Deleuze & Guattari

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Fractal Philosophy (and the small matter of learning how to listen)

Attunement as the Task of Art

Johnny Golding

Self-Portrait Dedicated to Paul Gauguin 1888; Oil on canvas, 60.5 x 49.4 cm (23 3/4 x 19 1/2 in); Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA	Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear, Arles: Jan 1889; Oil on Canvas, 60.0 x 49.0 cm; The Courtauld Institute Galleries

‘What terror haunts Van Gogh’s head, caught in a becoming-sunflower?’[1]

Self-Portrait? The Sunflowers (detail), 1888; replica (also by Van Gogh), Jan 1889, oil on canvas 2.1x 73 cm, National Portrait Gallery

B-side Philosophy (The Transformation of Van Gogh’s Right Ear)

Deleuze and Guattari offer three playful but coded journeys onto the broad arena they call ‘the task of art’ — where task, not to mention art, is meant to spill into, reconfigure and/or destroy the varying pragmatic-spatio-temporal intensities one might otherwise call ‘life’. These three journeys can be listed thus: that of an immanent ‘becoming-x’; that of the ever-sporing ‘rhizome’; and that of the a-radical, surface-structured, non-rooted ‘refrain’.

Par-boiled into a manifesto-style primer, the first of these journeys is shaded and toned by the concept-process-phrasings of a ‘becoming’, be that as a ‘becoming-intense’, a ‘becoming-animal’, a ‘becoming-woman’, a ‘becoming-sunflower’, a ‘becoming-imperceptible’ or a becoming-n+1-combination-of-that-which-lies-to-hand-or-may-be-or-already-has-been-becoming. [2] It all might seem a bit ‘method acting’ or indeed ‘running towards’ without ever really ‘getting there’. Nevertheless, D&G proclaim:

We are not in the world; we become with the world; we become by contemplating it. Everything is vision, becoming. We become universes. Becoming animal, plant, molecular, becoming zero. This is true of all the arts. [...] Art does not have opinions. Art undoes the triple organisation of perceptions, affections, and opinions in order to substitute a monument composed of percepts, affects, and blocs of sensations that takes the place of language. It is about listening [...] This is precisely the task of all art. [3]

These ‘becoming-’ journey-bandwidths mark the first stage of art’s work. But it is a ‘first’ not in a hierarchical, privileging sense, but rather in a logical sense; that is, by taking as a given that one ‘begins’ precisely where one ‘is’ — a pragmatic ‘start’ that can only ever happen by accounting for the constitutive reality of the present-tense ‘is’; that is to say, of the ‘here and now’. [4] This is a very different accounting of the ‘constitutive realities of the present-tense “is”‘ offered either by Hegel on the one hand or by Heidegger on the other. A brief potted-review of both on the question of what is ‘the is’ will serve to clarify what is at stake for Deleuze and Guattari — what they steal and what they leave behind from both treasure troves — and why.

Perhaps the clearest exposition of the constitutive ‘is’ for Hegelian logic can be found in the Phenomenology of Spirit where, for our purposes, three crucial distinctions are established: first, in terms of what is a ‘Universal Concept’ (as distinct from any other kind of concept); second, in terms of what is the ‘This’; and third, in terms of what is ‘Negation’. [5] At its most simple point, the Universal Concept names the full or totalised expression of any object — no matter where or when — without leaving anything to chance, opinion, perception or whim. To do otherwise is to fall prey to the usual fault of confusing an ‘abstraction’ (or ‘model’) with a Concept. [6] The only way in which one can be absolutely certain that the entirety of the picture has indeed been drawn — that nothing has been left out or can be added at will — is thus to follow the dialectical formulation that Universality will always-already consist of (a) an abstract version of ‘all that there is (thesis),’ plus (b) the point-for-point (but still abstract version) of ‘all that there is not (antithesis),’ whose (c) sublation of the one into the other (thesis into antithesis or vice versa) produces a synthesis, which (d) comes ‘back around’ to form the ‘concrete-ground’ (essence, basis) of the Absolute / Pure (Universality) of the Concept, itself now also ‘grounding’ (i.e., giving meaning to) the aforementioned and previously abstract thesis/antithesis. [7] In short, this dialectically encased resolution of the thesis/antithesis from pure abstraction into its highest, fully synthesized, ‘concrete’ and purest form of Spirit-Knowledge — with no extraneous bits hanging outside of the ‘whole picture’ (Totality) — ‘comes back around’ to form the basis/ground of all meaning, truth, interpretation and reason. It is a tidy, self- satisfying, teleological move. As Hegel summarises:

§20. The True is the whole. But the whole is nothing other than the essence consummating itself through its development. Of the Absolute, it must be said that it is essentially a result, that only in the end is it what it truly is; and that precisely in this consists its nature, viz. To be actual, subject, the spontaneous becoming of itself [8].

The niggling problem to which Hegel was of course fully aware, was that Reality managed always to be greater than the sum of its parts; indeed, if this were not the case then by simple arithmetic, thesis + its point-for-point contradictory antithesis would always equal ‘zero’ or at best would simply establish a tautology (A ⬄ not-A). One could say, ☸ names the synthesis ☞ : ☜ for no other reason than that I say it is so, a position that might be fine with Humpty Dumpty, but was far more problematic for Hegel. [9] And yet it was not possible to ‘add’ anything extra to the logic of the Concept in order to make it ‘make’ (as in produce, express, disclose) ‘sense’ (meaning, sensuousness, life). This is because at its most profound point, Idealism — and certainly Hegel’s version of it — was attempting to press the argument that no ‘outside’ set of logics or omnipotent points of observation should be required to explain any given phenomena. The logic had to hold, in and of itself; and more than that, it had to do so by simultaneously encompassing ‘change’, ‘movement’ and ‘progress’ as integral to any concept, and therewith, as integral (i.e. ‘within’) the Totality. [10]

The question, then, of how systematically to add a ‘something’ to the immanent movement without raising the entire edifice of Totality to an unworthy, arbitrary ground or, worse, to reducing it to mere tautology or opinion, perception or whim, was resolved in part by Hegel’s neat reformulation of the ‘This’. It was a curious kind of architectural move; one that not only led to one of Hegel’s greatest achievements — that of ‘Negation’ and with it, the notion of (a teleological unfolding of) the Universal ‘becoming-a-something’ — be it through self-certainty, perception, consciousness, identity politics, mastery, bondage and etc. — but it ironically heralded his ultimate failure — at least from the vantage point of the politically committed scholar, artist, person-in-the-street, not the least of whom included Deleuze and Guattari, despite their obviously sticky fingers when it came to pinching a concept.

Hegel played his cards by problematising the whereabouts of the ‘This’, as well as the ‘Here’ and ‘Now’ which, taken together constituted the dialectically informed manifestation of ‘This’. He problematised their whereabouts in the following way: At the very moment one might point to or attempt to grasp (both intellectually and practically) the present-tense Real in all its glorious manifestations — this ‘Now’ will always-already disappear into a Before or an After or a Somewhere Else. This is because the present — as present, i.e. as a ‘not-mediated’ entity, can never itself become embodied or ‘fully realised’, precisely because ipso facto it is ‘im-mediate’. Or, to put this slightly differently, it is to say that this ‘impossible’ non-representational moment of the ‘This’, is both the expression and presencing of an abstract ‘otherness’ whilst, simultaneously, also expressing/ presencing a radical fluidity of movement. A rhetorically demanding Hegel explains it thus:

§95. [...] What is the This? If we take the ‘This’ in the twofold shape of its being, as ‘Now’ and as ‘Here’, the dialectic it has in it will receive a form as intelligible as the ‘This’ itself is. To the question: ‘What is Now?’ let us answer, e.g. ‘Now is Night.’ In order to test the truth of this sense-certainty, a simple experiment will suffice. We write down this truth; a truth cannot lose anything by being written down, any more than it can lose anything through our preserving it. If now, this noon, we look again at the written truth we shall have to say that it has become stale. §106. The Now that is pointed to, this Now: ‘Now’; it has already ceased to be in the act of pointing to it. The Now that is, is another Now than the one pointed to, and we see that the Now is just this: to be no more, just when it is.The Now, as it is pointed out to us, is Now that has been, and this is its truth; it has not the truth of being. Yet this much is true, that it has been. But what essentially has been [gewesen ist] is, in fact, not an essence that is [kein Wesen]; [rather] it is a ‘not’. [...] [11]

Or, to put it yet another way: the ‘This’, the ‘Here’, the ‘Now’ — in short, the ‘is’ of Hegelian Idealism — is nothing other than the abstract surface structure of any given Universality. And as with any surface (say, for example, the surface of a table) not only can the ‘surface-is’ not exist without the actuality of the structure to which it is attached acting as ‘ground’ to the said surface, but that the surface acts also as the ‘expression’ of the point-for-point structure to which it is attached. In the case of the ‘This’, the ‘Here’, the ‘Now’, etc, each is ‘surface’ to the Totality, attached to and expressing in this case, the dialectical fluid structure of movement itself. And as that surface can never be larger nor smaller than the structure to which it is attached, nor for that matter, remain ‘inside’ or ‘outside’ any Totality, this ‘surface’ neither embodies weight nor substance nor essence nor space. Nevertheless, as a surface expressing a (transcendental/immanent) movement-structure, it still names an eternally unfolding ‘otherness-’ without which meaning cannot be sutured or made ‘manifest’, i.e. made present. Removed from its ground (synthesis), i.e., taking the ‘surface’ to be ‘in and of itself’, the ‘This’ of the ‘Here’ and ‘Now’ simply cannot be ‘grasped’. But as we will see momentarily, it is precisely the surface-immanent movement-structure called ‘This’ that D&G wish to liberate from the shackles of a Universalised Totality. As we will see, this immanent-movement-structure will morph into many things: sometimes the ‘refrain’; sometimes a ‘viral assemblage’; sometimes ‘logic of sense’; sometimes ‘simulacrum’. (We might even wish to call it ‘Van Gogh’s right ear’, but I am getting ahead of the argument). [12]

To the question, then, what can be added in order to avoid tautology, whim, outside direction or authorial opinion, Hegel’s answer is quite clear; he names it the Negative — the immanent teleological ‘surface’ unfolding of dialectical synthesis itself. [13] This may seem surprising, but this move to situate the ‘is’ as a Negative surface structure was quite an advance from the original zero-sum position of thesis + anti-thesis = the whole of the Universe. For not only did establishing ‘the Negative’ as an immanent and ‘unnameable-something-other’ allow for the breaking up and adding to an otherwise deadlocked and tautological A ⬄ not-A identity formation. It also meant that the so-called deep cut (‘/’) between thesis/antithesis could now no longer be envisioned as a logical no-man’s land, i.e., as the ‘excluded middle’, often wrongly subsumed by political/creative identity inventors to be the ‘in between space’ of Otherness, and therewith of liberation, itself. If one were to stay within the confines of Universality, there could never be an ‘in between’ moment bracketing the past and the future, just an abstract, negative surface structure of ‘a plurality’ of Nows, which vanish at the very moment of their debut, though not without holding the door open so that ‘meaning’ can take (its) place.

§108. [What gives the Here its gravitas?]. The Here pointed out, to which I hold fast, is similarly a This. Here which, in fact, is not this Here, but a Before and Behind, an Above and Below, a Right and a Left. The Above is itself similarly this manifold otherness of above, below, etc. The Here, which was supposed to have been pointed out, vanishes in other Heres, but these likewise vanish. What is pointed out, held fast, and abides is a negative This, which is negative only when the Heres are taken as they should be, but in being so taken they dispersed themselves; what abides is a simple complex of many Heres. The Here that is meant would be the point; but is not; on the contrary, when it is pointed out as something that is, the pointing-out shows itself to be not an immediate knowing [of the point], but a movement from the Here that is meant through many Heres into the universal Here which is a simple plurality of Heres, just as the day is a simply plurality of Nows. [14]

Of course Deleuze, as well as Guattari, reject — and for good reason — the Hegelian dialectic, often demanding to rid philosophy, politics, science and art of, as Foucault so eloquently put it, “the old categories of the Negative (law, limit, castration, lack, lacuna), which Western thought has so long held sacred as a form of power and an access to reality.” [15] But it was also no less the case that the Hegelian dialectic, and particularly the way in which the Concept itself had been formulated was, and remains to this day, a tough act to beat. For to rid Philosophy of the metaphysical ‘is’ seemed to imply a good riddance to some of its more eloquent fares — plurality, surface-synthesis, movement, the instant — not to mention ‘pure immanence’ and with it, the possibility of destroying the otherwise inventive categories of, say, ‘becoming-woman’ or ‘becoming-animal’ or ‘becoming-sunflower’ or ‘becoming- ear’ and etc. It often seemed (and in some quarters, still does), that the price of fighting to create a wholly different set of anti-oedipal identities and, with it, a wholly new set of social order(s) might just be worth the price of enduring, just for a moment or two, all the rotting bad smells of the Hegelian identi-kit corpse. [16]

And yet, this is precisely what D&G set out to accomplish: a way to hold one’s nose against Hegel and all forms of Metaphysical thought in order to conceptualise, materialise and endure the very act of ‘becoming-x’ without being penetrated by ‘arboreal philosophy’, even if ‘just for a moment or two’. The dangers to allow otherwise, were too grave. For arboreal philosophy was their euphemistic way to identify the, by now well-entrenched planters-wart logic of continuity, goals, processes and closed systems, thoroughly embedded in all flat-footed State philosophies and common sense pronouncements — of which 2000+ years of Metaphysics, contemporary Warfare, instrumental Science, Literature, Art and Religion had done little to uproot.

