registered clearly on some part of his consciousness. With perception came power; almost everything he saw, he could alter, destroy, or enhance. By the analogical rules of the covens, there was only one valid word for themselves in their present state: they were gods” (300).

 -True Names

On Narratives of Promiscuity

[links that may or may not make this less opaque to follow]

All the talks of crises of accumulation lately have us feeling slightly anxious about our anxiety over cyborg metaphors and anxious landscapes generating tix sales for globalization porn, in ways that feel more than a little counterproductive to the business of archiving mid-nineties Utopia fever for what had not yet become the business-as-usual of Amazon.com and near mergers. Consider the following field notes, then, in hopes of conversation, against the background foreclosures of despair here beneath the reign of a constantly mean density.

 

What we can’t help noticing in the smattering of readings taken up this week is what can’t help but strike us as a (meta- or not, your call) narrative of attitudes toward and hopes for the internet traced more or less along the following arc: the mid-nineties moment of hopeful dissolution of boundaries between everything fixed into everything potentially becoming anything else; passing through the 00’s tempered correctives descending from ontological desires into the ontic sewage of, yeah, who owns whose plumbing/metaphors; arriving in a kind of synthesis called hybridity that wants to go on hanging its hat on hope without losing sight of the city supplying the hat (natch) tree. (In what follows we deal only in the first (major) phase of that narrative.)

 

This side of that mid-nineties moment, that is, it’s hard to take without a grain of home mortgage equity loans seriously Paul Virilio’s exuberant proclamation “Cyberspace is a new form of perspective… without a single precedent or reference: a tactile perspective” (106). All to the goods, we suppose, except we seem to recall accounts where the loss of felt connections to historical referents and our corresponding loss of affect attending the triumph of the virtual over the Real isn’t so much a good thing. Certainly the “dematerialization of media on the one hand and reification of meanings on the other” (23) Benedikt sees enabling the frictionless exchange of information electronically (in place of the cumbersome business of personal encounters directly experienced in the shadows of our nostalgic architecture) has gone by the same name in other stories less happy about the migration of the haptic into the virtual. This aint, we’ll repeat, to naysay what the hopes hope for, nor to deny the possibility that new technologies promise new possibilities. It’s just to recall that not all narratives of the spectacular shift from the “actuality of physical doing” to an “education-stratified, literate reality of symbolic doing” (26) feel equally free to conclude in the strong Platonism wherein it seems to us Benedikt takes shelter in “the arising shape of a new world, a world that must, in a multitude of ways, begin, at least, as both an extension and a transcription of the world as we know it and have built it thus far” (32). Here Plato meets colonialism: This world sux and figuring ways to make it suck less harshes my tele-contact high; I’ll try that one, please.

 

And yet such narratives, replete with casual invocations of spectacle and the virtual as though they were equivalent accounts of the conditions of freedom, depend upon just such a “freedom” from referents and conceptual rigor underwriting the utopian clamor for a freedom that these days looks less and less like one. This is what every Smith in the Matrix knows: “We are here because we are not free.” But we know this because Hollywood told us so, which is to say history has a funny way of explaining itself after the facts. How else to make sense of Scott Bukatman offering in 1993  the “terminal space” he derives from Neuromancer and Blade Runner as analog to the dictum “cyberspace is a method of conceiving the inconcievable—an imaginary solution to the real contradictions of the Dataist Era” (99) inside which spectators become (italicized in the original) “pure gaze” as though this were a good thing? We can appreciate the exuberant hopefulness of these accounts of ‘everything is drifting free of everything’ as historical affects, in other words, but we struggle to reconcile their hopes with the terms of the hoping. Much as we would like to see the movie that takes as its hero Merleau-Ponty while passing the name-checked oracles Debord and Vaneigem en route to cashing in on the vocabulary of mode of production with Daddy Jameson looking on, we fear the imaginary solution that explains the frictionless exchange of these nouns drained of conceptual values Bukatman’s contradictions call into question is left up to us:

 

“A standing joke about cyberspace is that, in an era of ATMs and global banking, cyberspace is where your money is. So cyberspace is a financial space, a space of capital; it is a social space; it is responsive; it can be modified; it is a place of testing and the arena for technological rites of passage (Tomas)… Whether a real space or a ‘consensual hallucination,’ cyberspace produces a unified experience of spatiality, and thus social being, in a culture that has become impossibly fragmented. On the other hand, we should note that cyberspace is a ‘technological utopia, a sort of computer simulation of the future, or of the possible, within the framework of the real—the framework of the existing mode of production” (101).

