**
Signifying the Processes of Production
"Language is not a code," Lacan asserted, because he wished to
deny any one-to-one correspondence between the signifier and the signified.(11)
In word processing, however, language is a code. The relation between assembly
and compiler languages is specified by a coding arrangement, as is the relation
of the compiler language to the programming commands that the user manipulates.
Through these multiple transformations some quantity is conserved, but it
is not the mechanical energy implicit in a system of levers or the molecular
energy of a thermodynamical system. Rather it is the informational structure
that emerges from the interplay between pattern and randomness. The immateriality
of the text, deriving from a translation of mechanical leverage into informational
patterns, allows transformations to take place that would be unthinkable
if matter or energy were the primary basis for the systemic exchanges. This
textual fluidity, which the user learns in her body as she interacts with
the system, implies that signifiers flicker rather than float.
To explain what I mean by flickering signifiers, I will find it useful briefly
to review Lacan's notion of floating signifiers. Lacan, operating within
a view of language that was primarily print-based rather than electronically
mediated, not surprisingly focused on presence and absence as the dialectic
of interest.(12) When he formulated the concept of floating signifiers,
he drew on Saussure's idea that signifiers are defined by networks of relational
differences between themselves rather than by their relation to signifieds.
He complicated this picture by maintaining that signifieds do not exist
in themselves, except insofar as they are produced by signifiers. He imagined
them as an ungraspable flow floating beneath a network of signifiers that
itself is constituted through continual slippages and displacements. Thus
for him a doubly reinforced absence is at the core of signification--absence
of signifieds as things-in-themselves as well as absence of stable correspondences
between signifiers. The catastrophe in psycholinguistic development corresponding
to this absence in signification is castration, the moment when the (male)
subject symbolically confronts the realization that subjectivity, like language,
is founded on absence.
How does this scenario change when floating signifiers give way to flickering
signifiers? Foregrounding pattern and randomness, information technologies
operate within a realm in which the signifier is opened to a rich internal
play of difference. In informatics the signifier can no longer be understood
as a single marker, for example an ink mark on a page. Rather it exists
as a flexible chain of markers bound together by the arbitrary relations
specified by the relevant codes. As I write these words on my computer,
I see the lights on the video screen, but for the computer the relevant
signifiers are magnetic tracks on disks. Intervening between what I see
and what the computer reads are the machine code that correlates alphanumeric
symbols with binary digits, the compiler language that correlates these
symbols with higher level instructions determining how the symbols are to
be manipulated, the processing program that mediates between these instructions
and the commands I give the computer, and so forth. A signifier on one level
becomes a signified on the next higher level. Precisely because the relation
between signifier and signifier at each of these levels is arbitrary, it
can be changed with a single global command. If I am producing ink marks
by manipulating moveable type, changing the font requires changing each
line of type. By contrast, if I am producing flickering signifiers on a
video screen, changing the font is as easy as giving the system a single
command. The longer the chain of codes, the more radical the transformations
that can be effected. Acting as linguistic levers, the coding chains impart
astonishing power to even very small changes. Such leverage is possible
because the constant reproduced through multiple coding layers is a pattern
rather than a presence. Pattern can be recognized through redundancy or
repetition of elements. If there is only repetition, however, no new information
is imparted; the intermixture of randomness rescues pattern from sterility.
If there is only randomness, the result is gibberish rather than communication.
Information is produced by a complex dance between predictability and unpredictabililty,
repetition and variation. We have seen that the possibilities for mutation
are enhanced and heightened by long coding chains. We can now understand
mutation in more fundamental terms. Mutation is crucial because it names
the bifurcation point at which the interplay between pattern and randomness
causes the system to evolve in a new direction.(13) Mutation implies both
the replication of pattern--the morphological standard against which it
can be measured and understood as a mutation--and the interjection of randomness--the
variations that mark it as a deviation so decisive it can no longer be assimilated
into the same.