At its most simple form, arboreal philosophy could be understood in this manner: Take as a given a seed, say for example, an acorn. Now, no matter what one does (assuming it is gardened properly and not set alight or mashed), it will only ever unfold / manifest itself as an Oak Tree. The Tree is thus the ‘goal’ to which all little acorn seeds aspire. This ‘aspiration’, as it were, is continuous, linear (even if the path appears convoluted, spiralled, hysterical, nasty or relaxed). This is because all change, no matter how often or in what manner it occurs, does so in relation to an always-already ‘unfolding’ trajectory of that growth. The Oak, as the ‘outcome’ of the acorn, names thus the very purpose (ground) of the said seed. It is only the elemental processes to which that seed might be subjected (say, wind, sun, rain, unemployment, bullying etc) that determines ‘how’ the Oak might turn out (big, small, gnarly, demented, covered in law suits). Thus is revealed the ‘true purpose’ of one’s Being; or, as eugenics might proclaim, ‘it’s all already coded in one’s basic DNA’. [17]

Most crucially, then, and no matter what the seed might do, be it wishing, hoping, praying (or even becoming a political militant), it would only-ever keep unfolding towards its proverbial goal (The Old Oak Tree). The Oak Tree-goal thus gives meaning, purpose, destiny to our little seed, who in times of drought or strife or just hanging out with Feminists, might otherwise be tempted to fall off the so-called True path (though, in the cold light of day would ‘come to its senses’ and realise, one way or another, that this kind of dreaming could/should/would never do, as it was considered impossible to fall outside an always-already given ‘nature’). To be sure, then, under this logic, one could never leave the family; one could never attempt the dream of becoming-x, if that ‘becoming-x’ was something other than the already proscribed path. One could never morph into, say, a butterfly or Mazeratti car, no matter how dedicated to becoming ‘butterfly’ or ‘car’ that seed might wish to be. This might be very well and good if one happens to be an acorn; but if one happens to be a slave, woman, racial-Other, gay, transgender and etc; if one happens to ‘think outside the box’ or grow ‘bigger than one’s britches’ or try to ‘rise above one’s station’ etc, it becomes clear where this grounded and continuously unfolding logic can go wrong. Mob lynching, stoning, raping, murder, ethnic cleansing, Sharia law, torture all gain an ethical toe-hold in the culture as ‘rightful’ punishments against those attempting to become a-something-other-than-what-they-were-always-meant-to-be. “We’re tired of trees,” sigh D&G. “We should stop believing in trees, roots, and radicles. They’ve made us suffer too much. All of arborescent culture is founded on them, from biology to linguistics.” [18]

But the question remained: whether one could account, both epistemologically and analytically for the ‘constitutive is’ as a something that ‘made sense’ — in the fullest use of the terms ‘to make’ (create, enable, force) and ‘sense’ (sensuousness, intelligence, the senses), without reintroducing the tetra-headed trap of Universal Totality, the Negative, and the teleological methods of Dialectic unfolding. If this could be done, argued D&G, then the political and aesthetic yields would be substantial. Because, then, for the first time in a rather long time, not only would philosophy have caught up with the very reality it had been seeking to inhabit: i.e., one steeped in discontinuous logics, fractal codes, non-representational art, multiversal genders, non-national sovereignties. It would mean bearing witness to our contemporary age in an active, participant manner, rather than as mere drones, couch potatoes or passer-bys. Accounting both epistemologically and analytically for the ‘constitutive is’ in terms of this ‘age’ called ‘technology’ meant taking seriously the combinatory logics of ‘techne’ itself. It meant taking seriously that in our epoch/ age, a different way of systematising was virulently underway: one that foregrounded ‘the art of grasping the “out-there”‘; one that worked off of and around patterns and poeisis, simulacrum, circulation, assemblage and exchange. An epoch whereby wholly different end-games-as-mid-games become networked orders of the day, producing, expressing and demanding, quite different politics, ethics, science and art — not to mention timings and spatialities — than those encountered by our Ancient, Modernist (and postmodernist) cousins, barely visible with a Metaphysical lens.

Not to be daunted, it seemed the only way — or at least the main experimental way — to eliminate Hegelian substance, and with it, arboreal philosophy, was at first to commit to, what would later be called, the ‘outside of thought.’ [19] Here ‘outside of thought’ meant something quite different than a kind of anti-intellectual run toward ‘Practice’ (the usual partner-in-crime rallied against ‘Theory’). Getting away from, or getting ‘outside’ of, thought was meant to get distance from metaphysical Contemplation rather than getting away from being conceptual. It meant trying to get away from the conflation of language with ‘metaphor’, ‘semiotics’, ‘signifier,’ and therewith, representation. [20] In short, it meant trying to figure out how to ‘picture’ — without the visuals — the becoming-sunflower of Van Gogh’s right ear.

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DEEPER INTO THE MACHINE: THE FUTURE OF ELECTRONIC LITERATURE

by N. Katherine Hayles

Culture Machine

Language comes to media not all at once but in fits and starts as technologies develop and practitioners discover—and create—the medium’s specificity. The language of film, for example, evolved from the earliest cinema using stationary cameras through successive waves of technological development and creative experimentation, forging the grammar, syntax and rhetoric of today’s special effects, digital animation, nuanced color, digitized sound and plethora of camera techniques. In the last few years, electronic literature has moved beyond the print-based assumptions characteristic of first-generation texts into second-generation works that increasingly exploit the capabilities offered by digital environments.

Media can be thought of as collective intelligences that explore their conditions of possibility by trying to discover what they are good for. These attempts in turn feed back into technological innovation to transform their conditions of possibility. Film learns that it can use shadow and light to create images resonant with emotional significance and meaning; this heightened sensitivity to gray tones is succeeded by the plunge into color, where the expanded palette allows for still more extensive use of the visible spectrum as a reservoir of signifying practices. Riding on the coattails of software developers, electronic literature has seen its conditions of possibility dramatically transformed since its inception. So rapid has been the development that one can speak, as I have, of two generations of works. Dating the watershed between the generations is a matter of critical debate, but most people agree it falls somewhere between 1995 and 1997. First generation works, often written in Storyspace or Hypercard, are largely or exclusively text-based with navigation systems mostly confined to moving from one block of text to another. Second generation works, authored in a wide variety of software including Director, Flash, Shockwave and xml, are fully multimedia, employ a rich variety of interfaces, and have sophisticated navigation systems. The trajectory traced by developments subsequent to 1997 can be broadly characterized as moving deeper into the machine. Increasingly electronic literature devises artistic strategies to create effects specific to electronic environments. In short, it is learning to speak digital. This specificity can be explored through a series of works that construct the relation between machine, work and user to discover what it means to write, read, and inhabit a coded medium. The first work I will discuss is database, an installation created by Adriana de Souze e Silva and Fabian Winkler and exhibited at the Electronic Literature Organization’s ‘Symposium:  State of the Arts’ in Los Angeles in April, 2002.[1]  Database interrogates the assumptions embedded in the interfaces of screen, printer and projector by inverting them, a process that brings them into visibility for the viewer and invites meditation on the presuppositions they instantiate.

The second set of works interrogates how interfaces and the machines that process them construct subjectivity. Particularly important for these works is the realization that natural and machine languages mingle in the production of electronic literature. While the user parses words, the machine reads code. These works are not content to let code remain below the surface but rather show it erupting through the surface of the screen to challenge the hegemony of alphabetic language. Talan Memmott’s ‘Translucidity’ and MEZ’s ‘mezangelled’ productions push toward the creation of a creole comprised of English and code. These works draw on the literary tradition and programming protocols to ask what it means for contemporary users to be constructed by both. What kinds of subjects are spoken by this creole?  What kinds of subjectivities are implied by the interfaces created by these works, and what is their relation to the machines that write them?

Another way to push deeper into the machine is to construct the screen as a world the user is invited to enter. ‘The Many Voices of St. Caterina of Pedemonte’ by Alison Walker and Silvia Rigon illustrates how the creation of a world in electronic environments differs from the verbally constructed worlds of print literature. [2] This work employs animation, sound, graphics, and navigation as semiotic components working together with words to create multiple interpretive layers focusing on the spiritual practices of a fictional medieval mystic, Saint Caterina. As the different voices offer varying perspectives, the user is immersed in a richly imaged and layered topography where the church hierarchy, academic scholars, the mass of believers, and the female saint contest for the meaning and significance of her mystical experiences. In M.D. Coverley’s electronic novel, The Book of Going Forth by Day, the inscription technology producing the fictional world is foregrounded as part of the meaning.[3]  Navigation here does more than offer access to the work, becoming an important part of the work’s signifying structure and creating meaning through the functionalities it offers to the user. As critics and theorists encounter these works, they discover that the established vocabulary of print criticism is not adequate to describe and analyze them. The language that electronic literature is creating requires a new critical language as well, one that recognizes the specificity of the digital medium as it is instantiated in the signifying practices of these works. This new critical vocabulary will recognize the interplay of natural language with machine code; it will not stay only at the screen but will consider as well the processes generating that surface; it will understand that interplays between words and images are essential to the work’s meaning; it will further realize that navigation, animation and other digital effects are not neutral devices but designed  practices that enter deeply into the work’s structures; it will eschew the print-centric assumption that a literary work is an abstract verbal construction and focus on the materiality of the medium; and it will toss aside the presupposition that the work of creation is separate from the work of production and evaluate the work’s quality from an integrated perspective that sees creation and production as inextricably entwined. This is, of course, a tall order. Nothing less than forging a new critical vocabulary, however, will suffice to account for the new languages that contemporary electronic literature is creating. Critics must follow writers deeper into the machine, learning as we go the idioms that emerge when humans collaborate with intelligent machines to create the literature of the twenty-first century.
Interrogating the Interface
Database plays with the idea the materiality of technology should be thrust  into visibility as a way to bring into consciousness  assumptions that we normally take for granted. It undertakes this enterprise by reversing and subverting the technology’s usual operations.  The installation consists of a computer screen displaying virtual text, a printer with a miniature video camera attached, and a projection displaying the camera’s output.  Sitting in the printer are sheets of paper full of text, the exterior database for the project. When the user moves the cursor over the white computer screen, black rectangles appear that cover over most of the text, along with keywords that fade into white again when the cursor moves away—unless the user chooses to click, in which case the keyword is also covered by a black rectangle. At the same time, the click sends a message to the camera to focus on a second keyword in the exterior database related to the first through agonistic relation, perhaps an antonym or other oppositional tension. For example, clicking on ‘perpetually’ on the screen makes ‘too fast’ appear on the wall projection; the screenic ‘promise’ links to the projected ‘past’.  After a few clicks, the screen is dotted with black rectangles. The user can then click on a red dot at the upper right corner to activate a ‘print’ command. The printer sends through the sheet full of pre-written text, blacking out the keywords chosen by the user as the camera gives a fleeting glimpse of them before they disappear. The obliterations create alterations in the database’s text that change its meaning, so the database the user reads as it emerges from the printer is not the same as it was when seen on screen.

Figure 1. Souza exhibiting database.

Souza and Winkler’s artist’s statement makes clear the project’s complexity. Inversions operate throughout the apparatus to challenge conventional assumptions. The printer obliterates rather than inscribes words; the database is stored as marks on paper rather than binary code inside the computer; clicking blacks out visible words rather than stabilizing them; the camera ‘reads’ but does not record; and the projection displays words oppositional to the ones the user has chosen.  The inversions create new sensory, physical, and metaphysical relationships between the interactor and the database. Printing, a technique normally associated with creating external memory storage, here transforms a mark into an obliteration. The video camera, usually linked with storage technologies that make a permanent record, here makes writing ephemeral and transitory, disappearing from the projection as the word is inked out. The database, rather than residing at physically inaccessible sites as bit strings dispersed throughout the hard drive, is here constituted as linear text the user can literally hold in her hands.