 

Yes indeed. The question, then, is—call it dematerialization, deterritorialization, promiscuity (that “strategy of accretion and re-articulation without regard to proper boundaries,” as Tyler Curtain defines it), hysteria (as Plant re-mobilizes it, finding the “possibility of another mode of production” Irigary found in “the point at which association gets a little too free, spinning off in its own directions and making links without reference to any central core” so that “Her very inability to concentrate now connects her with the parallel processing of machines which function without unified control”), or the schizophrenia all implicitly or explicitly embrace—can the dissolution of difference into the hopeful stew of exchangeability (of bodies, gender, theoretical accounts) any longer be taken seriously as a strategically useful explosion of the core into all periphery, all the time? And would we really even want to? It’s easy to be glib, that is, about what from 1996 can’t help but seem nonsense to us in 2008: “Global telecommunications and the migration of capital from the West are undermining the pale male world and the patriarchal structures of the south and east, bringing unprecedented power to women workers” (Plant 349). (Although even in 1996, we wonder, would these phantom empowered women workers have included e.g. the unmentioned bodies belonging to those phone sex workers whose virtual properties alone Allucqure Rosanne Stone was interested in in 1992?) But it’s harder to answer what it was, back then, that made it seem briefly that the emergence of “a public,” in Curtain’s words quoting Michael Warner, as “a space of discourse organized by nothing other than discourse itself” (325) could be an answer to anything other than problems of discourse?

 

That’s asked less tongue in cheek than it’s been made to sound. Indeed it strikes us as a very live, not to say real, question. In our own words, that is, the question remains: this side of the consolidation of the internet’s potential into this or that instance of frictionless exchange and dematerialization of media—not to mention the infection of our critical vocabularies and the resultant poverty of concepts for asking this by more of the same—what useful horizon beyond the grim ones and zeroes of our present impoverished imaginings are we able to (ouch) think?

---

Upon reconsideration it occurs to us Benedikt perhaps meant the “new world” that he foresaw cyberspace making in synthesis with the material world, whereas we initially took him to mean a “new world” overlaid and in place of the irksome material and materiality of this one. We stand by the reading in context, but admit it’s open to interpretation.

Notes on Coincedences

Whereas Turkle’s self-described “sociology of superficial knowledge” concerns itself with the computer as an “evocative object” (what she sometimes designates an “information object”) lodged in a methodological shift from looking at “the things the computer does for us… to what using it does to us”, Ceruzzi’s equally paradigm busting effort weds what he calls a “systems approach” to “a social constructionist approach” welded onto the backbone of military industrial cum corporate financing of the architectural hardware giving us Spacecraft and Silicon Valley. Their moments of coincidence are less coincidences than syntheses, in other words, between the subjective and objective sides of a tale neither quite names directly. Given that, it’s tempting to make “hackers” the third term that completes this triangulation, as that medium neither bracketing off the objective machinations and ramifications of combat between the “rule based transparency” of machine code and assembly languages against the gestural opacity of graphical interfaces (oh specters of surface/depth models!) played out conceptually in commercials as Apple vs. PC, per Turkle; nor the subjectless mapping of logical structures fed by military-industrial capital seeking (without quite knowing it at the time) technologies to wed ROM and RAM into that single SAGE-like (Hello, Thomas!) machine that will send home the hordes of women missing their card punchers and cluttering up the workrooms of pharmaceuticals, insurance conglomerates, the IRS and universities Ceruzzi traces: but something else entirely, that hoped-for interface between the two that effaces naïveté and missiles alike in becoming the subject of its own object.

 

The trouble is that in grasping that “entirely” we tend to lose its “something else.” The hopeful politics of Turkle’s hacker aesthetic of “transparent algorithms” (15)—contained in the slogan “just as the computer is available to understanding, so should be the political world” (163), with its implicit metaphysics pitting an artificially intelligent and wizard-like posthumanism against the mechanical specs of an utterly determinist Marxism as merely so many drab instances of “Pandemonium” versus “the Lovelace model”—disappears inside the computational slips producing the triumphant dictum “if we are machines, we are human” (277). If along the way we get glimpses of something else—“Consciousness is just a feeling of thinking” (266); “It is I” (from a Catholic, no less!) (269); “What is most valued and most beautiful is what is most freely constructed” (230); “We construct our own minds” (231)—the game is given away during the seventh inning stretch when “Lady Lovelace’s dictum begins to have a different feel when obedience means autonomy” (256). We are stuck with that old bugaboo of metaphysics, in other words: whose machine/autonomy is it, i.e. who owns the labor inside the hardware letting us think so? And curiously, if perhaps predictably, the breakdown becomes visible in the humanism stuck inside aesthetics: “saying that a computer ‘decided to move a queen by adding’ is a little bit like saying that Picasso ‘created Guernica by making brushstrokes.’ Reducing things to this level of ‘local’ description gives no satisfying way to grasp the whole” (248). Fleshing out this debate fully would jeopardize our present schematic reduction of things to neat categories, but nonetheless and really: if he didn’t make the painting with brushstrokes, then what did he? And how far have we gotten, really, if to talk the materials of aesthetic production is to, ah, localize our accounts of human agency in ways that betray global accounts of, what, genius? And then where and who is this dispenser of stuffs of genius to whom obedience is autonomy, pray tell, and what’s the going rate?

