My Mother Was a Computer

tags

Computer

Notes

Prologue

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Computing Kin

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Comstock snorts, "A computer is a human being."

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the feeling that a kinship category essential to human society has been violated.

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contest for versions of the posthuman that would acknowledge the importance of embodiment

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repositioning materiality as distinct from physical­ ity and re-envisioning the material basis for hybrid texts and subjectivities.

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Materiality, as I defined it in Writing Machines, is an emergent property created through dynamic interactions between physical characteristics and signifying strategies. Materiality thus marks a junction between physical reality and human intention.

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what I call the Computational Universe, that is, the claim that the universe is generated through computational processes running on a vast computational mechanism underlying all of physical reality.

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displacement of Mother Nature by the Universal Computer.

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proclaimed that the universe was a clockwork.

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dynamics through which the Computational Universe works simultaneously as means and metaphor in technical and artistic practices

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sympathetic resonance between the natural world and human meaning.

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the mother's voice that haunted reading has been supplanted by another set of stimuli: the visual, audio, kinesthetic, and haptic cues emanat­ ing from the computer.

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cultural Imaginary in which digital subjects are understood as au­ tonomous creatures imbued with human-like motives, goals, and strategies.

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extent to which human beings can be understood as computer programs.

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literary texts create imaginary worlds populated by creatures that we can (mis)take for beings like ourselves.

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1 MAKING

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1 Intermediation

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code and language operate in significantly differ­ ent ways.

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multiple addressees of code

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small groups of technical specialists

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commercial product cycles

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If, as Stephen Wolfram, Edward Fredkin, and Harold Morowitz maintain, the universe is fundamentally computational, code is elevated to the lingua franca not only of computers but of all physical reality.

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three principal discourse systems of speech, writing, and digital computer code

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The Regime of Computation

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Jacques Derrida in exposing the impossible yearning at the heart of metaphysics for the "transcendental signified;" the manifes­ tation of Being so potent it needs no signifier

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the one-dimensional cellular automata described by Rule 110 yielded a Universal Turing machine

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"Whenever one sees behavior that is not obviously simple-in essentially any system-it can be thought of as corresponding to a computation of equivalent sophistication"

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the sweeping consequences Wolfram envisions for his research. This is the strong claim that computation does not merely simulate the behavior of complex systems; computation is envisioned as the process that actually generates behavior

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Under­ neath the laws of physics as we know them today it could be that there lies a very simple program from which all the known laws-and ultimately all the complexity we see in the universe-emerges.

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At issue is whether computation should be understood as a metaphor pervasive in our cul­ ture and therefore indicative of a certain "climate of opinion" (in Raymond Williams's phrase) at the turn of the millennium, or whether it has ontolog­ ical status as the mechanism generating the complexities of physical reality.

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computation as means and as metaphor are inextricably entwined as a generative cultural dynamic

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a shy and socially inept young man, comments, "Reality is not my best window."

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military strategists argue that information has become a key military asset and that the U.S. military must be reorganized to take full advantage of it. They aim to abandon a centralized command/control structure in favor of a highly mobile and flexible force

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Fred­ kin argues that the discrete nature of elementary particles indicates that the universe is discrete rather than continuous, digital rather than analog

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the discrete­ ness he takes as axiomatic implies that information is conserved

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So far, everyone we have interviewed who buys into Digital Philosophy has come to the conclusion that ordinary physics is a subject full of magic.

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"Emergence" carries special weight in this discourse. The term refers to properties that do not inhere in the individual components of a system; rather, these properties come about from interactions between components. Emergent properties thus appear at the global level of the system itself rather than at the local level of a system's components. Moreover, emergences typ­ ically cannot be predicted

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the kinds of systems for which equations can be used constitute only a small set of all possible systems

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What calculus has been to physics and mathematics, the digital computer will be to understanding complex systems, evolution, and emergence.

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From my perspective, all of these researchers claim much more than they actually demonstrate.

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does not explicate the mechanisms that link one level of emergence to another

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The contemporary indoctrination into linear causality is so strong that it con­ tinues to exercise a fatal attraction for much of contemporary thought. It must be continually resisted

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how media can converge into digitality and simultaneously diverge into a robust media ecology

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2 Speech, Writing, Code

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Let us begin, then, where Saussure began, with his assertion that the sign has no "natural" or inevitable relation to that which it refers

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speech as the true locus of the language system

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insist that writing, far from be­ ing derivative as Saussure claims, in fact precedes speech

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The produc­ tive role that constraints play in the Regime of Computation, functioning to eliminate possible choices until only a few remain, is conspicuously absent in Saussure's theory. Instead, meaning emerges and is stabilized by differential relations between signs.

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Both signifier and signified are purely relational or dif­ ferential entities

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the rec­ ognition that materiality imposes significant constraints becomes crucially important in code, and arguably in speech and writing as well

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For code, then, the assumption that the sign is arbitrary must be qualified by material constraints that limit the ranges within which signs can operate meaningfully and acquire significance.