Figure 2. Screen projection with database sheet emerging from printer in database

These inversions recall the distinction Lev Manovich makes between narrative and database in his pioneering The Language of New Media.[4] While narrative is the dominant form of print literature, Manovich argues, database is the native idiom of the computer. He notes that database inverts the relation between the syntagmatic and paradigmatic that obtains with print text. For print the syntagmatic, inhering in the order of the sentence, is visibly present on the page, whereas the paradigmatic, inhering in alternatives that could be substituted for a given word, is virtual, imaginable as a conceptual possibility but not physically realized.  With a database, however, the possible choices are physically present as encoded data, whereas the syntagmatic order created by their assembly is virtual, a possibility that can be realized only when the appropriate commands are executed.

This inversion of the syntagmatic and paradigmatic is playfully referenced by database’s pre-printed sheet, which serves as an actual paradigmatic array and also an emergent narrative created on the fly by the printer’s obliterations overwriting some of the inscriptions. The significance of these inversions is broadened by the prose constituting the database, selected from various writers meditating on time and memory, including Borges’s ‘The Immortals’.  In this fiction, the narrator is searching for the City of Immortals. He discovers a tribe of troglodytes, seemingly subhuman creatures that cannot speak, do not sleep, and eat barely enough to keep alive. The narrator decides to teach one of them to speak, only to discover that the creature is the poet Homer. Following Borges’s logic, Souza and Winkler point out that immortality drastically alters one’s relationship to time. Since time for an immortal stretches in an endless horizon, the future ceases to have meaning; the future is precious for mortals because they understand their lives have finite horizons.  The immortals, by contrast, live in a present that obliterates the past and devours the future, becoming absolute, permanent, and infinite. Saturated by memories stretching into infinity, the immortals become incapable of action, paralyzed by thoughts that have accumulated through eons without erasure. Seen in light of this story, the obliterations the printer creates can be read as inscriptions of mortality, non-signifying marks that paradoxically signify the ability to forget, a capability the immortals do not have.

Just as the printer plays with time by linking inscribing/obliterating with immortality/mortality, so the wall projection plays with time by linking writing/speaking with visibility/invisibility. The words projected on the wall function as visible inscriptions, but inscriptions that behave like speaking since they disappear as the printer inks out the selected word. Writing, a technology invented to preserve speech from temporal decay, here is made to instantiate the very ephemerality it was designed to resist. The interactor’s relation to this writing is reconfigured to require the same mode of attention one normally gives to speech. If one’s thoughts wander and attention lapses while listening to someone speak, it is impossible to go back and recover what was lost, in contrast to rereading a passage in a book. Moreover, the wall projection does not repeat the word the viewer selected on screen but rather substitutes another word orthogonally related to it. Blacked out as soon as the interactor clicks on it, the screen word became unavailable to visual inspection. The interactor can ‘remember’ it only by attempting to triangulate on it using the projected word, which requires her to negotiate a relationship constructed by someone else through the fields of meaning contained in the database. But as soon as the interactor prints the database out, it is altered by the obliteration of the words she selected, which also changes the meaning of the narrative that provides the basis for the relationship between screenic and projected words. Thus the interactor is placed in the position of trying to negotiate meanings whose significances are changed by her attempt to understand them.

It is no accident that database positions its interventions at the points where words are transported from one medium to another. The functionalities that allow us  to print out a screen or project it onto a vertical surface make it easy for us to forget the technological mediations that make these everyday activities possible, and more crucially to forget the embedded assumptions they instantiate. Screen text is not print, and a projected light image is not a scanning electron beam. The inscription technologies of screen, print and projection each has its own specificities, and each constructs the user in a distinctive sensory, cognitive, and material relation. What we dare not forget, database implies through its focus on remembering and forgetting, is that the technology is both a machine and an incarnation of assumptions embedded in its form and function. These assumptions interpenetrate the work, or better, commingle with it in a fusion that requires re-thinking the ideology that a literary work is an abstract immaterial entity. By bringing our assumptions into view through its subversions and inversions, database facilitates this creative revisioning.

Interfacing Subjectivity

In ‘The Data][H][ Bleeding Texts', MEZ (Mary-Anne Breeze) gives an 'Electroduction' to her 'polysemic language/code system'. [5]  She calls the system ‘mezangelle’, describing it as a way to extend the meaning of words and sentences ‘beyond the predicted or expected’.  Besides containing MEZ’s pen name, ‘mezangelle’ also suggests mangling, appropriate in its ordinary meaning as a process that deterritorializes and reterritorializes word fragments. ‘Mangle’ also has a specialized programming meaning, referring to a process whereby a program associates a file name longer than 8 bits, the maximum length a computer can store, with an arbitrary combinations of symbols 8 bits long. Thus a human can give a name like ‘Datableeding’ to a file that will enable easy recall, and mangling mediates between this human-meaningful name and a bit string the computer can store. Mangling thus works as a translator between natural language and code.

The pun on mangling points toward the play on code and English that is at the heart of the mezangelle language system. Inserting ‘programming language-shards and operating system echoes’ into English, MEZ works within the environments of email lists and chat rooms to create poem-like objects that display in their structure and syntax the interplay of human language and machine code. She thinks of the context for her works as an ‘environment x.clusively reliant’ on software functionalities, and the works explore the significance of intermingling language and code for the fictional voices that speak within it. At first her pieces consisted of ‘mezangelled’ text (along of course with the underlying code that formatted them for electronic environments). Recently, however, she has moved into creating ‘enhanced’ works that include in addition to “mezangelled” text animation, graphics, and sound. She has also self-consciously begun reaching out to a wider audience, giving hints and explanations about how to read and comprehend her texts, a venture about which she nevertheless voices misgivings.

In ‘_Non Compos Mentis:  Zen_Tripping the Non-Conference Circuitry_’, a work included in her recent collection ‘_][ad][  Dressed in a Skin C.ode_', MEZ provides both the mezangelled and plaintext, so that the polysemy introduced by 'mezangelling' can be easily seen.[6]

Figure 3. Screen shot from ‘_][ad][Dressed in a Skin C.ode_'.

A section entitled '_Back-and-Foregrounding_' in the plaintext descries the transformation of sensibility that occurs when the persona encounters the computer and is forever transformed.

A Mezzian Flesh-Mote enters a library. In a networked sense this library is cold; binary data advancements are yet to make any perceivable impact on its manifest functions. A silvered sliver-glint pulls the Mezzian Mote forward to the only technoniche available—a computer laboratory, used primarily for word-processing tasks. It also has an Internet connection. A Datadervish [E-Mote] is born, and a Flesh-Mote is extinguished.

A tale of transformation, the story can only be told from a retrospective view (for it is only after the fact that the transformation can be recognized as such), and this angle of vision is reflected in the vocabulary. ‘E-mote’ is a formation born of the Web, a verb transformed into a noun by the interjection of a dash that references the electronic (‘E’) world and the subjects who emerge from it. Through back-formation the subject prior to her electrification is named a ‘Flesh-mote’, a word that already recognizes the individual will exist in a haze of networked others as soon as it transforms into an ‘E-mote’.  Pulled forward by the gleam of the screen, the Flesh-Mote finds the means of her transformation in the computer, primitive though this particular laboratory is.

Now consider the ‘mezangelled’ text, which compresses the plaintext and, paradoxically, through compression extends its implications. .a mezzian flesh-mote enters. .the libr][bin][ary is cold. a s[]l][i][ver glint pulls the mote 4wards. .4warding][ing of the datadervish][in2 the][comp][lab lair.

At first it appears that the prose of the plaintext has been converted into poetic lines, a transformation that brings into play the traditional poetic tension between the ending of one line and the beginning of another. However, in the programming language Perl the dot is a concatenation operator used to add strings together, so the lines now exist both as discrete units and additive lines, with the dot signaling division when read as a period ending a sentence, and addition when read as a concatenation operator preceding the string.  The second line, typical in its use of interjected square brackets, shows how mezangelling works. 'Library' can be recovered as a word, but only after encountering ' ][bin][ary', the binary code still largely missing from this “'cold' library. 'Binary' is in a sense now hidden or found to be concealed within 'library', a form of reading that anticipates the coming transformation of this institution as it creeps into the information age, a process already begun in its primitive word-processing laboratory. Read as operators, the brackets in this mezangelled word do not make sense, for there is no opening bracket for the initial right bracket, and no closing bracket for the final left bracket. Despite its violation of normal syntax, '][' has a polysemy that draws MEZ to it, for it resembles “'I', the nomination of selfhood, and also 'H', which by back-formation can often be read as 'I' in her texts. Although the brackets can be broken apart, '][' often functions as a symbol in its own right. That the 'bin' of binary should be surrounded by this symbol suggests the implication of the subject 'I' in the discovery of the binary within the library, an association that the plaintext makes clear in other words. The 'silvered sliver-glint' of the plaintext is now compressed into a mezangelled word that folds 'silvered' and 'sliver' into one through the interjection of brackets, a process that also twice creates the '][' symbol and so interjects the 'Mezzian' of the plaintext into the middle of the word, so that now 'mote' appears without the preceding adjective. 'Forward' becomes '4wards', a word homophonically recoverable as the plaintext term but also visually contaminated by a number combined with an English syllable in a creole that signals the in-mixing of code with language.  In the mezangelled text, the 'Datadervish' is moved '4ward][ing' into a lab, a prescient anticipation of the transformation already encoded by the interjection of the '][' symbol into the motion of moving forward. 'Computer laboratory' in the plaintext becomes '][comp][lab lair', with the '][' symbol now surrounding 'comp', emphasizing that the 'I' and 'computer' have now joined in a space that has also become a 'lair', with the connotation of secrecy, protection, and most of all habitation. The transformation, in the plaintext performed by the assertion that 'A Datadervish [E-mote] is born, and a Flesh-mote is extinguished’, is now dramatically enacted by a visual and verbal full stop, punningly performed by bolded dots and the word ‘stop’.
.
>>stop<< 
.

In older languages such as Basic, ‘stop’ signaled the end of a routine. Here, however, it is not the program that ends but a certain kind of pre-electronic subjectivity. As was the case with the square brackets, the angle brackets function both as visual patterns, here indicating emphasis, and allusions to code. In C++ they are used to designate extraction (>>) and insertion (<<) operators, commands that indicate the program should successively output or input the terms in a file until all the terms have been used. Read as operators, the brackets pointing right metaphorically indicate terms are being extracted (those comprising the subject as Flesh-mote), while the brackets pointing left indicate terms are being inserted (those of the E-mote). The dots above and below this process serve both as dividers and connectors (when read as concatenation operators), thus marking the splice from one kind of subjectivity to another.

In her brilliant analysis of MEZ’s ‘code-wurk’, Rita Raley demonstrates that the reading process is significantly altered with a mezangelled text, for the decoding that normally constitutes literary reading is here disrupted by visual signs that have no phonemic equivalent, for example the ‘][' symbol or a word like 'libr][bin][ary'. [7]  This is a language that cannot be spoken in all its fullness. The historic evolution of a system of marks tied to oral articulation is disrupted and re-encoded as a system of mixed phonemes and code symbols that can be read and apprehended but not spoken. Thus ‘la langue’ of Saussure and the generations of semioticians following him is displaced by a language system that can be fully understood only by a bilingual reader who knows both English and code. Spoken language cannot be the desired object of study, as it was for Saussure, who saw written language as derivative and secondary. It is not oral articulations but inscriptions that are central in this language system, and moreover inscriptions that go deep into the machine. As the code symbols continually remind us, the screen text is only the topmost part of the language system; underlying the screen text are layers and layers of coding languages essential for producing the surface text. John Cayley calls for analysis of ‘a set of relationships—relationships constituted by artistic practice—between a newly problematized linguistic materiality and represented content’. [8]  To read mezangelle is to understand precisely what he means, for through her work we experience a world in which language is inextricably in-mixed with code and code with language, creating a creolized discourse in which the human subject is constituted through and by  intelligent machines.

