Deconstructing Body as Text

Revisiting a review I uncovered last summer took deconstruction theory up a notch in the food chain of what has become the ecology of my thesis. (One concept competes with the other, feeds off of another, is fodder for yet another, and so on.) Derrida, the father of deconstruction, would have us believe that there is “no outside of the text.” What does this mean?

Willy Maley, Professor of Renaissance Studies for the Department of English Literature at the University of Glasgow, put together a great little piece called “Ten Ways of Thinking about Deconstruction.” He claims that, despite having read Derrida for ten years, he’s struck dumb when asked to describe deconstruction in two words. Into the piece, he quotes a passage synthesized from several Derrida texts published in the 70s:

…all those boundaries that form the running border of what used to be called a text, of what we once thought this word could identify, i.e. the supposed end and beginning of a work, the unity of a corpus, the title, the margins, the signatures, the referential realm outside the frame, and so forth. What has happened … is a sort of overrun that spoils all these boundaries and divisions and forces us to extend the accredited concept, the dominant notion of a ‘text’ … that is no longer a finished corpus of writing, some content enclosed in a book or its margins, but a differential network, a fabric of traces referring endlessly to something other than itself, to other differential traces.

Jacques Derrida, ‘Living On: Border Lines’, trans. James Hulbert, in Bloom et al Deconstruction and Criticism (London: Routledge, 1979), p. 81; pp. 83-84. See also Jacques Derrida, ‘Form and Meaning: A Note on the Phenomenology of Language’, Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. D. B. Allison (Evanston ; Northwestern University Press, 1973), pp. 107-28.

Is it coincidence that dissolving these boundaries might work in the favor of burgeoning “hypertextual” digital environments? The binary opposition of inside vs. outside comes to mind, as does the resulting obsolescence of beginning vs. end, or presence vs. absence (i.e. we are “present” on the World Wide Web without ever having “been there”).

According to Penelope Deutscher’s review of Vicki Kirby’s Telling Flesh: The Substance of the Corporeal, “if there is no outside of the text, then flesh and matter must be theorisable as ‘corporeographies’, matter and flesh as ‘literate’”, and establishes that “body as text” has largely been undisputed truth (”…the body as the site of so-called ‘cultural inscription’”).

Kirby departs from Ferdinand de Saussure (the man at the forefront of semiotics) by rejecting his analysis of the arbitrary nature of the sign (there is, in fact, no arbitrary nature between signifier and object), claiming that “once you are seriously displacing the nature/language opposition, you have to be arguing that nature, far from being written on, and insofar as it cannot be said to ‘lack language’, ‘must be articulate’ (Kirby 1997: 90). What does it mean for nature to be articulate?

Deutscher writes, “if nature and culture are no longer discrete poles, then we should be able to theorise every aspect of embodiment and matter, the cell, the atom, electric activity, the neuron, the rock as always already culture, text,” admitting to a certain deadlock brought about by matter’s return to cultural inscription, regardless of how one views it. A proposal to break the deadlock: “…perhaps we must theorise matter not as written on by culture but as ’speaking to us’. Perhaps we must theorise the possibility that ‘nature scribbles’, that ‘flesh reads’” (Kirby 1997: 127). Is it possible to then imagine a situation in which flesh “scribbles” and nature “reads”?

Perhaps the most profound example of this role reversal in the digital age (at least for the purposes of this thesis) is the cyborg being; the body is used as a conduit, modified to technological whims. But is that where it ends? Is it possible that we are turning the tables of our cyborg tendencies, inscribing these attributes, on certain forms of technology? If so, is this the practical way of referring to ourselves as creators?

Notes on Virilio

Excerpts:

“…the body terminal of man…the witness’s own body becoming the last urban frontier. Social organization and a kind of conditioning once limited to the space of the city and to the space of the family home finally closing in on the animal body.

“This makes it easier to understand the decline in that unite of population, the family, initially extended then nuclearized, that is today becoming a single-parent family, indivudualism having little to do with the fact of a liberation of values and being more an effect of technological evolution in the development of public and private space, since the more the city expands and spreads its tentacles, the more the family unit dwindles and becomes a minority” (11-12).