Mutation is the catastrophe in the pattern/randomness dialectic analogous
to castration in presence/absence. It marks the opening of pattern to randomness
so extreme that the expectation of continuous replication can no longer
be sustained. But as with castration, this only appears to be a disruption
located at a specific moment. The randomness to which mutation testifies
is always already interwoven into pattern. One way to understand this "always
already" is through the probability function that mathematically defines
information in Claude Shannon's classic equations in information theory.(14)
Were randomness not always already immanent, we would be in the Newtonian
world of strict causality rather than the information-theoretic realm of
probability. More generally, randomness is involved because it is only against
the background or possibility of non-pattern that pattern can emerge. Wherever
pattern exists, randomness is implicit as the contrasting term that allows
pattern to be understood as such. The crisis named by mutation is as wide-ranging
and pervasive in its import within the pattern/randomness dialectic as castration
is within the tradition of presence/absence, for it is the visible mark
that testifies to the continuing interplay of the dialectical terms.
Shifting the emphasis from presence/absence to pattern/randomness suggests
different choices for tutor texts. Rather than Freud's discussion of "fort/da"
(a short passage whose replication in hundreds of commentaries would no
doubt astonish its creator), theorists interested in pattern and randomness
might point to something like David Cronenberg's film The Fly. At
a certain point the protagonist's penis does fall off (he quaintly puts
it in his medicine chest as a momento to times past), but the loss scarcely
registers in the larger metamorphosis he is undergoing. The operative transition
is not from male to female-as-castrated-male, but from human to something
radically other than human (see Figure 3). Flickering signification brings
together language with a psychodynamics based on the symbolic moment when
the human confronts the posthuman.
I understand "human" and "posthuman" to be historically
specific constructions that emerge from different configurations of embodiment,
technology, and culture. A convenient point of reference for the human is
the picture constructed by nineteenth-century U.S. and British anthropologists
of "man" as a tool-user.(15) Using tools may shape the body (some
anthropologists made this argument), but the tool nevertheless is envisioned
as an object, apart from the body, that can be picked up and put down at
will. When the claim could not be sustained that man's unique nature was
defined by tool use (because other animals were shown also to use tools),
the focus shifted during the early twentieth century to man the tool-maker.
Typical is Kenneth P. Oakley's 1949 Man the Tool-Maker, a magisterial
work with the authority of the British Museum behind it.(16) Oakley, in
charge of the Anthropological Section of the museum's Natural History division,
wrote in his introduction, "Employment of tools appears to be [man's]
chief biological characteristic, for considered functionally they are detachable
extensions of the forelimb" [p. 1]. The kind of tool he envisioned
was mechanical rather than informational; it goes with the hand,
not on the head. Significantly, he imagined the tool to be at once
"detachable" and an "extension," separate from yet partaking
of the hand. If the placement and kind of tool marks his affinity with the
epoch of the human, its construction as a prosthesis points forward to the
posthuman. Similar ambiguities informed the Macy Conference discussions
taking place during the same period (1946-53), as participants wavered between
a vision of man as a homeostatic self-regulating mechanism whose boundaries
were clearly delineated from the environment,(17) and a more threatening,
reflexive vision of a man spliced into an informational circuit that could
change him in unpredictable ways. By the 1960s, the consensus within cybernetics
had shifted dramatically toward reflexivity. By the 1980s, the inertial
pull of homeostasis as a constitutive concept had largely given way to theories
of self-organization that implied radical changes were possible within certain
kinds of complex systems.(18) Through these discussions, the "posthuman"
future of "humanity" began increasingly to be evoked. Examples
range from Hans Moravec's invocation of a "postbiological" future
in which human consciousness is downloaded into a computer, to the more
sedate (and in part already realized) prospect of a symbiotic union between
human and intelligent machine that Howard Rheingold calls "intelligence
augmentation."(19) Although these visions differ in the degree and
kind of interfaces they imagine, they concur that the posthuman implies
a coupling so intense and multifaceted that it is no longer possible to
distinguish meaningfully between the biological organism and the informational
circuits in which it is enmeshed. Accompanying this change, I have argued,
is a corresponding shift in how signification is understood and corporeally
experienced. In contrast to Lacanian psycholinguistics, derived from the
generative coupling of linguistics and sexuality, flickering signification
is the progeny of the fascinating and troubling coupling of language and
machine.