Talan Memmott shares with MEZ an interest in mingling code and English to create a creolized discourse. They differ, however, in their use of visual materials. Originally working only with text, MEZ tends to use visual images as illustrations for content, whereas for Memmott images are part of the content. Coming to electronic literature from a background as a painter, Memmott chooses to enact some concepts through screen design, animation and images rather than words. In addition, his work is more idiosyncratic than MEZ’s, whose content, once decoded, tends not to be especially esoteric.  The idiosyncrasy of Memmott’s work can be understood as a large-scale project, stretching over many individual texts, that is designed to deconstruct traditional ideas of selfhood, representation, and affectional relationships by revealing their ideological bases. In this sense, to use one of his neologisms, the work is not merely idiosyncratic but ideosyncratic, an experiential art form meant to pry us from our received views by re-describing and re-presenting relationships and subjectivities in terms of a networked environment in which individual selves blend into a collectivity, human boundaries blur as people merge with technological apparatus, and cultural formations are reconfigured to reflect and embody a cyborgian reality. This re-description, a deep re-visioning of what it means to be human, is ambiguously situated as a development dependent on information technology and as a truer apprehension of what the human condition has always been. Such an ambitious project is not without perils, of course, and at times the texts veer toward the Charybdis of incomprehensibility or the Scylla of sophomoric generalization. At their best, however, they are both playful and profound, challenging our visions of ourselves and presenting us with highly charged enactments of what we may be in the process of becoming.

The playfulness of the work is on display in ‘E_CEPHALOPEDIA||NOVELLEX’, a work in which a narrator finds a chalked figure on the sidewalk, as if a dead body has been outlined there. [9]  The figure is missing its head, which has been swept away or obscured. The narrator finds himself unable to decide if it is the outline of Leonardo’s famous drawing of the four-legged and four-armed man representing the ‘range and radiance’ of human proportions, or Bataille’s iconoclastic self-portrait showing him holding a dagger in one hand and his ripped-out heart in the other. Since the two images have little in common and indeed are ideological opposites—Leonardo’s drawing embodying the ideal of ‘man as the measure of all things’ and Bataille’s image an attempt to pollute and fatally contaminate that vision—the narrator’s confusion is ludicrous. On another level, however, it is significant, for inasmuch as the two images are one another’s opposites, they both depend upon the same assumptions, one to instantiate them, the other to refute. ‘Leonardo becomes Bataille’, the narrator suggests, ‘—learns a lessen from Batialle. There was a struggle.’  The lesson/lessen pun effectively makes the point that the grand vision of Leonardo, with its implicit generalizations about the human form and subject, is unconsciously imperialistic and must be made more specific, lessened, to retain validity.

Figure 4. Screen shot from ‘E_CEPHALOPEDIA||NOVELLEX’ showing the headless Leonardo body on left and the Bataille body on the right.

The narrator pretends that he would be able to make the distinction between the Leonardo and Bataille images if only the head were not missing, another significant confusion since it suggests that without the head, the body cannot signify. Here the narrator’s confusion subtly points to the insidious nature of a Cartesian view that identifies thinking solely with what happens in the head, making the body more or less superfluous to cognition. ‘One must RE:member’, the narrator comments punningly on a screen in which the radiant Leonardo head appears with a bifurcated arrow pointing toward the headless Leonardo body. On another screen, ‘The [Organ|Engin]eer tries to do his best. . . He thinks, we think Beyond what is’, and the bifurcated arrow again points to an enlarged image of the Leonardo head. A bolded command reads, ‘[</HEAD >@FRONT]‘, a non-syntactic combination of html coding for ‘head’ followed by a MOO command for location, suggesting again the Cartesian primacy of the head. Following is a screen showing the head floating above the body with the bolded tag ‘[<HEAD>@BODY]‘, another non-syntactic combination suggesting that the head should after all be included in the description of the body (@ is a command in many MOO environments that allows the user to input a physical description indicating how she wishes to be “seen” by other users).

In ‘Translucidity’, this kind of language-image play is extended to (re)describe the process whereby identity can become ‘adentity’, a form of subjectivity in which the individual escapes from the genetic and psychological encoding of the nuclear family to join an electronic collectivity.[10]    Translucidity is contrasted with transparency, which the work punningly interprets as the parenting process in which [par1] and [par2] in a ‘plural act of rendering’ create the ’3rd face’, the child who must break away from the ‘couplings and collusive partnerships’ that would keep him trapped within a model of individualistic selfhood reproduced in turn through his acts of (trans)parenting. In comparison, in translucidity ‘The 3rd is always other as it is I’, suggesting that individuality is an illusion, a mystification of the social and cultural processes that make every I a We. In contrast, translucidity would locate the face, signifier of selfhood, at  the ‘outside of an inside that allows for self observation as self-examination, a testing and playing with identity as adentity’.  Such a transformation is not envisioned without reservations. ‘We find warmth in this de.position of identity, entrusting it to an external repository that is accessible only through the attachment of some electronic device, needing an other for de.vice’, the narrator comments. The ‘de.position’ of identity both deconstructs and repositions the ‘I, which can only be we’.  Still, this collective I/We is not yet a complete ‘de.position’, for also involved is the ‘I + device’, which ‘[N]crusts the earth through hyperactive infofrenzy. . . the need to know . . . We exp[e|a]nd as we conduct—heat rises; global and lobal warming are sibling’.  The conjunction of the capitalistic forces that produce global warming with the ‘lobal’ of the human brain indicates how inextricably mingled are the human and machine in the digital age. Whether the resulting ‘infofrenzy’ will lead to amelioration or catastrophe is unclear; all that is certain is that it is the catalyst for unprecedented change.
Throughout the work a frequent visual trope is the face, as if rendering literally the idea of the (inter)face as a connection between a face inside the machine with the faces we wear outside the machine. Moreover, these faces are described as ambiguously located at once on the inside and outside, as if they are both looking out from the screen and reflecting our faces looking at the screen. In one image, we see a face—the only visual cue available for clicking—and when we click on it, smaller faces multiply across the screen in a visual enactment of (trans)parental reproduction. On another screen a face peeps through a clickable round window as if contained within a petri disk or microscope lens, the object or subject of an experiment.

Figure 5. Peeping face screen from ‘Translucidity’.

In yet another the face poses as an emblem of allure (alle.ure), seducing the visitor with the promise ‘I have what you want’ and inviting us to register. If we accept the invitation by clicking, another screen opens with seductive eyes half-closed above boxes where we can respond to questions such as ‘who are you?’  ‘where are you now?’, ‘what do you want?’ and ‘why are you (t)here?’  The promise implicit in these questions is not intimacy but what Memmott calls ‘intertimacy’, a meeting of subject and object–’[sub|ob]ject]’– in the apparatus. ‘She, the apparatus is always Ariadne. . .,’ spinner of threads, weaver of webs, creating the connections that allow the transformation from one to ‘WE’, ‘[com(mon)|ex][patr|p]iates’.  Expatriates who expatiate, comrades who are becoming common, this electronic collectivity will be formed not  through technological mediation alone but also through art works such as this. With creolized language, transformed subjectivites, and visual/verbal/kinetic (inter)faces,  this work images new kinds of faces appropriate to the posthuman subjects it (re)describes.
Sensing a World

In ‘The Many Voices of St. Caterina of Pedemonte’, sound, animation, image and text are woven together to create a compelling sensory experience. Drawing on their research into the lives of medieval female saints, Alison Walker and Silvia Rigon have created ‘St. Caterina’ as a fictional composite constructed to reveal the saint’s subjectivity as a site for contestation between five different perspectives. These are actualized in the text as competing voices represented as articulated sound and screenic text; each voice is associated also with related visualizations. The opening screen shows an iconographic Valentine-red heart, with white rays going out to smaller red hearts  serving as portals to the different sections. An important component of the work is its interactivity, designed to engage the user’s emotional and psychological responses. Referencing Lev Manovich’s observation that interactivity can be metaphorical as well as physical, they designed the interactivity to function as a ‘meta-commentary’ reinforcing the work’s significance. Moreover, they aimed to craft the individual modalities—sound, sight, kinesthesia—so they would synergistically enhance each other.
Interactivity as meta-commentary can be seen in the rendering of the first voice, the ‘authorized’ version of the Catholic Church, associated with a traditional iconographic rendering of the saint showing her heart pierced by rays emanating from above.

Interactivity as meta-commentary can be seen in the rendering of the first voice, the ‘authorized’ version of the Catholic Church, associated with a traditional iconographic rendering of the saint showing her heart pierced by rays emanating from above.

Figure 6. Iconographic image from ‘St. Caterina’.
When the user clicks on this stereotyped image, it changes to black and white with horizontal lines running across it, emphasizing its textuality and hence its constructedness.

Figure 7. Textualized image of St. Caterina

As a voice-over begins narrating the Church’s version of Caterina’s life, the corresponding written text scrolls over the image; only that portion outlined by the saint’s body is legible, however, the rest obscured by the transecting lines. As a result, the user can access the full text only by listening to the oral narration, a design choice that re-enacts the Church’s mandate that it should act as mediator between the believer and God. The point returns in other guises as St. Caterina experiences a direct connection to God through her mystical experiences, a claim to immediacy the Church contests. In a subtle way tension is already present in the subordination of the user to the voice-over, a positioning that strategically lays the groundwork for the user to empathize with Caterina as she struggles with a Church she both obeys and resists.
The second voice is the academic narrative of Rudolph Bell, whose research into the penitential practices of female saints links them with anorexia, an eating disorder with extremely debilitating effects on the body, up to and including death. This voice is accessed via another beatific image of a haloed saint. As the user clicks on the small red hearts at the corners of the image, text begins appearing that describes the primary and secondary effects of anorexia, including such medical symptoms as weakened internal organs and dysfunctional digestive tract.

Figure 8. Medical symptoms of anorexia superimposed over saint’s image.

When the user clicks again on the small red hearts, they act as corners that can stretch away from the surface, partially revealing underneath a naked female body disturbing in its skeletal form and starvation-ravaged flesh. Whatever the spiritual benefits of fasting, this voice makes clear its physical cost and, by doing so, draws into question any simple evaluation of it as a spiritual practice.

Figure 9. Anorexia body imaged behind iconographic saint.
The third voice is autobiographical, based on the fact that many female saints were ordered by their superiors to write their autobiographies, sometimes drawn out into years of writing and thousands of pages. These autobiographies represent both the writer’s desire to articulate and justify her visions and the superior’s command that she must write them, so that the text becomes a site of contestation between personal narrative and penitential punishment. In addition, when one historical saint was ordered by her superior to write her autobiography, her descriptions of her mystical raptures so disturbed him that he ordered her to stop immediately, even though it was on his orders that she began to write. St. Caterina’s autobiography begins with the words, ‘They made me lick the spiders from the walls’, alluding to a penitential practice in which, according to historical records, at least one woman was made to lick spiders as part of her punishment for daring to claim a direct relation to God. Images for this screen include spiders that flash over the surface, as if in frenetic imitation of a ‘Space Invaders’ video game. When the text of the autobiography appears it is illegible. Only when the user clicks on the spiders with a cursor imaged as the word ‘lick’ do the first couple of lines clear enough to read. To continue the user must keep clicking on the spiders, experiencing the text as a barrier that begrudges accessibility and yields only after the user pays the proper penance.

The fourth voice, the most personal and hence the least communicable of all the narratives, is represented in the text as body images. These are manifested not as coherent human shapes but portions of flesh that have been mutated, stretched and multiplied so that they allude to the body but cannot themselves be contained within the bounds of a recognizable subject, slipping away into ecstatic visions  that hint at the unspeakable. Similar visions appear on other screens and function as a wall that the user is unable to penetrate, alluding to a feeling frequently voiced by the female saints that their bodies were prisons from which they could not escape, save by death. Feeling themselves imprisoned within flesh and bones, some resolved to take as nourishment only the Sacrament of Christ’s body, determined to ingest only the food that, transformed into flesh, would connect them to Christ’s divine incarnation. Here functionality for the user—or rather non-functionality—is figured as resistance. Just as the saints could not escape their bodies, so no amount of manipulation by the user will allow her to pass the image of that mortal coil.

Figure 10. Flesh as wall in ‘St. Caterina’.
The final voice is a straightforward oral narration that tells the passage of Caterina’s heart from a body organ to a historical artifact. The screen is dominated by a pulsating anatomically correct heart that, beating in diastolic rhythm, transforms into the blasé red heart of traditional iconography. The alternation between romanticized image and medical accuracy creates an ironic tension that permeates as well the oral narration. The narrator tells us that when Caterina dies her body is ripped to shreds by believers seeking a souvenir. Her heart, torn from her chest, is preserved as a relic and enshrined in a church. The implicit irony continues the contestation that has been present throughout. Although the church is in the end successful in claiming ownership of Caterina’s heart, its triumph is located within a web of cooperating and competing narratives that encourage the user to see the Church’s authorized account as one story among many. In the layered structure of the work as a whole, the synergies created by its multiple sensory modalities tell a story too rich and complex to be reduced to any of its parts.

