All’s Wells that Ends Wells

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There is no pain! There is no law!

It'd suck to have to spring for two pairs of shoes at a time...

You’ll have to forgive the pun. But how else was I supposed to label my last blog (probably), while simultaneously continuing my habit of making light of literary classics and historical atrocities? It was a tough decision on my part, but I’ve made my peace with it. So, kiddies, here’s your piece of esoterica for the week: Pages 55-63 of Ollivier Dyens’ “The Rise of Cultural Bodies”

Dyens’ conclusions about the plastic body dovetail nicely with the Haraway and Pressman articles we’ve looked at the past two weeks. From Haraway, the idea that a mediated body need not refer to technology. And contra Pressman, a debate over whether the plastic body may be controlled.

This article has that strange, somewhat icky sensibility certain philosophers develop around bodymodding; a febrile, sexual fascination with pain, masochism and torture. Fetish as future. It’s like our evolution must be a painful experience, complete with Cronenbergian images of the flesh agonizingly moulding new limbs without the benefit of a womb. To be different, we must be imposed upon; a foetus slipped a scalpel so that it might do the C-section itself.

What Dyens’ decides from his reading of H.G. Wells and Franz Kafka is that they reflect a particularly late 19th-21st century reconception of these water-filled spacesuits, our skins: “the body would become this century’s fundamental concern, not only because its shape was about to be fundamentally challenged, but also because its specificity (as a receptacle for life) was being diluted and extended into nonorganic phenomena” (59). As Pressman pointed out last week, our definitions of what constitute ‘life’ and ‘living’ are being challenged. Dyens seems to subscribe to the idea that we are all carriers of media and culture, and that our bodies are our means of transmitting these values; more, that we are not carrying passive, unaware passengers but have instead become hosts to identities with individual agency. Our newly logical, plasticized bodies are founded as much upon “social pressure and political repression” as “flesh and genes” (60); we may only change by means of pain.

The Island of Dr. Moreau, The Holocaust, animal testing labs, plastic surgeons, slogging through Kafka. The estrangement of pain. The montage of repulsions.

There’s the shadow of Foucault’s Panopticon looming over Dyens’ analysis of The Metamorphosis, this idea that we can only be free from the prison of surveillance when we are a complete unknown. But to achieve that, one must not know oneself. Be punished. It’s an estrangement that torture seems to offer; it has a psychosexual allure. It leads to Dyens wearing leather pants in forty-degree heat (I imagine). Pressman agrees that the alteration of the body changes its relation to society, but she seems to conclude that it somehow makes us subject to the same control as a machine. The machine, for Dyens is already an apt comparison for humanity; our subjectivities are programmed. If we wish for the freedom we pay lip service to, we must pay a higher price. But that freedom would be so unfamiliar that, paradoxically, it is inhuman.

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From Foocoe, Feeline Trnslshuns 1

Oh, and The Onion continues to make my own humanity possible:

Broadband Umbilical Cords

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“You’re a thing. A construct. They grew you in a fucking lab.”

“But only God can make a tree.”

Artist's Conception of Jaimie Smith-Windsor's Kid

Your context for the week: Jaime Smith-Windsor’s “The Cyborg Mother: A Breached Boundary

We’re going to look at a piece that comes from the opposite polarity of Donna Haraway’s article from last week. Haraway was interested in the cyborg as a metaphor, a springboard to provocative suggestion. Smith-Windsor, by comparison, is concerned with literal technology. She brings its impact home, would bring it closer than home, to her very bosom if she could, were it not for the obstructing bramble of plastic and wires. Haraway was useful in terms of distancing ourselves from a knee-jerk association of the term “cyborg” with projects like Kevin Warwick‘s (I’m pretty sure this guy will accidentally invent SkyNet by the way); our understanding of the word is, after all, heavily mediated by the bombastic paranoia of sci-fi action flicks and ’80s thrash metal (okay, maybe that’s just a reflection of my teen years.)

With our palette somewhat cleansed, then, we may be more receptive to a comparatively mundane, everyday instance of the modern cyborg. Certainly we’ve all seen rose-tinted visions of impossibly tiny preemie babies resting comfortably in their high-tech incubators (usually accompanied by some kind of emotive post-rock a la Sigur Ros’ Staralfur or anything by Explosions in the Sky), but we seldom pause to consider the implications of this particular intersection between humans and technology. It’s all soft focus and chiming chords.