Information Narratives and Bodies of Information
The shift from presence and absence to pattern and randomness is encoded
into every aspect of contemporary literature, from the physical object that
constitutes the text to such staples of literary interpretation as character,
plot, author, and reader. The development is by no means even; some texts
testify dramatically and explicitly to the shift, whereas others manifest
it only indirectly. I will call the texts where the displacement is most
apparent information narratives. Information narratives show in exaggerated
form changes that are more subtly present in other texts as well. Whether
in information narratives or contemporary fiction generally, the dynamic
of displacement is crucial. One could focus on pattern in any era, but the
peculiarity of pattern in these texts is its interpenetration with randomness
and its implicit challenge to physicality. Pattern tends to overwhelm
presence, marking a new kind of immateriality which does not depend
on spirituality or even consciousness, only on information.
I begin my exploration with William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984),
the novel that sparked the cyberpunk movement and motivated Autodesk, a
software company, to launch a major initiative in developing virtual reality
technology. Hard on the heels of Neuromancer came two more volumes,
Count Zero (1986) and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988). The Neuromancer
trilogy gave a local habitation and a name to the disparate spaces of computer
simulations, networks, and hypertext windows that prior to Gibson's intervention
had been discussed as separate phenomena. Gibson's novels acted like seed
crystals thrown into a supersaturated solution; the time was ripe for the
technology known as cyberspace to precipitate into public consciousness.
The narrator defines cyberspace as a "consensual illusion" accessed
when a user "jacks into" a computer (p. 51). Here the writer's
imagination outstrips existing technologies, for Gibson imagines a direct
neural link between the brain and computer through electrodes. Another version
of this link is a socket implanted behind the ear which accepts computer
chips, allowing direct neural access to computer memory. Network users collaborate
in creating the richly textured landscape of cyberspace, a "graphic
representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the
human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace
of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding
. . ." (p. 51). Existing in the non-material space of computer simulation,
cyberspace defines a perimeter within which pattern is the essence of the
reality, presence an optical illusion.
Like the landscapes they negotiate, the subjectivities who operate within
cyberspace also become patterns rather than physical entities. Case, the
computer cowboy who is the novel's protagonist, still has a physical presence,
although he regards his body as so much "meat" that exists primarily
to sustain his consciousness until the next time he can enter cyberspace.
Others have completed the transition that Case's values imply. Dixie Flatline,
a cowboy who encountered something in cyberspace that flattened his EEG,
ceased to exist as a physical body and lives now as a personality construct
within the computer, defined by the magnetic patterns that store his identity.
The contrast between the body's limitations and cyberspace's power highlights
the advantages of pattern over presence. As long as the pattern endures,
one has attained a kind of immortality. Such views are authorized by cultural
conditions that make physicality seem a better state to be from than to
inhabit. In a world despoiled by overdeverlopment, overpopulation, and time-release
environmental poisons, it is comforting to think that physical forms can
recover their pristine purity by being reconstituted as informational patterns
in a multidimensional computer space. A cyberspace body, like a cyberspace
landscape, is immune to blight and corruption. It is no accident that the
vaguely apocalyptic landscapes of films like The Terminator, Bladerunner
and Hardware occur in narratives focusing on cybernetic lifeforms.
The sense that the world is rapidly becoming uninhabitable by human beings
is part of the impetus toward the displacement of presence by pattern.
These connections lie close to the surface in Neuromancer. "Get
just wasted enough, find yourself in some desperate but strangely arbitrary
kind of trouble, and it was possible to see Ninsei as a field of data, the
way the matrix had once reminded him of proteins linking to distinguish
cell specialities. Then you could throw yourself into a highspeed drift
and skid, totally engaged but set apart from it all, and all around you
the dance of biz, information interacting, data made flesh in the mazes
of the black market. . ." (p. 16). The metaphoric slippages between
urban sprawl, computer matrix and biological protein culminate in the final
elliptical phrase, "data made flesh." Information is the putative
origin, physicality the derivative manifestation. Body parts sold in black
market clinics, body neurochemistry manipulated by synthetic drugs, body
of the world overlaid by urban sprawl testify to the precariousness of physical
existence. If flesh is data incarnate, why not go back to the source and
leave the perils of physicality behind?
The reasoning presupposes that subjectivity and computer programs have a
common arena in which to interact. Historically, that arena was first defined
in cybernetics by the creation of a conceptual framework that constituted
humans, animals, and machines as information-processing devices receiving
and transmitting signals to effect goal-directed behavior.(20) Gibson matches
this technical achievement with two literary innovations that allow subjectivity,
with its connotations of consciousness and self-awareness, to be articulated
together with abstract data. The first is a subtle modification in point
of view, abbreviated in the text as pov. More than an acroynym, pov is a
substantive noun that constitutes the character's subjectivity by serving
as a positional marker substituting for his absent body.