Embodying a World:  The Book of Going Forth By Day
‘Space’ in literary theory and practice is frequently interpreted metaphorically as an imaginative grid upon which action can be mapped. For writers working with electronic literature, space acquires significantly different meanings. With graphics, animation, and multiple layers at their disposal, writers configure the screenic surface to simulate three-dimensional spaces that present an illusion of depth and perform as interactive arenas. The importance of this development can scarcely be over-emphasized, for it creates possibilities for rich interactions between narrative content, software functionality, and screen display that become part of the electronic work’s signifying practices.
Among the writers interested in exploring these possibilities is M. D. Coverley, author of two major electronic narratives, Califia (Eastgate Systems, 2000) and The Book of Going Forth by Day, as well as a number of shorter pieces.  Particularly important for Coverley is the relation between layered screenic spaces and deep layers of historical and geological time extending through generations, centuries, and even millennia. Visual representations of space on the screen, software functionality as navigation of space, and verbal accounts of movements through space and time become enmeshed in ways that tie together the narrative and the kinesthetic, the user’s actions and the maker’s design. As the user moves through screenic space she navigates through different narratives, with sites within the work correlating with different focalizations. As a result, the user does not merely read a narrative but enters a world, complete with sound, animation, verbal description and visual display.

After working five years on Califia, Coverley made the decision to make her next large work, The Book on Going Forth by Day, available on the Web as she continues to work on it. Although the work is still in progress, enough of the overall structure and design is now visible to make commentary feasible. The Book of Going Forth By Day has a tripartite narrative structure and a deep concern with connections between the present and historical past. The entwining tropes for this work are word and image, particularly their union in Egyptian hieroglyphs. Instead of three different narrators, this work has three speaking voices located within the same central narrator, corresponding to the Egyptian idea of the tripartite soul. Jeanette, corresponding to the Ba soul that leaves the tomb to wander in the world, is the present-day narrator drawn to Egypt at the invitation of her brother Ross; Tjeniet (also the term for facience, the vivid blue used to surface materials in ancient Egypt), corresponding to the Ka soul that stays in the tomb to accept offerings, is a kind of alter-ego of Jeanette, surfacing in the emails Jeanette sends to her sister Nancy and articulating thoughts that she does not quite consciously grasp; and  Isis, the Akh soul who travels in the Barque of Re and represents the eternal instantiated in Jeanette as one of her contemporary manifestations.

Figure 11. Narrative panel from The Book of Going Forth by Day.

Going Forth is fully multimedia, including sound, animation, graphics and verbal text. Building on her accomplishments in Califa, Coverley in this work makes sophisticated use of animation, creating skies that roll, views that pan across the inscribed surfaces of a pyramid, and papyrus images that appear to unroll like a scroll.  Steeped in Egyptian history, mythology, religion and art (the work is based on twenty years of research), Coverley imagines a work in which words count as images and images as words, time has two complementary dimensions of linear progression and eternal return, inscriptions are not merely tokens for words but powerful spells capable of deciding one’s fate for eternity, and the individual subject merges into the archetypes of eternal gods and goddesses. Hypertext is well suited for this kind of exploration, for with its multilinear narration, multimedia capability and unmatched powers of simulation, it enables the fluid combination of different textual elements and multiple possibilities for their combination and re-combination.

Modeled after the spatial arrangement of Egyptian hieroglyphs, the interface employs both horizontal and vertical registers. The horizontal panels narrate Jeanette’s first-person adventures with (and without) Ross, in which she re-enacts a dynamic of loss and recovery similar to Isis piecing together her murdered brother Osiris’ body, although here it is not literally a reassembly of a dismembered body but a re-membering of events.  The vertical panels are expository, giving linguistic, historical, and geographic information about ancient Egypt, modeled after the rubrics that in hieroglyphic texts give information on how to interpret the depicted events.

The correspondences between Egyptian hieroglyphs and the interface are much more than window-dressing. Rather, they suggest deep connections between inscription systems, cosmological beliefs, temporal orderings and geographic assumptions.   Hieroglyphic inscriptions were written in all directions, including left to right, right to left, up to down, down to up, edging sideways into margins or spiraling in a circle, with the order of reading indicated by the direction the figures face. Early Egyptologists assumed this spatial promiscuity was dictated by convenience; since the extant hieroglyphs were incised into stone, writers took advantage of any available space regardless of its orientation. Going Forth suggests a different interpretation, relating the omni-directionality of the writing to ancient Egyptian beliefs about the ‘endless geometry’ of the world, in which personages from the past continue over the threshold of death into the future, and gods and goddesses traveling in the barque of Re also manifest themselves in humans alive on the earth. One of the rubrics relates the discovery by ancient Egyptians that the rising of the star Sirius corresponds with the flooding of the Nile, thus enabling them to make connections between the movement of the heavens and the rhythms of the earth and resulting in the concept of an annual cycle, which in turn led to the temporal organization of the calendar into years. Thus the linear flow of time, associated with the unidirectional flow of the Nile, was overlaid onto a topological scheme cyclical in nature, corresponding both to the annual rising and falling of the Nile and cycles of human life in which individuals were seen as reincarnations of eternal deities.
Given such a cosmology, how would an inscription system be envisioned?  The answer, Going Forth implies, would be to envision the inscription surface as a complex topology in which linear writing takes place within a larger geometry that permits horizontal reversals, various up/down orientations, and even spirals and circles.  The reading directions for Going Forth emphasize that the interface is scrollable in both directions (left/right and right/left, up/down and down/up), an artistic decision that relates interface design to Egyptian inscription systems and implicitly to an ancient Egyptian worldview. Implementing this design in an electronic environment further suggests that like the ancient Egyptians, we do not so much leave history behind as carry it along with us.

Figure 12. Rubric explaining writing practices of ancient Egyptians.

The Egyptian practice of assigning both pictographic resemblances and sonic values to hieroglyphs meant that the primary relationship was not between arbitrary mark and corresponding sound, but a more complex relation between iconic image, acoustic production, and recognizable speech. Since there were no sonic values for vowels, the acoustic elements were underdetermined by themselves (for an equivalent example in English, suppose that an image has the sonic value of ‘tr’, which depending on the context could stand for ‘true’, ‘tar’, ‘tear’, etc.).  Determinates were necessary to eliminate the ambiguity and tie the image to the correct speech sound. Meaning was thus negotiated among several images, and it was their interrelation that determined significance rather than a one-to-one correlation between mark and sound. Moreover, Going Forth suggests that there was no clear distinction in ancient Egypt between writing and art. Art did not so much imitate life as it imitated and was imitated by writing, which is another way to say that world view and inscription system were intimately related.  Transported into an electronic environment, these correlations between word and image, sound and mark, icon and icon, take the form of complex relations between multimedia components and navigational functionalities in which meaning emerges from their interrelations rather than from the verbal narrative alone.

Going Forth dreams of a richly decorated and potentially infinite inscription surface that enables fluid transitions between exposition, narrative, maps, photographs, linguistic information and historical documentation. The ur-text is of course the Egyptian Book of the Dead, with special emphasis on Spell 64, an incantation so powerful that it was often kept secret and omitted from many versions of the Book of the Dead. More than any other single spell, it was Spell 64 that was deemed most important in releasing the soul from the scene of judgement into eternal life. Dense with numerological meaning, 64 marks the conjunction of the perfect square of 8 X 8, the union of three and four in 4 X 4 X 4, and of two, three and six in 2 X 2 X 2 X 2 X 2 X 2.  The electronic work preserves this numerology by creating three different narrators, all of whom are aspects of the same persona, and eight different ways of telling the story, indicated by the row of eight icons at the top of the screen.  In addition, the emphasis in The Book of the Dead on getting the spell exactly right has its parallel in getting the code exactly right. A spell incorrectly articulated fails to produce the desired result, just as code with an incorrect syntax fails to work when processed on the computer. Both function as what I have elsewhere called material metaphors, for they enable a transfer of sense to take place between verbal formulation and material circumstances, for example by releasing the soul from the underworld or causing the computer to generate a screen display.

The conjunction between spell and code foregrounds the fact that electronic literature has a very different materiality than a print book. Strictly speaking, an electronic text is a process rather than an artifact one can hold in one’s hand.  It cannot be accurately said to reside in a CD-ROM, a diskette, or even on a server; what exists at such locations are simply data and commands. Coming into existence as a text the user can experience requires that the appropriate software run on the right hardware. If the software is obsolete or if the operating system cannot recognize the commands, in a literal sense the work does not exist. The specificity of this ontological condition requires us to re-think many of the presuppositions that have evolved through the deep time of the print tradition. Hardware and software act not merely as vehicles to deliver text but rather enter consequentially and dynamically into the production of the text as such. Every act of reading electronic literature therefore takes place within a distributed cognitive system that includes both human and non-human actors.
Moving deeper into the machine means actively engaging these conditions of production and using them as resources for artistic creation. Interrogating the interface (database), developing a creolized language of English and code (‘_][ad][  Dressed in a Skin C.ode_'), crafting  metaphors that connect the interface and the human face ('Translucidity'), using multimedia capabilities to create synergistic effects ('St. Caterina') and figuring the screen as a writing surface that embodies a world view (Going Forth) are strategies that have no exact equivalents in print texts. As electronic literature matures, it develops rhetorics, grammars, and syntaxes unique to digital environments. Learning to speak digital, it calls forth from us new modes of attending—listening, seeing, moving, navigating—that transform what it means to experience literature ('read' is no longer an adequate term). If each era develops a literature that helps it understand (or create) what it is becoming, a better comprehension of our posthuman condition requires a full range of literary expression, print and electronic. The future of electronic literature is our future.
Endnotes

[1] Documentation on database is available at http://www.english.ucla.edu/faculty/hayles

[2] Forthcoming from Spineless Books. http://www.spinelessbooks.com/

[3]Coverley, M. D. The Book of Going Forth by Day. http://califia.hispeed.com/Egypt/ (accessed 15 June, 2002).

[4] Manovich, L (2001) ‘The Forms’, The Language of New Media. Cambridge:  MIT Press.

[5] MEZ, http://netwurkerz.de/mez/datableed/complete/ (accessed 15 June, 2002).

[6] MEZ, http://www.cddc.vt.edu/host/netwurker/ (accessed 15 June, 2002).

[7] Raley, R. (2001) ‘Reveal Codes:  Hypertext and Performance’, Postmodern Culture 12:1. http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/pmc/v012/12.1raley.html

[8] Cayley, J. (forthcoming) ‘The Code is Not the Text’, in F. W. Bloch et al (eds.), p0es1s:  Poetics in the Digital World. Vienna: Triton. I am grateful to him for sharing this article with me prior to its publication.

[9] Memmott,T.  ‘E_CEPHALOPEDIA || NOVELLEX’,  Drunken Boat #3 http://www.drunkenboat.com (accessed 15 June, 2002).

[10] Memmott,T.  ‘Translucidity’, frAme #6, http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/frame6/ (accessed 15 June, 2002).

Donna Haraway

Manifesto for Cyborgs

StanfordUniversity.edu

Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York; Routledge, 1991), pp.149-181.

AN IRONIC DREAM OF A COMMON LANGUAGE FOR WOMEN IN THE INTEGRATED CIRCUIT

This chapter is an effort to build an ironic political myth faithful to feminism, socialism, and materialism. Perhaps more faithful as blasphemy is faithful, than as reverent worship and identification. Blasphemy has always seemed to require taking things very seriously. I know no better stance to adopt from within the secular-religious, evangelical traditions of United States politics, including the politics of socialist feminism. Blasphemy protects one from the moral majority within, while still insisting on the need for community. Blasphemy is not apostasy. Irony is about contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes, even dialectically, about the tension of holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true. Irony is about humour and serious play. It is also a rhetorical strategy and a political method, one I would like to see more honoured within socialist-feminism. At the centre of my ironic faith, my blasphemy, is the image of the cyborg.

A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. Social reality is lived social relations, our most important political construction, a world-changing fiction. The international women’s movements have constructed ‘women’s experience’, as well as uncovered or discovered this crucial collective object. This experience is a fiction and fact of the most crucial, political kind. Liberation rests on the construction of the consciousness, the imaginative apprehension, of oppression, and so of possibility. The cyborg is a matter of fiction and lived experience that changes what counts as women’s experience in the late twentieth century. This is a struggle over life and death, but the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion.