Not so here, as anyone who has read the piece can attest. It’s a strange mix between deeply personal, involving and unflinchingly graphic “diary” excerpts and cool, detached interrogation of the philosophical implications of the process. Admittedly, it’s not terribly difficult to defamiliarize something few of us have put much thought into, but that’s sorta the point. Even (and perhaps especially) essential, lifesaving procedures like mechanically simulated wombs constitute an invasion of the organic body. Smith-Windsor, taking something of a psychoanalytic view of the development of the psyche, suggests that a baby who spends its final trimester in an artificial environment will have a different innate relationship to its mother. This seems to suggest that the bond between an infant and its mother is the result of some type of hardwired imprinting that allows the child to recognize the body which birthed it.

“The human condition becomes the medium itself. The cyborg consciousness becomes, like the clear glass of the incubator, an invisible interface through which everything is mediated – the environment, the experience of living, the means to communicate, the way of ‘knowing.’ The relationship between mother and child itself is mediated by technology. Technology interrupts the relationship, intercepts the exchange of nurturing and needing of the infantile language. The Mother becomes redundant: technology becomes the external womb.” (280)

I find some faults with this way of thinking; personally I don’t believe that a child’s personality or understanding of its mother is substantially shaped by its time in the womb, and Smith-Windsor’s child’s two months in the incubator occurred during a pre-conscious period. With the unfortunate exceptions of long-term health problems, there is little to suggest that children who finish their development in artificial wombs have a different experience of the world than children born in the customary fashion.

I do, however, think that Smith-Windsor raises some interesting questions about how we understand what constitutes “life.” I may often be accused of not having a life, but most would argue that I am “alive.” Were I to suffer some misfortune that left me conscious but unable to breathe unassisted, I would still be thought alive. But if my consciousness were let slip, the machines would go on inflating and deflating my lungs, shocking my blood into motion. “Even after the body expires, the machines keep going. It is not until they are turned off that we are pronounced ‘dead,’” says Smith.

“What is life?” the great poet Harrison once asked (not to be confused with the poet Haddaway, who asked the equally valid question “What is love?”), and the cyborg casts what seems a simple question into doubt. Smith-Windsor concludes, I think, that by reducing the concept of “life” to a process which can be imitated to perfection by a machine we can no longer differentiate ourselves from it. And, she continues in tones dripping with dystopia, if we are no different from machines then we may similarly be valued only in utilitarian terms.

Spooky.

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This Blog is About “The Lawnmower (wo)Man”

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Your naive idiocy makes me VERY ANGRY!

Woman as Assemblage

Alright, this post isn’t about The Lawnmower Man. Not even a little. Men don’t even really enter into it (*phew* says Donna Haraway). But according to my blog stats, I get a coupla hits a day from people looking for The Lawnmower Man, so I figure I should pander to my target audience a little. If you came here looking for that, this post actually is about that movie.

Usually I try to tie those tangents into my argument like I do it all intentional and planned and such, but not this time. Won’t even pretend that wasn’t totally superfluous.

So, what is actually, uh, fluous to this week’s post? We’re looking at Donna Haraway’s A Manifesto for Cyborgs, a masterfully polemic and maddeningly enigmatic piece of rhetoric if ever there was (worth reading if you have twenty minutes to spare). As much as we discussed in class the importance of its context (or more specifically, our lack of awareness of its context), I’m not convinced our collective confusion was entirely based upon the datedness of Haraway’s article. Certainly, it was written to respond to a specific time and place, but it strikes me as one of those

pieces that’s not really bound to one milieu.

Certainly the article has enjoyed an uncommonly long shelf-life, with Haraway’s ideas continuing to be thought of as current while most writing by her contemporaries is rapidly reduced to the status of artifact, of interest only to a sort of cultural archaeologist. This is because Haraway’s writing is not chained to the spec tech of her day; she doesn’t ramble on for paragraphs about a distant future replete with phones without wires or the possibility of a paperless office.  Haraway describes the technology she’s interested in in a single line:  “Our best machines are made of sunshine; they are all light and clean because they are nothing but signals, electro-magnetic waves, a section of a spectrum.” Although beautifully written, the sentence tells us next to nothing about the technology (luminology?) upon which she bases her argument; it certainly doesn’t sound like cybernetics or any of the other strains of post/transhumanism I’ve been hammering into the ground on this blog the past coupla weeks.

Which is because it isn’t.  Haraway is talking about the cyborg in terms of pure theory, an ideological avatar, as concrete as “these sunshine belt machines” she conjures. Our class’ comprehension problem isn’t a result of Haraway’s context, but of our own. We have become so used to discussing the social implications of invasive technology like Kevin Warwick’s that we are somewhat blindsided by something which treats cybertech as a metaphor rather than as an imminent literality. Consider:

“Late-twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions used to apply to organisms and machines. Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert.”