“Speed not only allows us to get around more easily, it enables us above all to see, to hear, to perceive and thus to conceive the present world more intensely. Tomorrow, it will enable us to act at a distance, beyond the human body’s sphere of influence and that of its behavioural ergonomics” (12).

Scott Fisher’s ‘DataSuit’ for NASA (16).

“Having been first mobile, then motorized, man will thus become motile, deliberately limiting his body’s area of influence to a few gestures, a few impulses, like channel-surfing” (17).

“…the law of least effort or least action. To reduce, to eliminate the range of action to the point of introducing a machine, a tool of instantaneous communication, into the human body’s very guts poses awesome questions about the new technological environment, the postindustrial ‘technosphere’…Indeed, acting at a distance renders problematic the very nature of the interval that makes up this distance…” (51). Get more sources.

Timothy Leary, example of the law of least action (105).

“‘The deepest thing in man is his skin,’ Paul Valery once claimed. This is where the very latest perspective comes in: the tactile perspective of so-called ‘touching at a distance’ (tactile telepresence)…In donning the DataSuit, the individual slips into information…information becomes the sole ‘relief’ of corporeal reality…” (105).

The absence of high and low referents induces a spatial (atmospheric) void. “How, indeed, can we picture any spatial or atmospheric perspective once we have lost ‘high’ and ‘low’ as referents? And the same goes for the split between ‘near’ and ‘far’, once we have lost resistance to forward motion” (31).

Transport revolution = 19th century railway system, automobile and aviation. Transmission revolution = 20th century propogation of electromagnetic radiation in the form of radio and video. Transplantation revolution = 21st century “is now secretly gearing up, not only with the grafting of livers, kidneys, hearts and lungs, but with the implantation of new kinds of stimulators, much more effective than the pacemaker, and the imminent grafting of micromotors capable of overcoming the defective functioning of this or that natural organ and so improving on the vital performance of this or that physiological system belonging to a person in perfect health…” (51). Use with Balsamo.

“…can we still talk of images when there are no longer any pixels…?” (94).

Mobilizing our field of perception (96).

“…the individual’s freedom of perception and the threats brought to bear on that freedom by the industrialization of vision and of hearing — noise pollution being doubled more often than not by a discreet pollution of our vision of the world through the sundry tools of communication” (96). Does this explain our attempt at extending ourselves in the creation of insulation things?

Napoleon Bonaparte quote/’The Man-Machine Interface’/the changing terrain of the real (98).

“To prefer the virtual being — at some remove — to the real being — close-up — is to take the shadow for the substance, to prefer the metaphor, the clone to a substantial being who gets in your way, who is leterally on your hands, a flesh-and-blood being whose only fault is to be there, here and now, and not somewhere else” (103-4).

“…the end of the supremacy of physical proximity in the megalopolis of the postindustrial age will not content itself with promoting a boom in the single-parent family. It will go on to provoke an even more radical gap between men and women, thereby directly threatening the future of sexual reproduction” (106). Love at a distance sets the stage for ‘procreating’ in ‘virtu’ — the online equivalent to in vitro. Back this up.

“…’the commingling of genes which all sexual reproduction implies allows the risk of extinction to be reduced to a minimum where species are faced with various infections, but especially, where they are faced with predictable mutations of the species.’ Now there is just one single mutation that nature overlooked: the mutation of biotechnology” (106). Further explanation of the “development of the technosciences of the living organism.” Recombination. Biosphere/technosphere/nanotechnologies.

Physiological and demographic disintegration (108).

“…whatever is necessary to life: motion, heat or inner equilibrium” (109).

Man loses his energy as a result of the law of least action (111).

The ultimate mode of procreation/’telesexual’ decentralization/sexual harassment (112). Link to Dibbell’s “Rape in Cyberspace.”

Sex is replaced by fear: assault on the living being. Or just evolution? Separation of bodies, the distaste for the living (113). High risk sexual behaviors/experiences (114).

“‘Communication technologies and biotechnologies are important tools that enable us to reinvent our bodies…the sensory and organic architecture of the human body, sexual and cultural identities, indeed our modes of thinking, and the place each of us occupies will be modified‘” (115). Cyberfeminism.