Contemporary science fiction is full of cyborgs – creatures simultaneously animal and machine, who populate worlds ambiguously natural and crafted. Modern medicine is also full of cyborgs, of couplings between organism and machine, each conceived as coded devices, in an intimacy and with a power that was not generated in the history of sexuality. Cyborg ‘sex’ restores some of the lovely replicative baroque of ferns and invertebrates (such nice organic prophylactics against heterosexism). Cyborg replication is uncoupled from organic reproduction. Modern production seems like a dream of cyborg colonization work, a dream that makes the nightmare of Taylorism seem idyllic. And modern war is a cyborg orgy, coded by C3I, command-control-communication-intelligence, an $84 billion item in 1984′sUS defence budget. I am making an argument for the cyborg as a fiction mapping our social and bodily reality and as an imaginative resource suggesting some very fruitful couplings. Michael Foucault’s biopolitics is a flaccid premonition of cyborg politics, a very open field.

By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs. Ths cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics. The cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality, the two joined centres structuring any possibility of historical transformation. In the traditions of ‘Western’ science and politics–the tradition of racist, male-dominant capitalism; the tradition of progress; the tradition of the appropriation of nature as resource for the productions of culture; the tradition of reproduction of the self from the reflections of the other – the relation between organism and machine has been a border war. The stakes in the border war have been the territories of production, reproduction, and imagination. This chapter is an argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction. It is also an effort to contribute to socialist-feminist culture and theory in a postmodernist, non-naturalist mode and in the utopian tradition of imagining a world without gender, which is perhaps a world without genesis, but maybe also a world without end. The cyborg incarnation is outside salvation history. Nor does it mark time on an oedipal calendar, attempting to heal the terrible cleavages of gender in an oral symbiotic utopia or post-oedipal apocalypse. As Zoe Sofoulis argues in her unpublished manuscript on Jacques Lacan, Melanie Klein, and nuclear culture, Lacklein, the most terrible and perhaps the most promising monsters in cyborg worlds are embodied in non-oedipal narratives with a different logic of repression, which we need to understand for our survival.

The cyborg is a creature in a post-gender world; it has no truck with bisexuality, pre-oedipal symbiosis, unalienated labour, or other seductions to organic wholeness through a final appropriation of all the powers of the parts into a higher unity. In a sense, the cyborg has no origin story in the Western sense – a ‘final’ irony since the cyborg is also the awful apocalyptic telos of the ‘West’s’ escalating dominations of abstract individuation, an ultimate self untied at last from all dependency, a man in space. An origin story in the ‘Western’, humanist sense depends on the myth of original unity, fullness, bliss and terror, represented by the phallic mother from whom all humans must separate, the task of individual development and of history, the twin potent myths inscribed most powerfully for us in psychoanalysis and Marxism. Hilary Klein has argued that both Marxism and psychoanalysis, in their concepts of labour and of individuation and gender formation, depend on the plot of original unity out of which difference must be produced and enlisted in a drama of escalating domination of woman/nature. The cyborg skips the step of original unity, of identification with nature in the Western sense. This is its illegitimate promise that might lead to subversion of its teleology as star wars.

The cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity. It is oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence. No longer structured by the polarity of public and private, the cyborg defines a technological polls based partly on a revolution of social relations in the oikos, the household. Nature and culture are reworked; the one can no longer be the resource for appropriation or incorporation by the other. The rela-tionships for forming wholes from parts, including those of polarity and hierarchical domination, are at issue in the cyborg world. Unlike the hopes of Frankenstein’s monster, the cyborg does not expect its father to save it through a restoration of the garden; that is, through the fabrication of a heterosexual mate, through its completion in a finished whole, a city and cosmos. The eyborg does not dream of community on the model of the organic family, this time without the oedipal project. The cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust. Perhaps that is why I want to see if eyborgs can subvert the apocalypse of returning to nuclear dust in the manic compulsion to name the Enemy. Cyborgs are not reverent; they do not re-member the cosmos. They are wary of holism, but needy for connection- they seem to have a natural feel for united front politics, but without the vanguard party. The main trouble with cyborgs, of course, is that they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism. But illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers, after all, are inessential.

I will return to the science fiction of cyborgs at the end of this chapter, but now I want to signal three crucial boundary breakdowns that make the following political-fictional (political-scientific) analysis possible. By the late twentieth century in United States scientific culture, the boundary between human and animal is thoroughly breached. The last beachheads of uniqueness have been polluted if not turned into amusement parks–language tool use, social behaviour, mental events, nothing really convincingly settles the separation of human and animal. And many people no longer feel the need for such a separation; indeed, many branches of feminist culture affirm the pleasure of connection of human and other living creatures. Movements for animal rights are not irrational denials of human uniqueness; they are a clear-sighted recognition of connection across the discredited breach of nature and culture. Biology and evolutionary theory over the last two centuries have simultaneously produced modern organisms as objects of knowledge and reduced the line between humans and animals to a faint trace re-etched in ideological struggle or professional disputes between life and social science. Within this framework, teaching modern Christian creationism should be fought as a form of child abuse.

Biological-determinist ideology is only one position opened up in scientific culture for arguing the meanings of human animality. There is much room for radical political people to contest the meanings of the breached boundary.2 The cyborg appears in myth precisely where the boundary between human and animal is transgressed. Far from signalling a walling off of people from other living beings, cyborgs signal distrurbingly and pleasurably tight coupling. Bestiality has a new status in this cycle of marriage exchange.

The second leaky distinction is between animal-human (organism) and machine. Pre-cybernetic machines could be haunted; there was always the spectre of the ghost in the machine. This dualism structured the dialogue between materialism and idealism that was settled by a dialectical progeny, called spirit or history, according to taste. But basically machines were not self-moving, self-designing, autonomous. They could not achieve man’s dream, only mock it. They were not man, an author to himself, but only a caricature of that masculinist reproductive dream. To think they were otherwise was paranoid. Now we are not so sure. Late twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and art)ficial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines. Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert.

Technological determination is only one ideological space opened up by the reconceptions of machine and organism as coded texts through which we engage in the play of writing and reading the world.3 ‘Textualization’ of everything in poststructuralist, postmodernist theory has been damned by Marxists and socialist feminists for its utopian disregard for the lived relations of domination that ground the ‘play’ of arbitrary reading.4 It is certainly true that postmodernist strategies, like my cyborg myth, subvert myriad organic wholes (for example, the poem, the primitive culture, the biological organism). In short, the certainty of what counts as nature — a source of insight and promise of innocence — is undermined, probably fatally. The transcendent authorization of interpretation is lost, and with it the ontology grounding ‘Western’ epistemology. But the alternative is not cynicism or faithlessness, that is, some version of abstract existence, like the accounts of technological determinism destroying ‘man’ by the ‘machine’ or ‘meaningful political action’ by the ‘text’. Who cyborgs will be is a radical question; the answers are a matter of survival. Both chimpanzees and artefacts have politics, so why shouldn’t we (de Waal, 1982; Winner, 1980)?

The third distinction is a subset of the second: the boundary between physical and non-physical is very imprecise for us. Pop physics books on the consequences of quantum theory and the indeterminacy principle are a kind of popular scientific equivalent to Harlequin romances* as a marker of radical change in American white heterosexuality: they get it wrong, but they are on the right subject. Modern machines are quintessentially microelectronic devices: they are everywhere and they are invisible. Modern machinery is an irreverent upstart god, mocking the Father’s ubiquity and spirituality. The silicon chip is a surface for writing; it is etched in molecular scales disturbed only by atomic noise, the ultimate interference for nuclear scores. Writing, power, and technology are old partners in Western stories of the origin of civilization, but miniaturization has changed our experience of mechanism. Miniaturization has turned out to be about power; small is not so much beautiful as pre-eminently dangerous, as in cruise missiles. Contrast the TV sets of the 1950s or the news cameras of the 1970s with the TV wrist bands or hand-sized video cameras now advertised. Our best machines are made of sunshine; they are all light and clean because they are nothing but signals, electromagnetic waves, a section of a spectrum, and these machines are eminently portable, mobile — a matter of immense human pain in Detroit and Singapore. People are nowhere near so fluid, being both material and opaque. Cyborgs are ether, quintessence.

The ubiquity and invisibility of cyborgs is precisely why these sunshine-belt machines are so deadly. They are as hard to see politically as materially. They are about consciousness – or its simulation.5 They are floating signIfiers moving in pickup trucks across Europe, blocked more effectively by the witch-weavings of the displaced and so unnatural Greenham women, who read the cyborg webs of power so very well, than by the militant labour of older masculinist politics, whose natural constituency needs defence jobs. Ultimately the ‘hardest’ science is about the realm of greatest boundary confusion, the realm of pure number, pure spirit, C3I, cryptography, and the preservation of potent secrets. The new machines are so clean and light. Their engineers are sun-worshippers mediating a new scientific revolution
*The US equivalent of Mills & Boon associated with the night dream of post-industrial society. The diseases evoked by these clean machines are ‘no more’ than the minuscule coding changes of an antigen in the immune system, ‘no more’ than the experience of stress. The nimble fingers of ‘Oriental’ women, the old fascination of little Anglo-Saxon Victorian girls with doll’s houses, women’s enforced attention to the small take on quite new dimensions in this world. There might be a cyborg Alice taking account of these new dimensions. Ironically, it might be the unnatural cyborg women making chips in Asia and spiral dancing in Santa Rita jail* whose constructed unities will guide effective oppositional strategies.

So my cyborg myth is about transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities which progressive people might explore as one part of needed political work. One of my premises is that most American socialists and feminists see deepened dualisms of mind and body, animal and machine, idealism and materialism in the social practices, symbolic formula-tions, and physical artefacts associated with ‘high technology’ and scientific culture. From One-DimensionalMan (Marcuse, 1964) to The Death of Nature (Merchant, 1980), the analytic resources developed by progressives have insisted on the necessary domination of technics and recalled us to an imagined organic body to integrate our resistance. Another of my premises is that the need for unity of people trying to resist world-wide intensification of domination has never been more acute. But a slightly perverse shift of perspective might better enable us to contest for meanings, as well as for other forms of power and pleasure in technologically mediated societies.

From one perspective, a cyborg world is about the final imposition of a grid of control on the planet, about the final abstraction embodied in a Star Wars apocalypse waged in the name of defence, about the final appropriation of women’s bodies in a masculinist orgy of war (Sofia, 1984). From another perspective, a cyborg world might be about lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints. The political struggle is to see from both perspectives at once because each reveals both dominations and possibilities unimaginable from the other vantage point. Single vision produces worse illusions than double vision or many-headed monsters. Cyborg unities are monstrous and illegitimate; in our present political circumstances, we could hardly hope for more potent myths for resistance and recoupling. I like to imagine LAG, the Livermore Action Group, as a kind of cyborg society, dedicated to realistically converting the laboratories that most fiercely embody and spew out the tools

* A practice at once both spiritual and political that linked guards and arrested anti-nuclear demonstrators in the Alameda County jail in California in the early 1985.
Of technological apocalypse, and committed to building a political form that acutally manages to hold together witches, engineers, elders, perverts, Christians, mothers, and Leninists long enough to disarm the state. Fission Impossible is the name of the affinity group in my town.(Affinity: related not by blood but by choice, the appeal of one chemical nuclear group for another, avidiy.)6

FRACTURED IDENTITIES

It has become difficult to name one’s feminism by a single adjective — or even to insist in every circumstance upon the noun. Consciousness of exclusion through naming is acute. Identities seem contradictory, partial, and strategic. With the hard-won recognition of their social and historical constitution, gender, race, and class cannot provide the basis for belief in ‘essential’ unity. There is nothing about teeing ‘female’ that naturally binds women. There is not even such a state as ‘being’ female, itself a highly complex category constructed in contested sexual scientific discourses and other social practices. Gender, race, or class consciousness is an achievement forced on us by the terrible historica experience of the contradictory social realities of patriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism. And who counts as ‘us’ in my own rhetoric? Which identities are available to ground such a potent political myth called ‘us’, and what could motivate enlistment in this collectivity? Painful fragmentation among feminists (not to mention among women) along every possible fault line has made the concept of woman elusive, an excuse for the matrix of women’s dominations of each other. For me – and for many who share a similar historical location in white, professional middle-class, female, radical, North American, mid-adult bodies – the sources of a crisis in political identity are legion. The recent history for much of the US left and US feminism has been a response to this kind of crisis by endless splitting and searches for a new essential unity. But there has also been a growing recognition of another response through coalition – affinity, not identity.7

Chela Sandoval (n.d., 1984), from a consideration of specific historical moments in the formation of the new political voice called women of colour, has theorized a hopeful model of political identity called ‘oppositional consciousness’, born of the skills for reading webs of power by those refused stable membership in the social categories of race, sex, or class. ‘Women of color’, a name contested at its origins by those whom it would incorporate, as well as a historical consciousness marking systematic breakdown of all the signs of Man in ‘Western’ traditions, constructs a kind of postmodernist identity out of otherness, difference, and specificity. This postmodernist identity is fully political, whatever might be said abut other possible postmodernisms. Sandoval’s oppositional consciousness is about contradictory locations and heterochronic calendars, not about relativisms and pluralisms.