Haraway is essentially using the synthetic destruction of binaries which the cyborg innately suggests as a kind of loophole to subversion. Haraway’s Man, the blind Lovecraftian monolith of patriarchy, conceives of the world as orderly and systematic, things that are One and things that are Other, because this gives him a logical basis upon which to justify his dominance. Confusion is to be avoided, as are unaccounted-for interminglings. Kevin Warwick’s project, while more idealistic than Haraway’s dystopian view of “the militant labour of masculinist politics,” is still at heart a utilitarian, serial exercise. One evolutionary step after another, one more way we can impose our will upon the world and shape it to our needs. It moves from one position of certainty to another.

Haraway advocates not being understood, and thus easily categorized and dismissed, as a means to strength and self-determination. She delights in being seen as an Enemy of the comfortable organic Self, has a sense that the quest for indifferent equality has failed and that ironic dualism holds more promise than any idealized monism. When she talks about “reconstructing the boundaries of daily life, in partial connection with others, in communication with all of our parts,” she’s not just talking about a future where we can telekinetically switch on the TV and summon a bottle of Blue from the fridge. It’s connected to all sorts of feminist theory, from repatriating the vagina (“Not in my backyard!”…) to establishing women as a political body, and it involves augmenting oneself not only with technology but with theory and philosophy and ontology.

The goddess is an ideal, and a deception. The cyborg is a real, and deceptive.

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I don't know what this is meant to represent, but it was on the page I found the Haraway article at, and it's just too goddamn hilarious to not draw attention to.

More search engine terms for my blog: Lawnmower Man, Jeff Fahey, optical illusion, Stanley Aronowitz, boobs

Computer Blue

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What sex will look like in 1999.

Prince is the ideal “new flesh.”

Hold up a moment! Wait. I have a quasi-defensible point here. You can run back to your four cherished Michael Jackson .mp3s in a moment, he’s not getting any deader. Prince though… if we’re going to talk about sex and technology, what better pop cultural point of entry is there? In the mid-80s the grimy wetware-modded cyberpunk futurism of Neuromancer and Videodrome was at its height. Contemporaneously, Prince was in the midst of gutting the organic body of classic post-James Brown funk and soul, replacing the aerobic horn sections of yore with banks of computerized synths, booting live drummers and bassists and granting the genre’s hip-swiveling rhythmic foundation to programmed keyboards. Prince wasn’t anywhere near the first to experiment with electronic instruments, but where Kraftwerk backspaced emotion and New Order begged for companionship contra coitus, the unnatural gleam of Prince’s revolutionary (pun) cyberfunk dripped with sex. Those synths may have been sterile, but they certainly weren’t impotent.

Sure, the lyrics to songs like Darling Nikki and Little Red Corvette were blatantly salacious, but the lyrics to Kraftwerk’s Trans-Europe Express could’ve been about nailing Olivia Newton-John and it still wouldn’t be sexy the way the wholly synthetic Kiss is. Prince’s entire public image, prior to his bizarre symbol period, was about transgression: masculine/feminine, black/white, queer/straight, the sexual/the divine… it was about collapsing binaries, forcing them into a controversial synthesis. I would add the division of man and machine to his collection of folded binaries. There’s a holistic serenity to Prince’s most forward-thinking work, an acceptance of technological integration that jumps from the same zeitgeist as the cyberpunks but emerges with less of the nicotine-stain soot that they wore with such snide pride.

It’s a rule of, uh, “thumb” that human beings can turn any technological advance into something useful for sex. It’s in our wiring, our need for the basic thrust-thrust-twitch of orgasm and the endorphin-drowse closeness afterward, and only the most dogmatic techno-purists (read: enforced-celibate programmers) seem optimistic (let alone enthusiastic) about shedding this primitive urge. The ruggedly pragmatic approach of the cyberpunk movement (and those movements with which it is associated) meant they were unlikely to sidestep the ickier aspects of technologically mediated boot-knocking; Blade Runner‘s pleasurebots and Videodrome‘s cassette-deck womb stem from the same bitterly post-Puritan worldview. Sex will always be present in a cybernetic world, but there’s no guarantee it will be anything but as consumptive and disposable as anything else blowing around the streets.

Lia Hotchkiss is right to identify the “ambivalence” to cybertransformations in cyberfunk-derived fiction. Part of it is a cynical acceptance of the belief that we will always be subject to the dominance of rich men and corporations. Sex is commodified within moments of becoming technologized; if, as the Bad Brains once sung, “we all must pay to cum” then we can be assured the rich man will cum first and everyone else’s pleasure agency declines with their tax bracket. Hence why, quoting Hotchkiss again, one man’s “transcendence of the body” so often forces a “restabilization of the real” for someone else. In the 2009 b-movie Gamer we see an expansion upon William Gibson’s concept of “meta puppet” proxy prostitutes. In the most obvious example, we are treated to an image of an almost baroquely grotesque man, obese and photographed as if he’d recently bathed in crude oil and chicken grease, who pays a monthly fee to remotely manipulate an attractive woman into feeding his fantasies. The woman’s experience is to be trapped within one’s body and experience, while the man is able to transcend his own gender and gruesome appearance to achieve satisfaction. All of Gamer‘s unfortunate puppets correspond to Baudrillard’s concept of the New Schizophrenic, defined as follows:

“[One who is] open to everything in spite of himself,” who experiences “too great a proximity of everything, the unclear promiscuity of everything which touches, invests, and penetrates without resistance, with no halo of private protection, not even his own body, to protect him anymore.’” (Tania Modleski qtd. in Hotchkiss)

The optimistic reading of Cronenberg’s films like Videodrome and eXistenZ suggests that leaving one’s body map to become New Flesh is sufficient to sidestep the corporate hierarchy, to slay the sinister Videodrome in other words; “Money Don’t Matter 2 Night” as Prince would have it. Gamer and its ilk posit that you must pay for your technology, and when technology becomes intermingled with something as essential as sex you are subject to complete control. Prince by comparison represents a fantasy of liberation from all bondage, save of the consensual variety; sex as route to revelation, to permanence, to immanence. It’s that attitude, the sense that through cybertransformation we might become something greater than machine or man which prevents even the grimmest cyberpunks from moving past ambivalence into outright despair; we might lose to the corporate machines, but we’ll still look okay bathing in the purple rain.

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Everything beautiful and terrible about robot sex in one pic.

Final Fantasy, First Citizen

LiveJournal Entry July 11, 2001 alone again…

well, i’ve been fighting wiht my dad asgain. god, why dose he hav to be SUCH a basterd to me? its like he dosent even CARE about me. i woud run away from home, but i dont think i could carry my stereo and all my cds with me. coudnt live without linkin park, KoRN, soad, ALIEN ANT FARM, stabbing westword, KITTIE, billy jole, NIN, pere ubu ect. ect. if olny the internet was faster i coud download evrythng from napster and i really coud run.

saw a movie y-day; final fantasy. realy mad. cloud wasnt in it. plus the solider guy looked like ben affleck but not t like him to. creepyyy…just made me SADDER

Current Mood SAD
Current Music the Cure – “Lovesong” (ohmigod save me Robert SMith)

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WORDPRESS Online Blogging OS [Version 4.2.616] CMD LINE INTERFACE

COPYRIGHT IN PERPETUITY WORDPRESS INC.

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Uncanny can't be canny can he?

Sorry about that glitch. Blogging about Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within must’ve accidentally reset my systems to a savepoint somewhere in 2001; oh LiveJournal, how I miss the halcyon days when you ruled the internet. But enough of this witty banter, onward to impenetrable academe!

Jason Sperb on Temporality and Post-Modernism

Sperb’s article is about David Cronenberg’s creepy/cool 1983 horror flick Videodrome, but the key point to take away from is his suggestion that we consider particularly timely films as projecting a sort of field of stasis around themselves and their immediate surroundings. Films themselves can become dated, but they also preserve some part of the context in which they came to be. As my flip little LJ flashback demonstrates, for those who saw it at the time Final Fantasy is a film that sheds little bits of 2001 all over your freshly vacuumed 2009 carpet. Like the games from which it is loosely derived, its portentous story and heavy-handed metaphors are but pretext for the experience; one plays the games, but the film’s purpose is merely for one to look at the accomplishment of man and his fabulous machines.

It’s all in the film’s opening sequence. The “camera” cranes up over a desolate alien landscape. There is an abrupt cut to an extreme close-up of a blinking eye. We are expected to note the incredible “realism” of the reflection of the sun on her iris, the detail of said iris, the way the eye moves, the pores of her skin. Gradually the film reveals more of both landscape and protagonist, demonstrating the circumference and volume of its reality. Suddenly, in the film’s most oft-reproduced shot, the camera whirls and we are presented with a view from directly below Ross, who now appears to be standing on top of a sheet of water. This is real enough to fool you, it says, but unbound from reality’s petty rules. Somewhere it’s 1991 and Bono’s singing “Even Better Than the Real Thing.” Somewhere it’s 1895 and Maxim Gorky is up late writing a thoroughly unnerved account of a still photograph of a train that is jumping suddenly into a silvered chaos of motion.

I am reminded of critic Robert Spadoni’s account of audience reception to the advent of sound pictures. According to Spadoni, at certain points of momentous technological change (i.e. motion, sound, colour, 3D) audiences briefly become hyper-aware of the cinematic apparatus. This type of audience member, termed the “Medium Sensitive Viewer,” is so struck by the newness of the innovation that the actual content of the film becomes secondary. Audience-members in 1927 spent as much time celebrating the novelty of synchronized sound as they did grousing about its drawbacks and inconsistencies relative to natural sound. An uncanny valley had opened up, wherein its unprecedented proximity to the real thing invariably drew attention to its minute differences. Familiar and unfamiliar, and thus uncanny. For a little while. But they got used to it, and now we never notice that the sound we interpret as issuing from an actor’s lips is in fact bursting from a loudspeaker elsewhere in the room.