In its usual Jamesian sense, point of view presumes the fiction of a person
who observes the action from a particular angle and tells what he sees.
In the preface to The Portrait of a Lady, James imagines a "house
of fiction" with a "million windows" formed by "the
need of the individual vision and by the pressure of the individual will."(21)
At each "stands a figure with a pair of eyes, or at least with a field
glass, which forms, again and again, for observation, a unique instrument,
insuring to the person making use of it an impression distinct from every
other" (p. 46). For James the observer is an embodied creature, and
the specificity of his location determines what he can see as he looks out
on a scene that itself is physically specific. When an omniscient viewpoint
is used, the limitations of the narrator's corporeality begin to fall away,
but the suggestion of embodiment lingers in the idea of focus, the "scene"
created by the eye's movement.
Even for James, vision is not unmediated technologically. Significantly,
he hovers between eye and field glass as the receptor constituting vision.
Cyberspace represents a quantum leap forward into the technological construction
of vision. Instead of an embodied consciousness looking through the window
at a scene, consciousness moves through the screen to become the
pov, leaving behind the body as a unoccupied shell. In cyberspace point
of view does not emanate from the character; rather, the pov literally is
the character. If a pov is annihilated the character disappears with it,
ceasing to exist as a consciousness in and out of cyberspace. The realistic
fiction of a narrator who observes but does not create is thus unmasked
in cyberspace. The effect is not primarily metafictional, however, but in
a literal sense metaphysical, above and beyond physicality. The crucial
difference between the Jamesian point of view and cyberspace pov is that
the former implies physical presence, whereas the latter does not.
Gibson's technique recalls Robbe-Grillet's novels, which were among the
first information narratives to exploit the formal consequences of combining
subjectivity with data. In Robbe-Grillet, however, the effect of interfacing
narrative voice with objective description was paradoxically to heighten
the narrator's subjectivity, for certain objects, like the jalousied windows
or the centipede in Jealousy, are inventoried with obsessive interest,
indicating a mindset that is anything but objective. In Gibson, the space
in which subjectivity moves lacks this personalized stamp. Cyberspace is
the domain of postmodern collectivity, constituted as the resultant of millions
of vectors representing the diverse and often conflicting interests of human
and artificial intelligences linked together through computer networks.
To make this space work as a level playing field on which humans and computers
can meet on equal terms, Gibson introduces his second innovation. Cyberspace
is created by transforming a data matrix into a landscape in which narratives
can happen. In mathematics matrix is a technical term denoting data that
have been arranged into an n-dimensional array. Expressed in this form,
data seem as far removed from the fascinations of story as random number
tables are from the National Inquirer. Because the array is already
conceptualized in spatial terms, however, it is a small step to imagining
it as a three-dimensional landscape. Narrative becomes possible when this
spatiality is given a temporal dimension by the pov's movement through it.
The pov is located in space, but it exists in time. Through
the track it weaves, the desires, repressions, and obsessions of subjectivity
can be expressed. The genius of Neuromancer lies in its explicit
recognition that the categories Kant considered fundamental to human experience,
space and time, can be used as a conjunction to join awareness with data.
Reduced to a point, the pov is abstracted into a purely temporal entity
with no spatial extension; metaphorized into an interactive space, the datascape
is narrativized by the pov's movement through it. Data are thus humanized,
and subjectivity computerized, allowing them to join in a symbiotic union
whose result is narrative.
Such innovations carry the implications of informatics beyond the textual
surface into the signifying processes that constitute theme and character.
I suspect that Gibson's novels have been so influential not only because
they present a vision of the posthuman future that is already upon us--in
this they are no more prescient than many other science fiction novels--but
also because they embody within their techniques the assumptions expressed
explicitly in the novels' themes. This kind of move is possible or inevitable
when the cultural conditions authorizing the assumptions are pervasive enough
so that the posthuman is experienced as an everyday lived reality as well
as an intellectual proposition.