Sandoval emphasizes the lack of any essential criterion for identifying who is a woman of colour. She notes that the definition of the group has been by conscious appropriation of negation. For example, a Chicana or US black woman has not been able to speak as a woman or as a black person or as a Chicano. Thus, she was at the bottom of a cascade of negative identities, left out of even the privileged oppressed authorial categories called ‘women and blacks’, who claimed to make the important revolutions. The category ‘woman’ negated all non-white women; ‘black’ negated all non-black people, as well as all black women. But there was also no ‘she’, no singularity, but a sea of differences among US women who have affirmed their historical identity as US women of colour. This identity marks out a self-consciously constructed space that cannot affirm the capacity to act on the basis of natural identification, but only on the basis of conscious coalition, of affinity, of political kinship.8 Unlike the ‘woman’ of some streams of the white women’s movement in the United States, there is no naturalization of the matrix, or at least this is what Sandoval argues is uniquely available through the power of oppositional consciousness.

Sandoval’s argument has to be seen as one potent formulation for feminists out of the world-wide development of anti-colonialist discourse; that is to say, discourse dissolving the ‘West’ and its highest product – the one who is not animal, barbarian, or woman; man, that is, the author of a cosmos called history. As orientalism is deconstructed politically and semiotically, the identities of the occident destabilize, including those of feminists.9 Sandoval argues that ‘women of colour’ have a chance to build an effective unity that does not replicate the imperializing, totalizing revolutionary subjects of previous Marxisms and feminisms which had not faced the consequences of the disorderly polyphony emerging from decolonization.

Katie King has emphasized the limits of identification and the political/ poetic mechanics of identification built into reading ‘the poem’, that generative core of cultural feminism. King criticizes the persistent tendency among contemporary feminists from different ‘moments’ or ‘conversations’ in feminist practice to taxonomize the women’s movement to make one’s own political tendencies appear to be the telos of the whole. These taxonomies tend to remake feminist history so that it appears to be an ideological struggle among coherent types persisting over time, especially those typical units called radical, liberal, and socialist-feminism. Literally, all other feminisms are either incorporated or marginalized, usually by building an explicit ontology and epistemology.10 Taxonomies of feminism produce epistemologies to police deviation from official women’s experience. And of course, ‘women’s culture’, like women of colour, is consciously created by mechanisms inducing affinity. The rituals of poetry, music, and certain forms of academic practice have been pre-eminent. The politics of race and culture in the US women’s movements are intimately interwoven. The common achievement of King and Sandoval is learning how to craft a poetic/political unity without relying on a logic of appropriation, incorpora-tion, and taxonomic identification.

The theoretical and practical struggle against unity-through-domination or unity-through-incorporation ironically not only undermines the justifica-tions for patriarchy, colonialism, humanism, positivism, essentialism, scient-ism, and other unlamented -isms, but all claims for an organic or natural standpoint. I think that radical and socialist/Marxist-feminisms have also undermined their/our own epistemological strategies and that this is a crucially valuable step in imagining possible unities. It remains to be seen whether all ‘epistemologies’ as Western political people have known them fail us in the task to build effective affinities.

It is important to note that the effort to construct revolutionary stand-points, epistemologies as achievements of people committed to changing the world, has been part of the process showing the limits of identification. The acid tools of postmodernist theory and the constructive tools of ontological discourse about revolutionary subjects might be seen as ironic allies in dissolving Western selves in the interests of survival. We are excruciatingly conscious of what it means to have a historically constituted body. But with the loss of innocence in our origin, there is no expulsion from the Garden either. Our politics lose the indulgence of guilt with the naivete of innocence. But what would another political myth for socialist-feminism look like? What kind of politics could embrace partial, contradictory, permanently unclosed constructions of personal and collective selves and still be faithful, effective – and, ironically, socialist-feminist?

I do not know of any other time in history when there was greater need for political unity to confront effectively the dominations of ‘race’, ‘gender’, ‘sexuality’, and ‘class’. I also do not know of any other time when the kind of unity we might help build could have been possible. None of ‘us’ have any longer the symbolic or material capability of dictating the shape of reality to any of’them’. Or at least ‘we’ cannot claim innocence from practicing such dominations. White women, including socialist feminists, discovered (that is, were forced kicking and screaming to notice) the non-innocence of the category ‘woman’. That consciousness changes the geography of all previous categories; it denatures them as heat denatures a fragile protein. Cyborg feminists have to argue that ‘we’ do not want any more natural matrix of unity and that no construction is whole. Innocence, and the corollary insistence on victimhood as the only ground for insight, has done enough damage. But the constructed revolutionary subject must give late-twentieth-
century people pause as well. In the fraying of identities and in the reflexive strategies for constructing them, the possibility opens up for weaving something other than a shroud for the day after the apocalypse that so prophetically ends salvation history.

Both Marxist/socialist-feminisms and radical feminisms have simul-taneously naturalized and denatured the category ‘woman’ and conscious-ness of the social lives of ‘women’. Perhaps a schematic caricature can highlight both kinds of moves. Marxian socialism is rooted in an analysis of wage labour which reveals class structure. The consequence of the wage relationship is systematic alienation, as the worker is dissociated from his (sic) product. Abstraction and illusion rule in knowledge, domination rules in practice. Labour is the pre-eminently privileged category enabling the Marxist to overcome illusion and find that point of view which is necessary for changing the world. Labour is the humanizing activity that makes man; labour is an ontological category permitting the knowledge of a subject, and so the knowledge of subjugation and alienation.

In faithful filiation, socialist-feminism advanced by allying itself with the basic analytic strategies of Marxism. The main achievement of both Marxist feminists and socialist feminists was to expand the category of labour to accommodate what (some) women did, even when the wage relation was subordinated to a more comprehensive view of labour under capitalist patriarchy. In particular, women’s labour in the household and women’s activity as mothers generally (that is, reproduction in the socialist-feminist sense), entered theory on the authority of analogy to the Marxian concept of labour. The unity of women here rests on an epistemology based on the ontological structure of’labour’. Marxist/socialist-feminism does not ‘natur-alize’ unity; it is a possible achievement based on a possible standpoint rooted in social relations. The essentializing move is in the ontological structure of labour or of its analogue, women’s activity.11 The inheritance of Marxian humanism, with its pre-eminently Western self, is the difficulty for me. The contribution from these formulations has been the emphasis on the daily responsibility of real women to build unities, rather than to naturalize them.

Catherine MacKinnon’s (198Z, 1987) version of radical feminism is itself a caricature of the appropriating, incorporating, totalizing tendencies of Western theories of identity grounding action.12 It is factually and politically wrong to assimilate all of the diverse ‘moments’ or ‘conversations’ in recent women’s politics named radical feminism to MacKinnon’s version. But the teleological logic of her theory shows how an epistemology and ontology – including their negations – erase or police difference. Only one of the effects of MacKinnon’s theory is the rewriting of the history of the polymorphous field called radical feminism. The major effect is the production of a theory of experience, of women’s identity, that is a kind of apocalypse for all revolutionary standpoints. That is, the totalization built into this tale of radical feminism achieves its end – the unity of women – by enforcing the experience of and testimony to radical non-being. As for the Marxist/ socialist feminist, consciousness is an achievement, not a natural fact. And MacKinnon’s theory eliminates some of the difficulties built into humanist revolutionary subjects, but at the cost of radical reductionism.

MacKinnon argues that feminism necessarily adopted a different analyt-ical strategy from Marxism, looking first not at the structure of class, but at the structure of sex/gender and its generative relationship, men’s constitu-tion and appropriation of women sexually. Ironically, MacKinnon’s ‘ontology’ constructs a non-subject, a non-being. Another’s desire, not the self’s labour, is the origin of ‘woman’. She therefore develops a theory of consciousness that enforces what can count as ‘women’s’ experience – anything that names sexual violation, indeed, sex itself as far as ‘women’ can be concerned. Feminist practice is the construction of this form of consciousness; that is, the self-knowledge of a self-who-is-not.

Perversely, sexual appropriation in this feminism still has the epistemolo-gical status of labour; that is to say, the point from which an analysis able to contribute to changing the world must flow. But sexual object)fication, not alienation, is the consequence of the structure of sex/gender. In the realm of knowledge, the result of sexual objectification is illusion and abstraction. However, a woman is not simply alienated from her product, but in a deep sense does not exist as a subject, or even potential subject, since she owes her existence as a woman to sexual appropriation. To be constituted by another’s desire is not the same thing as to be alienated in the violent separation of the labourer from his product.

MacKinnon’s radical theory of experience is totalizing in the extreme; it does not so much marginalize as obliterate the authority of any other women’s political speech and action. It is a totalization producing what Western patriarchy itself never succeeded in doing – feminists’ consciousness of the non-existence of women, except as products of men’s desire. I think MacKinnon correctly argues that no Marxian version of identity can firmly ground women’s unity. But in solving the problem of the contradictions of any Western revolutionary subject for feminist purposes, she develops an even more authoritarian doctrine of experience. If my complaint about socialist/Marxian standpoints is their unintended erasure of polyvocal, unassimilable, radical difference made visible in anti-colonial discourse and practice, MacKinnon’s intentional erasure of all difference through the device of the ‘essential’ non-existence of women is not reassuring.

In my taxonomy, which like any other taxonomy is a re-inscription of history, radical feminism can accommodate all the activities of women named by socialist feminists as forms of labour only if the activity can somehow be sexualized. Reproduction had different tones of meanings for the two tendencies, one rooted in labour, one in sex, both calling the consequences of domination and ignorance of social and personal reality ‘false consciousness’.

Beyond either the diff~culties or the contributions in the argument of any one author, neither Marxist nor radical feminist points of view have tended to embrace the status of a partial explanation; both were regularly constituted as totalities. Western explanation has demanded as much; how else could the ‘Western’ author incorporate its others? Each tried to annex other forms of domination by expanding its basic categories through analogy, simple listing, or addition. Embarrassed silence about race among white radical and socialist feminists was one major, devastating political consequence. History and polyvocality disappear into political taxonomies that try to establish genealogies. There was no structural room for race (or for much else) in theory claiming to reveal the construction of the category woman and social group women as a unified or totalizable whole. The structure of my caricature looks like this: socialist feminism–structure of class // wage labour // alienation labour, by analogy reproduction, by extension sex, by addition race radical feminism – structure of gender // sexual appropriation // objectification sex, by analogy labour, by extension reproduction, by addition race

In another context, the French theorist, Julia Kristeva, claimed women appeared as a historical group after the Second World War, along with groups like youth. Her dates are doubtful; but we are now accustomed to remembering that as objects of knowledge and as historical actors, ‘race’ did not always exist, ‘class’ has a historical genesis, and ‘homosexuals’ are quite junior. It is no accident that the symbolic system of the family of man – and so the essence of woman – breaks up at the same moment that networks of connection among people on the planet are unprecedentedly multiple, pregnant, and complex. ‘Advanced capitalism’ is inadequate to convey the structure of this historical moment. In the ‘Western’ sense, the end of man is at stake. It is no accident that woman disintegrates into women in our time. Perhaps socialist feminists were not substantially guilty of producing essentialist theory that suppressed women’s particularity and contradictory interests. I think we have been, at least through unreflective participation in the logics, languages, and practices of white humanism and through searching for a single ground of domination to secure our revolutionary voice. Now we have less excuse. But in the consciousness of our failures, we

risk lapsing into boundless difference and giving up on the confusing task of making partial, real connection. Some differences are playful; some are poles of world historical systems of domination. ‘Epistemology’ is about knowing the difference.