Engaging the virtual body is influenced by how the codes and specifications are generated (116).

“Cyberfeminism then weighs in with the big question of political responsibility in the construction of such a body, ‘a truly revolutionary subject’: ‘What will happen to the social relationships of sexuality, the body’s sexual modes of communicating, desire and sexual difference in the age of the coded metaphor? Control of interpretation of the body’s boundaries is a truly feminist issue‘” (116). Link to Cyborg Manifesto.

Corn Responds to Turkle’s Second Self

In 1985, Stanford University academic Joseph J. Corn responded to Sherry Turkle’s Second Self in an American Quarterly book review entitled, “Culture and Computers.” Corn recognized the differentiation between genders in the work, stating how she “finds female programmers [to] display a ‘negotiational’ and ‘relational’ style, sometimes envisioning themselves in the program, contrast[ing] markedly with the more abstract approach characteristic of males” (611).

In response to Turkle’s vision of the democratization of education however, Corn was skeptical, stating that “the computer can do little for people who lack access to the machines altogether” (612). The “cultural development” of artificial intelligence was put into the context of a culture that is “incomplete without technology” (ibid). This suggests technology and culture to be symbionts of one another.

Corn characterized Turkle’s description of cognitive science as “a blend of computer science, experimental psychology, theoretical linguistics, and other disciplines” (613). This suggests that computer science adds a viable contribution to the evolution of certain established fields of study.

Corn’s review was a sign of preeminent advancement in both technology and the social study surrounding it.

For Corn citation see Supplements

social recombination pt 1

From “The Architecture of Cyberception”:

Similarly the paradigms and discoveries of Artificial Life science must be brought into play. The architect’s new task is to fuse together material structures and cyberspace organisms into a new continuum. Architecture is the true test of our capacity to integrate into humanly enriching zones and structures, the potentials of the material world, the new consciousness, and virtual realities (Ascott).

If there is a corporeal counterpart to socially interactive Internet environments (as the primary loci of social reformation), that counterpart might be a precipitate of modern architecture. Meaning, individuals interface with the virtual in the aforementioned environments (MUDs, MOOs). An individual meets others, converses, travels, develops a personality, and makes memories in these environments; the individual is an active participant, inhabiting the environments and directly influencing every outcome within those environments.

This “new continuum” in which material structures and cyberspace organisms are “fused together” can be thought of as the corporeal counterpart to these Internet environments. Just as individuals inhabit these virtual spaces, virtual entities inhabit the material world at particular loci. Intelligent Cities, for example, “are defined as intelligent environments with embedded information and communication technologies creating interactive spaces that bring computation into the physical world… [they] refer to the physical environments in which information and communication technologies and sensor systems disappear as they become embedded into physical objects…” It should be noted that “city” in this instance, is interchangeable with “space.”

Taking all of this into account, we can then think of the virtual loci at which social reformation occurs as incubators for invention, having stripped away prejudice and bias that might otherwise constrict creativity and open-mindedness in the material world. This can be viewed as a type of social recombination. Just as communications technologies are forced to adapt to environments in order to accommodate a myriad of possible scenarios or to maximize a desired outcome, collaborating at times to the point of interdependency, human social interaction in incubation may serve a similar purpose.

more to Ascott’s “Cyberception”

A place to jot down a few passages from an early iteration of Roy Ascott’s “The Architecture of Cyberception.” The author thinks the omission may have been due to word length considerations or to accommodate a more architectural tone, but assures me it was not omitted ideologically.

About 5 graphs in:

The effect of cyberception on art practice is to throw off the hermeneutic harness, the overarching concern with representation and self expression, and to celebrate a creativity of distributed consciousness (mind-at-large), global connectivity and radical constructivism. Art now is less concerned with appearance and surfaces, and more concerned with appartition, with the coming-into-being of identity and meaning. Art embraces systems of transformation, and seeks to maximise interaction with its environment, both the visible and the invisible, by maximising the environment’s capacity for intelligent, anticipatory behaviour. The artist inhabits cyberspace while others simply see it as a tool.