Same thing goes for the visual effects of Final Fantasy. What was once revolutionary now seems commonplace, next even to the videogames of recent years. At the time, some were willing to overlook its formulaic plot and stock characters for the wonder of its very existence; Roger Ebert gushing review hurriedly disposes of the plot to wax lyrical about its strangeness and newness. Square Pictures planned to turn digital “actress” Aki Ross into a star who could work on the same variety of projects as fleshly counterparts like Angelina Jolie. Hyperbolic predictions ensued. The stun value has worn away now; its graphics would be impressive in a videogame, but hardly revolutionary. We are left with a pedestrian sci-fi actioner, an archaic digital film whose characters lack the charm and lasting appeal of simpler creations like Buzz Lightyear.

Yet still it holds the distinction accorded it by Ebert, “the first citizen of the new world of cyberfilm.” And still it bears the impression of the time when it was the only denizen of that realm, that time when blogs were a place for teen angst and not university assignments.

Current Mood WISTFUL
Current Music The Cure – “Untitled”

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Oh I'm gonna get all up Within that Spirit.

Root Deep, Tower High

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augmENT? (By Rob Mason)

“Tangible interfaces: treating the whole of physical space around the user as part of a human-computer interface (HCI) by employing physical objects as carriers of information.” – Lev Manovich on one element of the technologically “augmented space.”

“Once populated biotechnological interfaces can be deployed on a large scale to transform the landscape into a vast kinesthetic garden. Habitation of the landscape is based on one’s own movement and tactile relationships with the space. Pressure sensitive turfed areas respond to footsteps, long grasses chime to be stroked, artificial scents are diffused through the air at the tap of a leaf whilst vast arrays of LED’s change colour in response to your movement.” – Conceptual architect Guido Macioci

Guido Macioci’s Augmented Ecologies

Often in ancient creation myths our world comes into existence via sound. The makers in the Finnish Kalevala sang this earth into being; the Biblical God said “Let there be light” and we were illuminated whole. Suppose then that we lived in an environment where every plant rang out at the brush of a hand, and from their sound emerged new colours and shapes drawn vast down the sides of skyscrapers. Such are the ambitions of Macioci, who has managed to outfit plants with sophisticated (yet commercially available) digital sensor arrays which generate vibrant images on nearby LED screens. This preliminary rig is far short of the “kinesthetic garden” he envisions, but it demonstrates the possibility of a newly holistic integration of the organic and the technological.

I’ve written before in this blog about the immanence of nature (specifically here); there is no such thing as unnatural because we are always within nature. This argument is typically advanced in response to concerns that we verge upon becoming to detached from our traditional arboreal environs. In this case, however, we see the possibility to bridge the digital divide with leaf and vine. It’s a stark contrast to the glaring fluorescent horror of the New York Prada store described by Manovich as the vanguard of augmented spaces, as well as the neo-Luddite character of many leading “white cube” art installations. We might even take Macioci’s project as taking to one logical extreme Manovich’s prediction that the 2000s would be “about the physical – that is, physical space filled with electronic and visual information.” Regardless of whether we can accept the conceptual “naturalness” of the advert-laden hyper-reality Manovich discusses, there is something inherently grounded and physical about plants that we sense at the reptilian stem of our brains. The verdant is expected and accepted innately.

Of course, the cynics out there among you (and I’m a card-carrying member) will likely notice right away that, for all of this project’s logical inevitability in a realm of pure theory, it is being conducted within the sheltering aegis of a university rather than the “real” world. Augmented spaces in reality have been appropriated, promoted and brokered by business, and their goal has been mostly to encourage and expand the toothless vampirism that is consumer culture. Leaves don’t sell products, but they do cost money to be rooted into circuit boards, to have their vines jacked into I/O ports. But Macioci’s plan, for all its lack of obvious “use” anticipates this; his outline emphasizes the availability and relative cheapness of all the technology involved, two key factors to any significant grassroots change.

After all, if leaves can learn to sing and draw from computers, perhaps they can teach their plastic partners a thing or two about growing organically.

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Coming soon to a graphic t-shirt from Blue Notes!

No Dark Sarcasm in the Classroom

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Someone forgot the spandex on their mo-cap suit.

