I've been reading this interesting book,
How We Became Posthuman by N. Katherine Hayles but I must admit that it's really slow going, because I keep stopping to think about the implications of her argument. Now, I know that sounds weird - of course I realize that one of the aims of this academic game is to think about the stuff we read - I drill this into my students for gods' sakes! But this one is getting me thinking after every second or third page, often involving long digressions into thinking about past research projects, current ones, and even my teaching (which feels REALLY odd since all I get to teach is Comp!)
For example, this comparison of books and the human body stopped me for a while:
Once encoding in the material base has taken place, it cannot easily be changed. Print and proteins in this sense have more in common with each other than with magnetic encodings, which can be erased and rewritten simply by changing the polarities.
It reminded me of a favored argument that my students liked to make the couple of times I taught Jorge Louis Borges' short story, "
The Library of Babel". If you don't want to read the story, the premise is that the entire world is a library and that within this library, there are an infinite number of books. From this a 'librarian'
observed that all the books, no matter how diverse they might be, are made up of the same elements: the space, the period, the comma, the twenty-two letters of the alphabet. He also alleged a fact which travelers have confirmed: In the vast Library there are no two identical books. From these two incontrovertible premises he deduced that the Library is total and that its shelves register all the possible combinations of the twenty-odd orthographical symbols. You can already see how this starts to sound like DNA and people, right? Well, it continues on with fanatics destroying books, pilgimages, the rumors of the perfect librarian, "The Man of the Book" and such. My students loved the idea that the books were people and though it's a slightly reductive argument (what then are the librarians for example?), it got them thinking, which frankly, is sometimes hard to generate in these classes!
The other thing that quotation got me thinking about is translation or adaptation, you know, when books get made into movies, movies into books, movies into video games, video games into comics, comics into movies... well, the list goes on and on, right? That's another thing we worked on a bit in the class that's just wrapped up at the end of the term here: "Constructing Narratives Across Media". Although we didn't look specifically at any adaptations, we did question the way the structure or form of a narrative affected the possibilities for representation.
One of the most effective ways of getting students to think about how the media in which art is created affects the kinds of stories it can tell (or at least the way it can tell them) is to get them to talk through how a scene from a book would look if you had to put it to film, or vice versa. The translation of a film scene to writing is actually slightly easier for them to envisage, so I often get them to write out a scene from the film we watch. It gets them thinking about how the media structures the kind of story they can tell.
Which of course led me to one of my current/former projects (I haven't decided whether I'm going to follow up on it or drop it) about the palimpsest. When texts used to be written on vellum, if you wanted to reuse the piece of sheep skin for something else, you had to actually scrape off the top layer where the ink penetrated to get a clean surface. Problem is, it's pretty much impossible to do that (try scraping the ink off a thick piece of paper) - you get most of it, but there are still often shadows or impressions left by the previous writing. The palimpsest. I used the image to argue in a paper that a writer trying to rewrite myth for new purposes had to contend with these shadows that cannot be fully erased.
What does this have to do with becoming posthuman? In the quote, Hayles talks about the magnetic strip that can be erased and re-recorded. As far as I know, there is no kind of ghost in the machine thing that happens with erasing a disk and rewriting it - it's a complete wipe and no trace of what was once on there is left to contaminate whatever is overwritten in the way the palimpsest affects subsequent writing. Even the language makes that evident - simply reverse the polarity - the orientation one might say - and everything that came before is now gone.
This kind of complete erasure is unique in the history of human development both of print and within the human body itself. The palimpsest of early written texts shows through when you try to do something new with the vellum. The human body isn't a perfect system built custom made from the ground up - we're an accumulation of mutations that modified already existing systems, thus, as well as the human body does work for us, there are parts of it that certainly could be more efficient if one were to start from the beginning - knee caps for example, do a good enough job in most cases of protecting the joint they're supposed to, but the number of ACL reconstructive surgeries performed every year leads one to wonder what a custom designed knee could look like. That's a flight of fantasy now, isn't it? Not used to thinking of the human body as custom made.
Or erasable. Which is why the idea of the magnetic recording device is so alien, so posthuman. Hayles argument moves into a discussion of signification in
Neuromancer which now makes me want to reread the book, and also leads me into considering
Pattern Recognition and some of the discussions we've been having over at
Read, Think, Write, particularly
Beatrice's question about Cayce's Sartrean type of nausea (which I'm still trying to fully suss out myself).
You see why it's taking me forever to read this book? A simple statement noting the difference between embodiment and the electronic text has me wandering through pedagogical technique, a revisionist archetypal critique paper, evolutionary theory (I just did finish reading parts of
The Origin of Species last month) and finally to book club and cyberpunk. At this rate, I'll get to my next exam sometime in 2007.