 

Meanwhile, while we were away wondering who dropped the curtain covering up the brushstrokes than whose sum the painting is greater, we left behind the business of converting the architecture of rooms themselves and the people in them to the architecture of hardware just as fast as Capital and Science can make it happen, preferably before the Soviets get there first. The drama of Ceruzzi’s account is of course the drifting free of software from hardware that is the paradoxical result of the initial struggle to reconcile data with operations in one place: the stored-program computer. What is fascinating here is the inscription within our construction of the technology itself of that founding division of social labor between manual and intellectual, experience and speculation, material action and theoretical know-how. Get them in one place under a universal operating system, and all your problems will be solved: this is the map that finally maps Roger Mexico’s points onto Slothrop’s stars, jettisoning Poisson and his uselessly precise distributions once and for all in an equation (destined perhaps to be called “Swanlake’s Symmetry”?) that stops and explains the rockets randomly falling in City Paranoia “all over the fucking East End, you see” (Gravity’s Rainbow, Viking 162). Except, no, wait, now we have this pesky ghost in the machine (that might in fact be the machine itself, or at least not readily separable from it) that seems to have a mind of its own, or something we feel inclined to call a mind, preferring the comforts of Ethos to the immiseration of Telos. Especially when the latter keeps turning out to be no more teleological than, say, the weather, or what the Markets “did” today:

 

“In October 1968 a conference was convened in Garmisch, Germany, with the provocative title “Software Engineering.” The conference marked the end of the age of innocence, a realization that a ‘crisis’ in software production would not end soon but could—and had to—be managed… That the conference was sponsored by NATO further revealed software engineering’s distance from computer science, which was centered in the universities. Conference organizers had recognized that computers were responsible for systems that put human lives at risk, including the military systems employed at NATO… In December 1968, under pressure from the U.S. government, IBM announced that the following year it would ‘unbundle’ its software; that is, charge separately for it instead of combining its costs with that of hardware systems. One of the first products it began to sell was also one of the most successful in the history of computing, its Consumer Information Control System (CICS), which it offered on a tape beginning in July 1969 for $600 a month. Software remained ethereal, but now it could be bought and sold. The effect of that decision was to open up up the field of software to comercial vendors, who would now be driven by the powerful and unforgiving forces of the free marketplace… Although not made in response to the crisis, the decision by IBM to sell its software and services separately from its hardware probably did even more [than the development of new and better integrated high-level programming languages to replace the quickly becoming obsolete COBOL and FORTRAN] to address the problem. It led to a commercial software industry that needed to produce reliable software in order to survive. The crisis remained, however, and became a permanent aspect of computing. Software came of age in 1968; the following decades would see further changes and further adaptations to hardware advances.”

-A History of Modern Computing, Paul Ceruzzi (106-8)

If it seems a little cheeky to break off in medias res mocking the Real Metaphysica of Capital with a lengthy quotation from a history of technology, we must admit we are feeling a little cheeky. But some symptoms appear so at home on the surfaces of things we feel they need no symptomologists. And while we feel safe in confessing our suspicion that it will turn out to be true to say something like “What we really see in the drifting free of software from hardware in Ceruzzi’s account is the drifting free of finance capital from its industrial base, producing the postmodernity we’ve come to know and love” and study in classes, complete with our confusions of leisure and labor, pleasure and production, software/hardware/mind/body dubbed cybernetics, we are not yet sure we are sufficiently equipped to make the claim. So tune in next week, dear readers! And yet, lest we be accused of chicanery for leaving our analysis open-ended this way (we haven’t yet finished the book, after all), let us leave you with a few keywords, Amazon word-cloud style, nouns rendered so many Legos with which to construct your own obedience here beneath the increasingly sweltering Logos:

 

1968, October, July, software engineering, computer science, crisis, NATO, IBM, Consumer Information Control System, “human lives at risk”

 

Compute!