About 8 graphs in:

…[T]he Romanticism of the private, solitary individual – essentially anxious, alienated, paranoid. Indeed paranoia, secrecy and dissimulation seems to have been embedded in all aspects of the industrial age. In our telematic culture, instead of paranoia we celebrate Telenoia: open-ended, inclusive, collaborative, transpersonal networking of minds and imaginations.

9th and 10th graphs:

And just as the cybernet is our community, we shall see increasingly, the replacement of the nuclear family with the non-linear family. The telematic culture may bring back to human relationships what industrial society effectively eradicated. Take life on the street now. I mean those streets just off hte super highway. Nothing is more human, warm and convivial than a bunch of kids hanging out on the Internet. As networked virtual reality transports our telepresence, and gives us the tools to reconfigure our own identities, social life is becoming not only more complex but more imaginative. As I have long-time insisted, there is love in the telematic embrace.

Our new body and new consciousness will bring forth a wholly new environment, an intelligent environment which returns our gaze, which looks, listens and reacts to us, as much as we do to it: smart buildings and tools which listen for our every move, attend our every utterance. We are not talking about simple voice commands at some crude computer interface, we are talking about anticipation on the part of our constructed environment, based on our behviour, resulting in subtle transformations of the mis en scene. Just as we cyborgs see, hear, feel in ways unknown directly to biological man, (although his myths and rituals always expressed his desires for self transformation), we live in an environment which increasingly hears, sees and feels us. There is a community implication in all of this for us.

body as the last frontier

My friend Daniel and I met one night to discuss the evolution of his new “public space” column for UM. We got talking about how virtuality fits in (mainly how it really shouldn’t fit in, because his endeavor surrounds public space as “material artifact”). But virtuality really does come into play, no matter how you look at it.

We started with “urbanism.”

‘What is it?’ he asked (in the context of our conversation). We agreed that it would refer to the cultivation (or lack thereof) between man and the urban environments he inhabits.

He wasn’t sure what angle to take with the column, concerned there might not be enough material to maintain it. I suggested he begin with a few recent reactions. He discussed a pride party, a naked party and an upper west side party. The dynamics of all three were different. For instance, at the naked party, if you approached someone and were interested and had an erection, your intentions would be clear, as opposed to another space, like a café (or similarly the pride party) where the implied intention was perhaps to “hook up” but the social setting didn’t allow for it. You would constantly question motives and as a result, talk about “bullshit” (i.e. all subjects devoid of substance).

He thought it interesting how he was blown off in real life, but could make a meeting (and follow through) online so much more easily. He wondered why he was “running back” to his apartment to log on; there was a natural yearning to engage socially in that virtual space. Then he observed how in material settings, perhaps people were disinterested in others because they looked the same. There was no uniqueness to their clothes, their style. Their haircuts were identical. But when he engaged online, he perceived the uniqueness of others by their word choice and individual presentation. Because people are more likely to express themselves online, whether or not that representation is “real.”

Then I suggested that this “normative” behavior observed in the bar scene was synonymous with gentrification, in that it stifled individuality and therefore produced this desire for active participants to go elsewhere for their social needs (i.e. online?). Gentrification, in my opinion, stifles individuality on the urban level, therefore forcing active participants to seek public spaces elsewhere (i.e. online?).

So he didn’t think there were effective “private” spaces online, noting that virtual spaces were all “public.” I disagreed, citing individual email as an example of “private” virtual space. I noted that technology was still in its infancy, but described social networks (web2.0) as private spaces – spaces controlled by passwords and dashboards and “invitations,” as in Facebook or MySpace – spaces that might resemble “homes” in which hosts “entertain” others by allowing them to post comments, animations, and other “material” artifacts, thus reproducing a type of communication akin to the letters, verbal dialogue — the “knocks on doors” present in corporeality.

Because the conversation was becoming online-centric, I shifted gears by suggesting we point the compass back to the corporeal. If there was a void in corporeality that made active participants seek a solution in virtuality, what was it about the virtual landscape that could make it all work? And how could that solution be translated back into corporeality to solve the problem?

Dan answered, “don’t you think we are interacting less in reality?” “Yes,” I answered, “but we will always interact in the material world. There will always be materiality. We will never be fully virtual, communicating from cubes, etc.” “But compared to a century ago,” he answered, “we are living in cubes, shut off from everyone else, with our cell phones and our cars…”

“But we are always flesh,” I replied, “and will always seek to feel the flesh of others. After all, what we represent online is not flesh, but a facsimile of flesh. You might see me on your computer, but that is not really me. It’s only a representation of me.”