In The Condition of Postmodernity, David Harvey characterizes the
economic aspects of the shift to an informatted society as a transition
from a Fordist regime to a regime of flexible accumulation.(22) As Harvey
along with many others have pointed out, in late capitalism durable goods
yield pride of place to information.(23) A significant difference between
information and durable goods is replicability. Information is not a conserved
quantity. If I give you information, you have it and I do too. With information,
the constraining factor separating the haves from the have-nots is not so
much possession as access. The shift of emphasis from ownership to access
is another manifestation of the underlying transition from presence/absence
to pattern/randomness. Presence precedes and makes possible the idea of
possession, for one can possess something only if it already exists. By
contrast, access implies pattern recognition, whether the access is to a
piece of land (recognized as such through the boundary pattern defining
that land as different from adjoining parcels), confidential information
(constituted as confidential through the comparison of its informational
patterns with less secure documents), or a bank vault (associated with knowing
the correct pattern of tumbler combinations). In general, access differs
from possession because it tracks patterns rather than presences. When someone
breaks into a computer system, it is not her physical presence that is detected
but the informational traces her entry has created.(24)
When the emphasis falls on access rather than ownership, the private/public
distinction that was so important in the formation of the novel is radically
reconfigured. Whereas possession implies the existence of private life based
on physical exclusion or inclusion, access implies the existence of credentialling
practices that use patterns rather than presences to distinguish between
those who do and do not have the right to enter. Morover, entering is itself
constituted as access to data rather than a change in physical location.
In DeLillo's White Noise (1985), for example, the Gladney's home,
traditionally the private space of family life, is penetrated by noise and
radiation of all wavelengths--microwave, radio, television. The penetration
signals that private spaces, and the private thoughts they engender and
figure, are less a concern than the interplay between codes and the articulation
of individual subjectivity with data. Jack Gladney's death is prefigured
for him as a pattern of pulsing stars around a computerized data display,
and it is surely no accident that Babette, his wife, objects to the idea
that a man sexually "enters" a woman. The phrases she prefers
emphasize by contrast the idea of access.
Although the Gladney family still operates as a social unit (albeit with
the geographical dispersion endemic to postmodern life), their conversations
are punctuated by random bits of information emanating from the radio and
TV. The punctuation points toward a mutation in subjectivity that comes
from joining the focused attention of traditional novelistic consciousness
with the digitized randomness of miscellaneous bits. The mutation reaches
incarnation in Willie Mink, whose brain has become so addled by a designer
drug that his consciousness is finally indistinguishable from the white
noise that surrounds him. Through a different route than that used by Gibson,
DeLillo arrives at a similar destination: a vision of subjectivity constituted
through the interplay of pattern and randomness rather than presence and
absence.
The bodies of texts are also implicated in these changes. The displacement
of presence by pattern thins the tissue of textuality, making it a semipermeable
membrane that allows awareness of the text as an informational pattern to
infuse into the space of representation. When the fiction of presence gives
way to the recognition of pattern, passages are opened between the text-as-object
and representations within the text that are characteristically postmodern.
Consider the play between text as physical object and information flow in
Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler (1981). The text's awareness
of its own physicality is painfully apparent in the anxiety it manifests
toward keeping the literary corpus intact. Within the space of representation,
texts are subjected to birth defects, maimed and torn apart, lost and stolen,
and last but hardly least, pulverized when the wrong computer key is pushed
and the stored words are randomized into miscellaneous bits.
The anxiety is transmitted to readers within the text who keep pursuing
parts of textual bodies only to lose them, as well as to readers outside
the text who must try to make sense of the radically discontinuous narrative.
Only when the titles of the parts are perceived to form a sentence is the
literary corpus reconstituted as a unity. Significantly, the recuperation
is syntactical rather than physical. It does not arise from or imply an
intact physical body. Rather, it emerges from the patterns--metaphorical,
grammatical, narrative, thematic and textual--that the parts together make.
As the climactic scene in the library suggests, the reconstituted corpus
is a body of information, emerging from the discourse community among whom
information circulates.