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tie code more intimately to material condi­ tions than is the case either for Saussure's speech system or Derrida's gram­ matological view of writing. In the worldview of code, materiality matters.

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insists that the signifier is not the acoustic sound itself but the "sound pat­ tern" or "sound image," that is, an idealized version of the sound

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This is Saussure's way of coping with the noise of the world, whereby idealization plays a role similar to the function performed by discreteness in digital systems.

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rectification with code happens in the electronics rather than in the (idealized) system created by a human theorist. Thus it is a physical op­ eration rather than a mental one, and it happens while the code is running rather than retrospectively

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differance, a neologism suggesting that meanings generated by differential relations are endlessly deferred

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In the context of digital computers, even less tenable than ambiguity is the proposition that a signifier could be meaningful without reference to a signified.

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the possibility of thinking a concept signified in and of itself, a concept simply present for thought, independent of a relationship to language

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In the worldview of code, it makes no sense to talk about signifiers with­ out signifieds.

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these dynam­ ics happen before (or after) any human interpretation of these messages.

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Then, as the independent contractor responsible for the system, she met with the staff whose clients would be using the software. Suddenly the clear logic dissolved into an amorphous mass of half-articulated thoughts, messy needs and desires, fears and hopes of desperately ill people

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reconcile these two very differ­ ent views of the world.

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This character of code stands in striking contrast to the communities that decide whether an act of speech or a piece of writing constitutes a legible and competent utterance

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class of "priestly" interpreters who can understand his writing, in contrast to many nonspecialist readers who have found it unintelligible. Like esoteric theoretical writing, code is intelligible only to a specialized community of experts

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With code, a (relatively) few experts can initiate changes in the sys­ tem

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in code the breaks are much sharper and more complete than with either speech or writing.

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Whereas undergraduates can understand (with some help) the Middle English of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales or the Elizabethan English of Shake­ speare, thus making a connection over the hundreds of years that separate them from these works, no such bridges can be built between Windows 95 and Windows XP (separated by a mere seven or eight years)

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allows programmers to conceptual­ ize the solution in the same terms used to describe the problem.

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''Abstraction is selective ignorance;' Andrew Koenig and Barbara E. Moo write in Accelerated C++, a potent aphorism that speaks to the importance in large systems of hiding details until they need to be known.

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there is no parallel to compiling in speech or writing, much less a distinction between compil­ ing and run-time.

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As comput­ ers are increasingly understood (and modeled after) "expressive mediums" like writing, they begin to acquire the familiar and potent capability of writ­ ing not merely to express thought but actively to constitute it

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Code is not the enemy, any more than it is the savior

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3 The Dream of Information

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the dream of information beckoned as a realm of plenitude and infinite replenishment

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If I have a disk and make a copy for you, we both have the information.

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Wars, conquests, enslavement of peoples, malevolent dictatorships-all the stuff driven by predation-will be obsolete

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link the conservation laws of thermodynamics with the formation of the liberal subject

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the dream of information is figured as an escape, but the more powerfully it exerts its presence as a viable place in which to live, the more it appears not as an escape at all but rather as an arena in which the dynamics of domination and control can be played out in new ways.

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Code as Female Subjectivity: What Can a Girl Sell When She Really Needs To?

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the social arrangements of Victorian London virtually required prostitution

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women come to mediate exchange. Communication flows through them

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2 STORING

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4 Translating Media

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From Print to Electronic Texts

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regard the transformation of a print document into an electronic text as a form of translation

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even small differences in materiality potentially affect meaning

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navigational functionalities are not merely ways to access the work but part of a work's signifying structure.

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Gunder points out that the "work as such can never be accessed but through some kind of text, that is, through the specific sign system designated to manifest a particular work"

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editors presume that it does make sense to talk about a text as something separate from its physical embodiment in an artifact.

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The text is contained and stabilized by the physical form but is not the physical form itself

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in cases where text is dynamically assembled on the fly, the text as "the actual order of words and punctuation" does not exist as such in these data files. Indeed, it does not exist as an artifact at all. Rather, it comes into existence as a process

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multiple layers, color, and animation, among other signifying components, are essential to the work's effects.

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as if "text" were an inert, nonreactive substance that can be poured from container to container without affecting its essential nature.

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he seeks to protect the "work" from the noisiness of an embodied world-but this very noise may be the froth from which artistic effects emerge.

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The idea of TEI was to arrive at principles for coding print documents into electronic form that would preserve their essential features and, moreover, allow them to appear more or less the same in complex networked environments, regardless of platform, browser, and so on.

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asserted that the hierarchy is essential to the production of the text

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the text does not preexist encoding as a stable ontological object but is brought into existence through implicit assumptions actualized through encoding procedures.