“There is no way I want to stay merely human.” – Kevin Warwick

“The disappearance of the body will not just result in the exit of ‘the meat,’ but also likely to go will be parts of our identity, our pleasures and desires.” – Mischa Peters

Amongst those interested in the intersections between human beings and technology, Kevin Warwick needs little introduction. A British pioneer in the field of robotics and cybernetics, Warwick has spent the last twenty-plus years pushing the boundaries of what it means to be ‘human.’ He has surgically implanted himself with various computer chips and transmitters, allowing him to achieve a variety of effects such as remote manipulation of simple machines such as lightswitches and doors by thought alone. More radically, he has with the cooperation of his similarly implanted spouse managed to electronically transmit physical sensations directly into another person’s nervous system. He hopes the result of the latter project will eventually lead to a form of technological telepathy, or “thought communication.”

Speaking bluntly, Warwick’s research leaves me scared shitless. This could be the atomic bomb of our era, except that where the bomb had the potential to destroy us physically, the technological advance Warwick heralds could lead to our cultural and experiential annihilation. I skirt the perilous edge of hyperbole with such statements, so bear with me a moment longer as I attempt to explain myself. Here is an excerpt from the FAQ on Warwick’s webpage (I’ll provide the link at the end of the blog):

“Will this technology [neural transmitters] change the way we communicate?

I feel so. At present our method of communication, speech, is very slow, serial and error prone. The potential to communicate by means of thought signals alone is a very exciting one. We will probably have to learn how to communicate well in this way though, in particular how to send ideas to one another. It is not clear if I think about an ice cream are my thoughts roughly the same as yours – we will have to learn about each other’s thoughts. Maybe it will be easier than we think, maybe not. Certainly speech is an old fashioned, out dated means of communication – it’s on its way out!”

Consider the implications of this statement. Already, due to the intercession of media, we live in a more globally homogenized society than ever before. While the eccentricities of regional spoken and textual communications are worn down by the memetic viruses of the internet and the cinema, we have at least the silent spaces in our skulls within which we are alone. In that moment between thought and expression we may have to shape what we wish to say to suit another, but the thought itself can remain as idiosyncratic or conformist as we are inclined. To learn another’s thoughts, to reshape the way we think has the potential to be the final death of difference.

As Mischa Peters aptly summarizes, most proponents of techno-organic hybridization “hope that the posthuman will eradicate some of the lesser traits of the human subject, such as dichotomizations, whether according to gender, race or class, or the infamous mind/body split.” Yet, when one considers how most cultures function in this world, the posthuman is less likely to be “queer, cyborg, metamazoan” than it is to be the ‘perfected’ Caucasian heterosexual. Homogeneity of this type is vastly more efficient than the panoply of ethnicities and orientations we have now. And of course, there’s a good chance might soon no longer care about the loss of such basic differences.

Cybernetic enhancements to human brain capacity and our perceptual mechanisms suggest the elimination of those cognitive limitations against which humanity has defined itself. Since the human brain contains something like 300 megabytes of information (roughly 0.0004% of my current hard drive storage), imagine how we might think with the storage and processing capability of a computer. Or rather, try. It is literally impossible for us to conceive of how something so many orders above us thinks; it would be less like a dog attempting to imagine how we think as it would be a dog trying to imagine how God thinks. Popular media that deals with the addition of computer storage to human brain tissue tends to shy away from these questions for this reason; in Johnny Mnemonic we see a dolphin raised to the level of a human genius, but human enhancements are limited to weaponization and data-transfer.

In her discussion of such basic ‘upgrades’ Peters quotes Elisabeth Grosz: “The limits or borders of the body image are not fixed by nature or confined to the anatomical ‘container,’ the skin. The body image is extremely fluid and dynamic; its borders, edges and contours are ‘osmotic’ – they have the remarkable power of incorporating and expelling outside and inside in an ongoing interchange.” I have little fear of this purely physical experimentation (a la the Great Machine of Brian K. Vaughn’s Ex Machina), because it lacks the potential for direct alteration of our minds. But once the transmission equipment which makes it possible is within us, the door is irreversibly open.

Whether we are held down by our governments and implanted with GPS-trackers and thought monitoring devices, or become schools of likeminded fish who from birth have never had a chance to think alone, or indeed ascend to another plane of comprehension, I want none of it. I hope to be long dead, not lingering, when we come to Warwick’s evolution.

Warwick’s Webpage: http://www.kevinwarwick.com/
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[EDIT: I've just noticed that the class is going to be looking at Warwick's webpage in a few weeks. Regardless, I'm sure I'll have no shortage of other things to say about the man's work in light of the readings/screenings that week. Or I could just talk about Screamers that week instead.]

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I liked them better when they just squeaked.