The correspondence between transformations in human and textual bodies can
be seen as early as William Burroughs' Naked Lunch (1959), written
in the decade that saw the institutionalization of cybernetics and the construction
of the first large-scale electronic computer. The narrative metamorphizes
nearly as often as bodies within it, suggesting by its cut-up method a textual
corpus as artificial, heterogeneous, and cybernetic as they are.(25) Since
the fissures that mark the text always fall within the units that
comprise the textual body--within chapters, paragraphs, sentences and even
words--it becomes increasingly clear that they do not function to delineate
the textual corpus.Rather, the body of the text is produced precisely by
these fissures, which are not so much ruptures as productive dialectics
bringing the narrative as a syntactic and chronological sequence into being.
Bodies within the text follow the same logic. Under the pressure of sex
and addiction, bodies explode or mutate, protoplasm is sucked out of cocks
or nostrils, plots are hatched to take over the planet or nearest lifeform.
Burroughs anticipates Jameson's claim that an information society is the
purest form of capitalism.(26) When bodies are constituted as information,
they can not only be sold but fundamentally reconstituted in response to
market pressures. Junk instantiates the dynamics of informatics and makes
clear its relation to late capitalism. Junk is the "ideal product"
because the "junk merchant does not sell his product to the consumer,
he sells the consumer to his product. He does not improve and simplify his
merchandise. He degrades and simplifies the client" ("Introduction,"
xxxix). The junkie's body is a harbinger of the postmodern mutant, for it
demonstrates how presence yields to patterns of assembly and disassembly
created by the flow of junk-as-information through points of amplification
and resistance.
The characteristics of information narratives include, then, an emphasis
on mutation and transformation as a central thematic for bodies within the
text as well as for the bodies of texts. Subjectivity, already joined with
information technologies through cybernetic circuits, is further integrated
into the circuit by novelistic techniques that combine it with data. Access
vies with possession as a structuring element, and data are narrativized
to accomodate their integration with subjectivity. In general, materiality
and immateriality are joined in a complex tension that is a source of exultation
and strong anxiety. To understand the links between information narratives
and other contemporary fictions that may not obviously fall into this category,
let us turn now to consider the more general effects of informatics on narrative
encodings.
Functionalities of Narrative
The very word narrator implies a voice speaking, and a speaking voice implies
a sense of presence. Derrida, announcing the advent of grammatology, focused
on the gap that separates speaking from writing; such a change transforms
the narrator from speaker to scribe, or more precisely an absence toward
which the inscriptions point.(27) Informatics pushes this transformation
further. As writing yields to flickering signifiers underwritten by binary
digits, the narrator becomes not so much a scribe as a cyborg authorized
to access the relevant codes.
To see how the function of the narrator changes, consider the seduction
scene from "I Was an Infinitely Hot and Dense White Dot," one
of the stories in Mark Layner's My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist.(28)
The narrator, "high on Sinutab" and driving "isotropically,"
so that any destination is equally probable, finds himself at a "squalid
little dive" (p. 6).
I don't know. . . but there she is. I can't tell if she's a human or a fifth-generation gynemorphic android and I don't care. I crack open an ampule of mating pheromone and let it waft across the bar, as I sip my drink, a methyl isocyanate on the rocks--methyl isocyanate is the substance which killed more than 2,000 people when it leaked in Bhopal, India, but thanks to my weight training, aerobic workouts, and a low-fat fiber-rich diet, the stuff has no effect on me. Sure enough she strolls over and occupies the stool next to mine. . . . My lips are now one angstrom unit from her lips . . . I begin to kiss her but she turns her head away. . . . I can't kiss you, we're monozygotic replicants--we share 100% of our genetic material. My head spins. You are the beautiful day, I exclaim, your breath is a zephyr of eucalyptus that does a pas de bourre across the Sea of Galilee. Thanks, she says, but we can't go back to my house and make love because monozygotic incest is forbidden by the elders. What if I said I could change all that. . . What if I said that I had a miniature shotgun that blasts gene fragments into the cells of living organisms, altering their genetic matrices so that a monozygotic replicant would no longer be a monozygotic replicant and she could then make love to a muscleman without transgressing the incest taboo, I say, opening my shirt and exposing the device which I had stuck in the waistband of my black jeans. How'd you get that thing? she gasps, ogling its thick fiber-reinforced plastic barrel and the Uzi-Biotech logo embossed on the magazine which held two cartridges of gelated recombinant DNA. I got it for Christmas. . . . Do you have any last words before I scramble your chromosomes, I say, taking aim. Yes, she says, you first (p. 7).