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the belief that "work" and "text" are immaterial constructions independent of the substrates in which they are instantiated. We urgently need to rethink this assumption

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the Web's remarkable flexibility and radically different instantiation of textuality also draw into question whether it is possible or desirable to converge on an ideal "work" at alL

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Mats Dahlstrom argues that electronic text should be understood as consisting, at bottom, of binary code

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Friedrich Kittler's argument in "There Is No Software"¹

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textuality is instantiated rather than dematerialized, dispersed rather than unitary, processural rather than object-like, flickering rather than durably imprinted? The specter haunting textual criticism is the nightmare that one cannot then define a "text" at all

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it is normal procedure for literary scholars to consider a "text" as something negotiated among a community of readers, infinitely interpretable and debatable.

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think about what kinds of textuality a dispersed, fragmented, and heterogeneous view of the subject might imply.

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Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's rhizomatic Body without Organs (BwO), a construction that in its constant deterritorialization and reterritorialization has no unified essence or identifiable center, only planes of consistency and lines of flight along which elements move according to the charged vectors of desire.

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Deleuze and Guattari's project to change the emphasis from objects to processes, and from hierarchical structures to rhizomatic ones.

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"materiality is key to understanding innovative practice"

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"It is very tempting to say that a book written in Chinese is simply a book written in English which was coded into the 'Chinese code: If we have useful methods for solving almost any cryptographic problem, may it not be that with proper interpretation we already have useful methods for translation?" (22). 36 Raley rightly criticizes the hegemonic implication here that all languages are in some sense already English.

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a universal substratum common to all languages

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fragment language and reduce its complexities to small pieces.

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Cramming language into the Procrustean bed of TIB would have disastrous effects, were it not for the fact that documentation is increasingly written to fulfill legal requirements rather than to produce something buyers can use

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Borges thought of all writing as translation, not in the strong sense that Octavio Paz employs of writing as a translation of experience, but in the sense of all writing as a stab in the dark at articulating meanings that al­ ways remain to some extent elusive.

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Borges delighted in thinking of all writings as drafts in progress, imperfect instantiations never fully one with the significations toward which they gesture.

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5 Performative Code and Figurative Language

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"text and literature are highly privileged symbolic systems in these translation processes because a) they are already coded and b) computers run on code."

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To explore these questions, I take as my tutor text Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon

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seeing information as immaterial; although information must necessarily be embodied to exist in the world, these embodiments can easily be seen as contingent and dispensable

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when he displays a world map with cables depicted between countries and conti­ nents, it is "not weblike at all;' with only a few intercontinental cables run­ ning through "a small number of chokepoints" (317). Geography matters

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tries to convert the material world into signs, but the abject resists this implicit dematerialization, insisting on its own repugnant physicality.

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Stephenson's attitude toward computer code is clear in his quixotic jeremiad, In the Beginning Was the Command Line

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The real individ­ ual, Stephenson implies repeatedly, would not want to put himself at the

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At issue is pride, expertise, and, most importantly, control. Those who fail to understand the technology will inevitably be at the mercy of those who do. mercy of large corporations that in effect tell him what to think, deciding what he wants and what is good for him.

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to suggest that figurative lan­ guage is to cultural understanding as Windows is to code, a pernicious cov­ ering that conceals the truth of things. This is the ancient charge brought by philosophers against rhetoricians, the suspicion of scientists that if hu­ manists really knew what they were talking about they would use equa­ tions rather than metaphors, the ideological program of the Royal Society to use plain unadorned language rather than fancy analogies.

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connecting mythic figures with the contemporary action aims to bring about an ethical understanding of technology, with the result that principled action follows.

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language might be used not just as a tool for expression but also as a method of exploration.

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Randy and Avi wonder whether it needs to be unearthed. Why can't they use the gold to secure the electronic money they are in the process of establishing without needing to dig up the treasure? Isn't it enough that it exists and that they know where it is, even if it is not accessible?

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6 Flickering Connectivities in Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl

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3 TRANSMITTING

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7 (Un)masking the Agent Stanislaw Lem's "The Mask"

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"transmitting" refers primarily to the mechanisms and processes by which informational patterns are transferred between analog consciousness and digital cognition

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a proposition: to count as a person, an entity must be able to exercise agency. Agency enables the subject to make choices, express intentions, perform actions.

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is computation here to be considered a metaphor appropri­ ated from information technologies, or an accurate description of psychic processes?

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Guattari argues that even a mechanism as simple as a lock and key has a repertoire of structural forms through which it can move. This deterritorializing or "smoothing" opens the discrete machine to trans­ formation and, by a nonrational leap of inference, to desire

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"Existence is not dialec­ tic;' Guattari exclaims. "It is not representable. It is hardly even livable!"

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Lacan's conception of the unconscious as a kind of Turing machine

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a conflict between a conscious mind that can think and an underlying program that determines action.

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8 Simulating Narratives What Virtual Creatures Can Teach Us

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the analog subject implies a depth model of interiority, relations of resemblance between the interior and the surface

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The digital subject implies an emergent complexity that is related through hierarchical coding levels to simple underlying rules

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9 Subjective Cosmology and the Regime of Computation Intermediation in Greg Egan's Fiction

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Epilogue Recursion and Emergence

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