Spirits in the Material World

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I don't know, but it's powdered by pixie dust and Satan

“At last, according to some, the full development of the individual is possible, because we have finally objectified both our physical and mental capacities in a machine.” – Stanley Aronowitz

“But computerization also entails the passing of a certain type of skill, that associated with the close coordination of feeling and reason, of intuition and calculation. Now the old organic self is subsumed under the cyborg self: we are wired, simulacra.” – Aronowitz again

In his article “Technology and the History of Work” Stanley Aronowitz attempts to chart and interrogate the progress of thought on the value of what we might term technologized labour. Reactions to the egress of the machine into the sphere of the workplace, and particular that of manual labour, has tended to fall into a fairly Manichean binary alignment; one tends to either believe that it holds the key to liberation from the drudgery of the workplace (a “postwork” environment to use Aronowitz’s word) or that it portends the destruction of a tradition of cooperative labour and the ruination of the common man’s power to self-determine (a “fuckedover” situation to quote the average Michigander). Aronowitz doesn’t really come down on one side or the other, rather choosing to give one side’s opinion before countering it with the opposite perspective, and continuing to repeat the process until the various buzzwords employed by each school of thought become shuffled together in the reader’s mind. Marx actually crops up under both banners.

Perhaps the most interesting concept that Aronowitz introduced to me was Heidegger’s techné: “Where modern culture views technology as a regime of powerful tools by which human purposes may be served, particularly the domination of nature, techné signifies an uncovering, a way to the truth. Heidegger’s point is that techné signified human activity itself rather than a ‘tool’ of production and organization.” Leaping from this idea to the question of the cyborg, Aronowitz mentions the idea that there is no “separation of spirit from ‘dead’ matter…: all there is [is] the material world.” This is a radical idea that threatens to explode the binary opposition of the organic and the technology. If nature can be conceived as non-static, as being wherever we stand, then terms like “simulacra” lose all meaning. Phrases like “even better than the real thing” lose all meaning, because any thing is the real thing, even if it is experienced on a computer screen. William Carlos Williams’ belief of “no ideas but in things” recast as metaphysics.

Of course, as any number of aforementioned Michiganders can tell you, priority number one is having food on the table, and even though there be may be no true binary dividing the digital thing from the corporeal thing from another in experiential terms, we can’t yet eat circuit boards. And even if we could, there’s a good chance we would have to pay for them. It’s this perceived lack of practicality that leads Jeffrey Sconce in his delightfully curmudgeonly “Tulip Theory” article to equate the boom in digital studies to the fad of speculating on flowers which ruined several European economies in the seventeenth century. Similarly, virtually all of the gritty, hard science fiction written over at least the last thirty years (Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars included) tend to look at technology as tool rather than techné. This is because on some level we find it difficult to believe in a “postwork” society as anything but pure fantasy; it’s why Aronowitz, after making some compelling points as to the nature of techné still concludes with a dour warning about ruining the “real.”

Yet North America has already transitioned to a point where our economy produces little, but sells much. Our work is largely in the service sector these days for which we are paid not for what we make but for what we do. It stands to reason that, if we reach a point of total automation in every sector of work that we could similarly automate the current transfer of currency and leave ourselves free to “number the streaks of the tulip” as we please. It’s all material.

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X:/digiflower.jpeg

Even a digital flower is possessed.

Your Time Will Come, Virtual Boy

Yeah, well, uh, just keep your Power Gloves off her, pal, huh?

X:> Matrix/Virtual_Bodies_of_Lawnmower_Men.exe

Note: Nothing I say in this blog applies to Japan. They's crazy.

If this were a standard bitingly cynical pop culture blog about the film The Lawnmower Man, I would probably spend my time musing on why Pierce Brosnan chose to perform every scene as if he had just snorted a rail of coke backstage, or deciphering Jeff Fahey’s bizarre interpretation of how to perform as a mentally-disabled character, or perhaps even itemizing the ways in which the film is one of the most strikingly homoerotic science fiction films ever made.

But it isn’t! This is an academic bitingly cynical pop culture blog. That being the case, what can this film tell us about the intersections of humanity and technology in contemporary culture?

The Lawnmower Man is a film made in 1992 cresting off of a wave of heightened interest in what I’ll refer to as ‘classical virtual reality.’ In the late ’80s and early ’90s it was widely thought that we were on the cusp of a new age of highly immersive, interactive technology. I recall every vision of futuristic entertainment involving bulky head-mounted displays and plated gloves more suited to operating a blowtorch than simulating reality. As Anne Balsamo says in her article on the subject, the buzzword was “experience:” it’s “a new kind of theatrical entertainment experience” and we have to “experience it live.” The idea wasn’t to watch it was to be in (now there’s a gender-loaded distinction…). Since then, the technology has stagnated, with mass-marketed exponents like Nintendo’s Virtual Boy failing catastrophically and more advanced units being simultaneously massively expensive (Balsamo quotes one unit as costing $250 000 in 1991) and unable to provide satisfactorily visceral experiences. Our fantasies of disembodiment continue unabated as evinced by films like The Matrix and Vanilla Sky, but we have largely left behind for the moment the belief that such advances will come in the immediate future. We are content to live our second lives at a point of remove from the screen.