Much of the passage's wit comes from the juxtaposition of folk wisdom and
seduction cliches with high-tech language and ideas that makes them nonsensical.
The narrator sips a chemical that killed thousands when it leaked into the
environment, but he is immune to damage because he eats a low-fat diet.
The narrator leans close to the woman/android to kiss her, but he has not
yet made contact when he is an angstrom away, considerably less than the
diameter of a hydrogen atom. The characters cannot make love because they
are barred by incest taboos, being replicants from the same monozygote,
which would make them identical twins but does not seem to prevent them
from being opposite sexes. They are governed by kinship rules enforced by
tribal elders, but they have access to genetic technologies that intervene
in and disrupt evolutionary modes of descent. They think their problem can
be solved by an Uzi-Biotech weapon that will scramble their chromosomes,
but the narrator, at least, seems to expect their identities to survive
intact.
Even within the confines of a short story no more than five pages long,
this encounter is not preceded or followed by events that relate directly
to it. Rather the narrative leaps from scene to scene, which are linked
by only the most tenuous and arbitrary threads. The incongruities make the
narrative a kind of textual android created through patterns of assembly
and disassembly. There is no natural body to this text, any more than there
are natural bodies within the text. As the title intimates, identity merges
with typograpy ("I was a . . . dot") and is further conflated
with such high-tech reconstructions as computer simulations of gravitational
collapse ("I was an infintelyhot and dense white dot"). Signifiers
collapse like stellar bodies into an explosive materiality that approaches
the critical point of nova, ready to blast outward into dissipating waves
of flickering signification.
The explosive tensions between cultural codes that familiarize the action
and neologistic splices that dislocate traditional expectations do more
than structure the narrative. They also constitute the narrator, who exists
less as a speaking voice endowed with a plausible psychology than as a series
of fissures and dislocations that push toward a new kind of subjectivity.
To understand the nature of this subjectivity, let us imagine a trajectory
that arcs from storyteller to professional to some destination beyond. The
shared community of values and presence that Walter Benjamin had in mind
when he evoked the traditional storyteller whose words are woven into the
rhythms of work echo faintly in allusions to the Song of Songs and tribal
elders.(29) Overlaid on this is the professionalization that Lyotard wrote
about in The Postmodern Condition, in which the authority to tell
the story is constituted by possessing the appropriate credentials that
qualify one as a member of a physically dispersed, electronically bound
professional community.(30) This phase of the trajectory is signified in
a number of ways. The narrator is driving "isotropically," indicating
that physical location is no longer necessary or relevant to the production
of the story. His authority derives not from his physical participation
in a community but his possession of a high-tech language that includes
pheramones, methyl isocyanate, and gelated recombinant DNA, not to mention
the Uzi-Biotech phallus. This authority too is displaced even as it is created,
for the incongruities reveal that the narrative and therefore the narrator
are radically unstable, about to mutate into a scarcely conceivable form,
signified in the story by the high-tech, identity-transforming orgasmic
blast that never quite comes.
What is this form? Its physical manifestations vary, but the ability to
manipulate complex codes is a constant. The looming transformation, already
enacted through the passage's language, is into a subjectivity who derives
his authority from possessing the correct codes. Countless scenarios exist
in popular literature and culture where someone fools a computer into thinking
he is an "authorized" person because he possesses or stumbles
upon the codes that the computer recognizes as constituting authorization.
Usually these scenarios imply that the person exists unchanged, taking on
a spurious identity that allows him to move unrecognized within an informational
system. There is, however, another way to read these narratives. Constituting
identity through authorization codes changes the person who uses them into
another kind of subjectivity, precisely one who exists and is recognized
because he knows the codes. The surface deception is underlaid by a deeper
truth. We become the codes we punch. The narrator is not a storyteller and
not a professional authority, although these functions linger in the narrative
as anachronistic allusions and wrenched referentiality. Rather the narrator
is a keyboarder, a hacker, a manipulator of codes.(31) Assuming that the
text was at some phase in its existence digitized, in a literal sense he
(it?) is these codes.