I wonder if this conversation can be continued in scholarship surrounding computer-mediated communication (i.e. my thesis)? How do online communities differ from offline communities. How are they similar? How does online communication differ from offline communication? How is it similar? How does one facilitate/negate the other? What is to be gained from online communication that was not possible offline? How does our new sense of self/selves online affect what we can or cannot do offline?

Last month I picked up Paul Virilio’s Open Sky, a book that is described as “a passionate critique of information technology and the global media by one of the foremost thinkers of social transformation.” First published in 1995 (a hotbed year of CMC scholarship), I figured this was a good springboard to get back into my thesis. Little did I know it would prompt a drastic change. On page 10, he mentions “teletopia” and “telepresence” and later describes “the witness’s own body becoming the last urban frontier.” What exactly does this mean? It is, for sure, resonant given the aforementioned discussion. How is our body the last urban frontier? Behavior? Social dynamism? Technological evolution and how it relates to social trends? Or does it refer to the material.

Next was the discovery of “intelligent cities”:

“ICs are defined as intelligent environments with embedded information and communication technologies creating interactive spaces that bring computation into the physical world. From this perspective, intelligent cities (or intelligent spaces more generally) refer to physical environments in which information and communication technologies and sensor systems disappear as they become embedded into physical objects and the surroundings in which we live, travel, and work” (Steventon and Wright, 2006).

[there's more to intelligent cities here 09/29/08]

The body as the last urban frontier, coupled with advances in Artificial Life and genomic discovery, suggests a new potential for the species. A new understanding of self. A new understanding of construction.

A springboard, indeed.

NOTE: I’ll be coming back to this post to insert links.

C. Kaha Waite: Contradiction with Ulmer?

I’m creeping back into this blog after many months. I don’t feel SO bad because I’ve been reading up a storm – most notable is a nifty book I came across by C. Kaha Waite – Mediation and the Communication Matrix. Part of the “Digital Formations” series. I love it. So much that I’m adding it to my source list. Not only does it broach a number of topics discussed in Dr. Byron Hawk’s class at MASON, but it might prove to be a wonderful companion to a few new thoughts I have.

My thesis is changing. No matter what I do I can’t slip quietly away from what’s been stewing inside me since I started reading up on Artificial Life (A-Life).. but anyway, more on that later.

Ok so here’s a passage from the book: On p34 Waite writes, “An epistemology that equates words with thought and images with emotion will be incapable of addressing the essential features of the screen.” She mentions this in the context that “both images and words contribute to an understanding of the ‘context’ about which Ong writes.” I completely agree. Which presents a certain conundrum.

If epistemology investigates the origin, nature, methods and limits of human knowledge, it seems as if we can’t rule out the emotional effect images have on our psyche. Barthes’ photographs and whatnot. But I’m forced to wonder whether or not this contradicts Ulmer. I’m particularly thinking of his Mystory, in which the emotion and ‘homesickness’ are used to center — or decenter (depending on how you look at it) the reader.

glossary_epistemology

Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that studies the nature of knowledge, its presuppositions and foundations, and its extent and validity. American Heritage Dictionary

think[ing]

I’m here in the East Village on some random Saturday in January. Winter weather’s just kicked in. I’m resentful of that. I always resent the cold when it comes, having made such good friends with the sun and all, now recessing behind gloomy clouds, snow and cool gray. I’m ok with cycling in and out of things; going away and coming back. Really, I am.

Truth is, I’ve been doing a lot of that lately: relationship; academics; friendships; myself. I walk into one of my favorite diners on the edge of Alphabet City, order breakfast, grab an orange juice, and sit with Writing Machines by N. Katherine Hayles, one of the seminal works of my thesis research. “Computer mediated communication” – that exciting yet elusive subject throws everyone for a loop, it seems, even me sometimes. This morning the loop stops for a brief moment and I’m able to clearly envision the message on page 67, the one about digital algorithms, about spaces between words, the model that sought to bridge the disconnect between print and electronic literature (communication in this instance) with the WORDIMAGE. Something I once read about speech act theory brings the understanding closer to me: there’s some deeper meaning on the page. Not the meaning of the universe or even my tiny existence in it, but something more localized, more practical and thus, more grand.