This why I refer to the cyberspace The Lawnmower Man envisages as ‘classical VR.’ At the time of its creation, highly realistic computer simulations (a la Star Trek‘s holodeck) were thought of as a relatively distant fantasy, but we were eager enough to submerse ourselves in primary-coloured unrealities of the sort we see in The Lawnmower Man‘s groundbreaking FX. It’s unconvincing, but somehow more convincing than the holodeck because we had all seen demonstrations of actual machines capable of producing the basic experiences shared by Jobe and Peter in the film:

From the film

From the DOS Lawnmower Man videogame

Thus, the events seemed closer to imminence than in films which posited graphics “even better than the real thing.” These days, the conceptual view The Lawnmower Man has of VR seems very much of its time, and thus dated. One sequence that I found intriguing, however, was Jobe’s rampage through town. The majority of our conceptualizations to date about using VR to “escape from conventional reality, a way out for those who confront the severe limitations reality imposes in the form of corporate ideology, determining social structures, and the physical body itself” (Balsamo again). Yet here we have Jobe bringing cyberspace into the ‘reality’ of the film; impressed as we were in 1992 by the film’s effects, no one was even slightly misled by the ‘fire’ Jobe uses to ignite the abusive priest. Instead, cyberspace ceases to be a safety net and becomes instead a part of everyday experience. That its power is wielded by a psychopath is a danger inherent to any object or concept in real life.

I think that says something more about what we deal with today than much of the rest of the film. For every World of Warcraft shut-in there are a million others who spend more time in the real world, and the contemporary virtual realities of handheld computers and digital interfaces are always with them. The lawnmower man is in our heads…

—

X:> Homoeroticism.exe

We go now to a braver future, where our love dares speak its name...

The Desert of the Real looks shooped

That’s from The Matrix innit it?

X:> Matrix/Mirzoeff_response.exe

What do you see?

The picture above is a fairly standard optical illusion. Paint has been applied in such a way that your eyes automatically interpret the image as a three-dimensional object, even though we know that it is a trick of perspective and nothing more. It’s a clever piece of guerrilla art, one which gives us a chuckle, or at most provokes a moment of brief contemplation. But we know what’s really going on here, in spite of what ours eyes may insist.

Or do we?

What if we are not looking at a photograph of paint applied to real physical tiles but rather a digital image upon which paint as been applied? Moreover, is this subway station itself “real”? Do we care?

Aesthetic questions of reality and authenticity in art have been commonplace in philosophy for aeons, but over the last hundred years or so these questions have become more and more relevant to the everyday experience of whom we might call the “common man.” Two hundred years ago there was no question about the reality or unreality of a man-made image. With the advent of the photograph, our clarity of vision began to blur somewhat; we could no longer believe without condition the evidence of our eyes. But there was at least the comfort of knowing that, while the object of the photograph might have been constructed, it was still physical, was still at worst a “real fake.” Ten years ago Nicholas Mirzoeff felt confident in saying that the “pixelated image” lacked the sublimity of photography because it lacked the smoothness and completeness with which our eyes view the natural world. To use the terminology of alchemy, a similarly outdated worldview, the pixelated image has been sublimed by increases in bandwidth and computer memory, sieved of impurities and rendered capable of a pristine clarity undreamed of in photography’s salad days. How do we, we “common men,” cope now that the pixelated image no longer “reminds us of its necessary artificiality and absence”? Have we been blinded?

If modernism/modernity was in many ways a crisis of belief, let us say that post-modernism is the agnostic resolution to that crisis. We lost some faith in the old explanations, and rather than reconcentrate it on a new totalizing concept, we simply let all that faith disperse into a myriad of other conceptions in spite of their occasional contradictions. The “cyberpoetics” Sydney Eve Matrix wishes for is essentially what John Keats called “negative capability”: we are capable of being in uncertainty without any irritable reaching after fact and reason. The soul of post-modernity, this new Visual Culture, thus rests in our eyes. We see things that are unreal, and are able to take pleasure even as we are conscious of their unreality.

That’s not to say that some illusions don’t shake us. The illusion of Bruce Willis with a full head of hair? Impress me with your special effects all you like Surrogates, but that’s one I won’t buy!

Now excuse me while I walk acrylic stairs up a wall, out of sight, and into next week…

X:> Shatter_monitor.exe

Is it broken?