The construction of the narrator as a manipulator of codes obviously has
important implications for the construction of the reader. The reader is
similarly constituted through a layered archeology that moves from listener
to reader to decoder. Because codes can be sent over fiber optics essentially
instantaneously, there is no longer a shared, stable context that helps
to anchor meaning and guide interpretation. Like reading, decoding takes
place in a location arbitrarily far removed in space and time from the source
text. In contrast to fixed type print, however, decoding implies that there
is no original text--no first editions, no fair copies, no holographic manuscripts.
There are only the flickering signfiers, whose transient patterns evoke
and embody what G. W. S. Trow has called the context of no context, the
suspicion that all contexts, like all texts, are electronically mediated
constructions.(32) What binds the decoder to the system is not the stability
of an interpretive community or the intense pleasure of physically possessing
the book that all bibliophiles know. Rather it is her construction as a
cyborg, her recognition that her physicality is also data made flesh, another
flickering signifier in a chain of signification that extends through many
levels, from the DNA that in-formats her body to the binary code that is
the computer's first language.
"Functionality" is a term used by virtual reality technologists
to describe the communication modes that are active in a computer-human
interface. If the user wears a data glove, for example, hand motions constitute
one functionality. If the computer can respond to voice-activated commands,
voice is another functionality. If it can sense body position, spatial location
is yet another. Functionalities work in both directions; that is, they both
describe the computer's capabilities and also indicate how the user's sensory-motor
apparatus is being trained to accomodate the computer's responses. Working
with a VR simulation, the user learns to move her hand in stylized gestures
that the computer can accomodate. In the process, changes take place in
the neural configuration of the user's brain, some of which can be long-lasting.
The computer molds the human even as the human builds the computer.
When narrative functionalities change, a new kind of reader is produced
by the text. The effects of flickering signification ripple outward because
readers are trained to read through different functionalities, which can
affect how they interpret any text, including texts written before computers
were invented. Moreover, changes in narrative functionalities go deeper
than structural or thematic characteristics of a specific genre, for they
shift the modalities that are activated to produce the narrative. It is
on this level that the subtle connections between information narratives
and other kinds of contemporary fictions come into play.
Drawing on a context that included information technologies, Roland Barthes
in S/Z brilliantly demonstrated the possibility of reading a text as a production
of diverse codes.(33) Information narratives make that possibility an inevitability,
for they often cannot be understood, even on a literal level, without referring
to codes and their relation to information technologies. Flickering signification
extends the productive force of codes beyond the text to include the signifying
processes by which the technologies produce texts, as well as the interfaces
that enmesh humans into integrated circuits. As the circuits connecting
technology, text, and human expand and intensify, the point where quantitative
increments shade into qualitative transformation draws closer. If my assessment
is correct that the dialectic of pattern/randomness is displacing presence/absence,
the implications extend beyond narrative into many cultural arenas. In my
view, one of the most serious of these implications for the present cultural
moment is a systematic devaluation of materiality and embodiment. I find
this trend ironic, for changes in material conditions and embodied experience
are precisely what give the shift its deep roots in everyday experience.
In this essay I have been concerned not only to anatomize the shift and
understand its implications for literature but also to suggest that it should
be understood in the context of changing experiences of embodiment. If on
the one hand embodiment implies that informatics is imprinted into body
as well as mind, on the other it also acts as a reservoir of materiality
that resists the pressure toward dematerialization.
Implicit in nearly everything I have written here is the assumption that
presence and pattern are opposites existing in antagonistic relation. The
more emphasis that falls on one, the less the other is noticed and valued.
Entirely different readings emerge when one entertains the possibility that
pattern and presence are mutually enhancing and supportive. Paul Virilio
has observed that one cannot ask whether information technologies should
continue to be developed.(34) Given market forces already at work, it is
virtually (if I may use the word) certain that increasingly we will live,
work, and play in environments that construct us as embodied virtualities.(35)
I believe that our best hope to intervene constructively in this development
is to put an interpretive spin on it that opens up the possibilities of
seeing pattern and presence as complementary rather than antagonistic. Information,
like humanity, cannot exist apart from the embodiment that brings it into
being as a material entity in the world; and embodiment is always instantiated,
local, and specific. Embodiment can be destroyed but it cannot be replicated.
Once the specific form constituting it is gone, no amount of massaging data
will bring it back. This observation is as true of the planet as it is of
an individual lifeform. As we rush to explore the new vistas that cyberspace
has made available for colonization, let us also remember the fragility
of a material world that cannot be replaced.