Alright, the thinking part:

We do, do and do. We don’t think enough. Sure, I find plenty of time to think about people, places and things. Where I want to be rather than here. My relationship. Registering for classes, taking care of paperwork, meeting with friends.

[Right now, I'm watching an elderly Chinese lady sift through a blue bin outside, overturning a Trader Joe's bag, dumping the contents. What does she hope she'll find? Unavoidably, an act that's elicited much thinking on my part.]

Those things I mentioned before (friends, relationship, paperwork, school), they are things to do, not necessarily things to think about. You just do them. You shouldn’t have to think about them all that much. Yet, we I spend a lot of time thinking about them.

Reading Hayles and other academics like her is far too often a lesson in futility, because I don’t think about what I read long enough. I’ll think about that when I have more time, I tell myself. When I have more time. Have more time. More time. Time. It takes time to think.

And now I just take the time and it comes. When I stop and think long enough about the things that matter, the things that are thinking and not just doing, that’s when true invention comes.

speech act theory

I’m back. After a 5 month hiatus I’ve resumed my thesis work. And here’s what jumped out at me today:

I think I’ve found a bridge between writing technologies and retrieving information more ‘organically.’ In my proposal I suggested that computer mediated communication, the rhetorical vehicles by which information would be disseminated in digital environments, enable us to view texts in new ways. To quote myself, “advances of conceptualization due to the non-linear nature of digital environments are most evident in the complex associations we see in these online publications. New technology has grown up around the traditional linear presentation of texts, and is becoming more of an extension of the human mind…”

I came across an old blog post by Richard MacManus (2004) in which a conversation between Talan Memmott (editor of hypertext/media journal Beehive who incidentally has this amazing piece called Self Portrait(s) [as Other(s)] published by the Iowa Review Web) and theorist Gregory Ulmer is linked. Turned out it’s a paper by Florian Cramer called “Digital Code and Literary Text” that uses the shift in the theoretical debate of literature as its base (enter hypertext, hyperfiction, hypermedia, etc.).

Basically, the bridge is this little thing we call “speech act theory.” A speech act is a linguistics term that has several distinct concpetual meanings to describe what we do when we speak (i.e. what is the rhetorical act/outcome of our words to another person). John L. Austin introduced the term “illocutionary act” (synonymous with “speech act,” meaning that “by saying something, we do something”) to describe one of these conceptions, in his 1962 text How to Do Things with Words.

Florian Cramer concludes that “while all literature should teach us to read and deal with the textuality of computers and digital poetry, computers and digital poetry might teach us to pay more attention to codes and control structures coded into all language.” My question is: are digital poetry and computer codes direct results of the codes and control structures coded into all language? Is computer coding organic in that sense?

The Doonesbury strip above was taken from a web archive of the 1997 MIT symposium: Communicative Action in Humans and Machines. It is meant as an account of speech act meaning. Click the image for a larger view.

Cramer states that “program code contaminates in itself two concepts which are traditionally juxtaposed and unresolved in modern linguistics: the structure, as conceived of in formalism and structuralism, and the performative, as developed by speech act theory.” When we do something by saying something (for example, by Ted telling Maria, “The ice is thin, watch out,” he is performing the act of warning her), the “act” is specifically built into the language code. There is a cause and effect situation there. Likewise, computer language is coded to yield a particular result. When the code is ”spoken,” and “act” is performed, depending on the desired outcome - similar to what happens in conversation or in print.

Organic is now a characteristic of computer code, in that it seeks to elicit a particular response through the written word as a symbol made up of ones and zeroes (based, of course on Lawrence Lessig’s claim that computer code is speech). So when I suggest that “[technology] has become more of an extension of the human mind, in that it utilizes video, sound, and text in concert to simulate how humans process information…” perhaps I mean to focus on the coding of the language found in online literary journals (specifically, that of poetry and new media*).

*When I mention “new media” I think of how video and sound work together to elicit particular emotions or reactions.