THE INFORMATICS OF DOMINATION

In this attempt at an epistemological and political position, I would like to sketch a picture of possible unity, a picture indebted to socialist and feminist principles of design. The frame for my sketch is set by the extent and importance of rearrangements in world-wide social relations tied to science and technology. I argue for a politics rooted in claims about fundamental changes in the nature of class, race, and gender in an emerging system of world order analogous in its novelty and scope to that created by industrial capitalism; we are living through a movement from an organic, industrial society to a polymorphous, information system–from all work to all play, a deadly game. Simultaneously material and ideological, the dichotomies may be expressed in the following chart of transitions from the comfortable old hierarchical dominations to the scary new networks I have called the informatics of domination:

This list suggests several interesting things.13 First, the objects on the right-hand side cannot be coded as ‘natural’, a realization that subverts naturalistic coding for the left-hand side as well. We cannot go back ideologically or materially. It’s not just that igod’is dead; so is the ‘goddess’. Or both are revivified in the worlds charged with microelectronic and biotechnological politics. In relation to objects like biotic components, one must not think in terms of essential properties, but in terms of design, boundary constraints, rates of flows, systems logics, costs of lowering constraints. Sexual reproduction is one kind of reproductive strategy among many, with costs and benefits as a function of the system environment. Ideologies of sexual reproduction can no longer reasonably call on notions of sex and sex role as organic aspects in natural objects like organisms and families. Such reasoning will be unmasked as irrational, and ironically corporate executives reading Playboy and anti-porn radical feminists will make strange bedfellows in jointly unmasking the irrationalism.

Likewise for race, ideologies about human diversity have to be formulated in terms of frequencies of parameters, like blood groups or intelligence scores. It is ‘irrational’ to invoke concepts like primitive and civilized. For liberals and radicals, the search for integrated social systems gives way to a new practice called ‘experimental ethnography’ in which an organic object dissipates in attention to the play of writing. At the level of ideology, we see translations of racism and colonialism into languages of development and under-development, rates and constraints of modernization. Any objects or persons can be reasonably thought of in terms of disassembly and reassembly; no ‘natural’ architectures constrain system design. The financial districts in all the world’s cities, as well as the export-processing and free-trade zones, proclaim this elementary fact of’late capitalism’. The entire universe of objects that can be known scientifically must be formulated as problems in communications engineering (for the managers) or theories of the text (for those who would resist). Both are cyborg semiologies.

One should expect control strategies to concentrate on boundary conditions and interfaces, on rates of flow across boundaries– and not on the integrity of natural objects. ‘Integrity’ or ‘sincerity’ of the Western self gives way to decision procedures and expert systems. For example, control strategies applied to women’s capacities to give birth to new human beings will be developed in the languages of population control and maximization of goal achievement for individual decision-makers. Control strategies will be formulated in terms of rates, costs of constraints, degrees of freedom. Human beings, like any other component or subsystem, must be localized in a system architecture whose basic modes of operation are probabilistic, statistical. No objects, spaces, or bodies are sacred in themselves; any component can be interfaced with any other if the proper standard, the proper code, can be constructed for processing signals in a common language. Exchange in this world transcends the universal translation effected by capitalist markets that Marx analysed so well. The privileged pathology affecting all kinds of components in this universe is stress – communications breakdown (Hogness, 1983). The cyborg is not subject to Foucault’s biopolitics; the cyborg simulates politics, a much more potent field of operations.

This kind of analysis of scientific and cultural objects of knowledge which have appeared historically since the Second World War prepares us to notice some important inadequacies in feminist analysis which has proceeded as if the organic, hierarchical dualisms ordering discourse in ‘the West’ since Aristotle still ruled. They have been cannibalized, or as Zoe Sofia (Sofoulis) might put it, they have been ‘techno-digested’. The dichotomies between mind and body, animal and human, organism and machine, public and private, nature and culture, men and women, primitive and civilized are all in question ideologically. The actual situation of women is their integration/ exploitation into a world system of production/reproduction and com-munication called the informatics of domination. The home, workplace, market, public arena, the body itself- all can be dispersed and interfaced in nearly infinite, polymorphous ways, with large consequences for women and others – consequences that themselves are very different for different people and which make potent oppositional international movements difficult to imagine and essential for survival. One important route for reconstructing socialist-feminist politics is through theory and practice addressed to the social relations of science and technology, including crucially the systems of myth and meanings structuring our imaginations. The cyborg is a kind of disassembled and reassembled, postmodern collective and personal self. This is the self feminists must code.

Communications technologies and biotechnologies are the crucial tools recrafting our bodies. These tools embody and enforce new social relations for women world-wide. Technologies and scientific discourses can be partially understood as formalizations, i.e., as frozen moments, of the fluid social interactions constituting them, but they should also be viewed as instruments for enforcing meanings. The boundary is permeable between tool and myth, instrument and concept, historical systems of social relations and historical anatomies of possible bodies, including objects of knowledge. Indeed, myth and tool mutually constitute each other.

Furthermore, communications sciences and modern biologies are constructed by a common move – the translation of the world into a problem of coding, a search for a common language in which all resistance to instrumental control disappears and all heterogeneity can be submitted to disassembly, reassembly, investment, and exchange.

In communications sciences, the translation of the world into a problem in coding can be illustrated by looking at cybernetic (feedback-controlled) systems theories applied to telephone technology, computer design, weapons deployment, or data base construction and maintenance. In each case, solution to the key questions rests on a theory of language and control; the key operation is determining the rates, directions, and probabilities of flow of a quantity called information. The world is subdivided by boundaries differentially permeable to information. Information is just that kind of quantifiable element (unit, basis of unity) which allows universal translation, and so unhindered instrumental power (called effective communication). The biggest threat to such power is interruption of communication. Any system breakdown is a function of stress. The fundamentals of this technology can be condensed into the metaphor C31, command-controlcommunication-intelligence, the military’s symbol for its operations theory.

In modern biologies, the translation of the world into a problem in coding can be illustrated by molecular genetics, ecology, sociobiological evolutionary theory, and immunobiology. The organism has been translated into prob-lems of genetic coding and read-out. Biotechnology, a writing technology, informs research broadly.14 In a sense, organisms have ceased to exist as objects of knowledge, giving way to biotic components, i.e., special kinds of information-processing devices. The analogous moves in ecology could be examined by probing the history and utility of the concept of the ecosystem. Immunobiology and associated medical practices are rich exemplars of the privilege of coding and recognition systems as objects of knowledge, as constructions of bodily reality for us. Biology here is a kind of cryptography. Research is necessarily a kind of intelligence activity. Ironies abound. A stressed system goes awry; its communication processes break down; it fails to recognize the difference between self and other. Human babies with baboon hearts evoke national ethical perplexity– for animal rights activists at least as much as for the guardians of human purity. In the US gay men and intravenous drug users are the ‘privileged’ victims of an awful immune system disease that marks (inscribes on the body) confusion of boundaries and moral pollution (Treichler, 1987).

But these excursions into communications sciences and biology have been at a rarefied level; there is a mundane, largely economic reality to support my claim that these sciences and technologies indicate fundamental transforma-tions in the structure of the world for us. Communications technologies depend on electronics. Modern states, multinational corporations, military power, welfare state apparatuses, satellite systems, political processes, fabrication of our imaginations, labour-control systems, medical construc-tions of our bodies, commercial pornography, the international division of labour, and religious evangelism depend intimately upon electronics. Micro-electronics is the technical basis of simulacra; that is, of copies without originals.

Microelectronics mediates the translations of labour into robotics and word processing, sex into genetic engineering and reproductive technologies, and mind into artificial intelligence and decision procedures. The new biotechnologies concern more than human reproducdon. Biology as a powerful engineering science for redesigning materials and processes has revolutionary implications for industry, perhaps most obvious today in areas of fermentadon, agriculture, and energy. Communicadons sciences and biology are construcdons of natural-technical objects of knowledge in which the difference between machine and organism is thoroughly blurred; mind, body, and tool are on very intimate terms. The ‘multinational’ material organization of the production and reproduction of daily life and the symbolic organization of the production and reproduction of culture and imagination seem equally implicated. The boundary-maintaining images of base and superstructure, public and private, or material and ideal never seemed more feeble.

I have used Rachel Grossman’s (1980) image of women in the integrated circuit to name the situation of women in a world so intimately restructured through the social relations of science and technology.15 I used the odd circumlocution, ‘the social relations of science and technology’, to indicate that we are not dealing with a technological determinism, but with a historical system depending upon structured relations among people. But the phrase should also indicate that science and technology provide fresh sources of power, that we need fresh sources of analysis and political action (Latour, 1984). Some of the rearrangements of race, sex, and class rooted in high-tech-facilitated social relations can make socialist-feminism more relevant to effective progressive politics.

THE ‘HOMEWORK ECONOMY’ OUTSIDE ‘THE HOME’

The ‘New Industrial Revolution’ is producing a new world-wide working class, as well as new sexualities and ethnicities. The extreme mobility of capital and the emerging international division of labour are intertwined with the emergence of new collecdvities, and the weakening of familiar groupings. These developments are neither gender- nor race-neutral. White men in advanced industrial societies have become newly vulnerable to permanent job loss, and women are not disappearing from the job rolls at the same rates as men. It is not simply that women in Third World countries are the preferred labour force for the science-based multinationals in the export-processing sectors, particularly in electronics. The picture is more systematic and involves reproduction, sexuality, culture, consumphon, and producdon. In the prototypical Silicon Valley, many women’s lives have been structured around employment in electronics-dependent jobs, and their intimate realities include serial heterosexual monogamy, negotiating childcare, distance from extended kin or most other forms of traditional community, a high likelihood of loneliness and extreme economic vulnerability as they age. The ethnic and racial diversity of women in Silicon Valley structures a microcosm of conflicting differences in culture, family, religion, education, and language.

Richard Gordon has called this new situation the ‘homework economy’.16 Although he includes the phenomenon of literal homework emerging in connecdon with electronics assembly, Gordon intends ‘homework economy’ to name a restructuring of work that broadly has the characteristics formerly ascribed to female jobs, jobs literally done only by women. Work is being redefined as both literally female and feminized, whether performed by men or women. To be feminized means to be made extremely vulnerable; able to be disassembled, reassembled, exploited as a reserve labour force; seen less as workers than as servers; subjected to dme arrangements on and off the paid job that make a mockery of a limited work day; leading an existence that always borders on being obscene, out of place, and reducible to sex. Deskilling is an old strategy newly applicable to formerly privileged workers. However, the homework economy does not refer only to large-scale deskilling, nor does it deny that new areas of high skill are emerging, even for women and men previously excluded from skilled employment. Rather, the concept indicates that factory, home, and market are integrated on a new scale and that the places of women are crucial – and need to be analysed for differences among women and for meanings for relations between men and women in various situations.

The homework economy as a world capitalist organizational structure is made possible by (not caused by) the new technologies. The success of the attack on relatively privileged, mostly white, men’s unionized jobs is deaf to he power of the new communications technologies to integrate and control labour despite extensive dispersion and decentralization. The consequences of the new technologies are felt by women both in the loss of the family (male) wage (if they ever had access to this white privilege) and in the character of their own jobs, which are becoming capital-intensive; for example, office work and nursing.

The new economic and technological arrangements are also related to the collapsing welfare state and the ensuing intensification of demands on women to sustain daily life for themselves as well as for men, children, and old people. The feminization of poverty– generated by dismantling the welfare state, by the homework economy where stable jobs become the exception, and sustained by the expectation that women’s wages will not be matched by a male income for the support of children– has become an urgent focus. The causes of various women-headed households are a function of race, class, or sexuality; but their increasing generality is a ground for coalitions of women on many issues. That women regularly sustain daily life partly as a funcdon of their enforced status as mothers is hardly new; the kind of integration with the overall capitalist and progressively war-based economy is new. The particular pressure, for example, on US black women, who have achieved an escape from (barely) paid domeshc service and who now hold clerical and similar jobs in large numbers, has large implicadons for condnued enforced black poverty with employment. Teenage women in industrializing areas of the Third World increasingly find themselves the sole or major source of a cash wage for their families, while access to land is ever more problemadc. These developments must have major consequences in the psychodynamics and politics of gender and race.

Within the framework of three major stages of capitalism (commercial/ early industrial, monopoly, multinational) –tied to nationalism, imperialism, and multinationalism, and related to Jameson’s three dominant aesthetic periods of realism, modernism, and postmodernism –I would argue that specific forms of families dialectically relate to forms of capital and to its political and cultural concomitants. Although lived problematically and unequally, ideal forms of these families might be schematized as (1) the patriarchal nuclear family, structured by the dichotomy between public and private and accompanied by the white bourgeois ideology of separate spheres and nineteenth-century Anglo-American bourgeois feminism; (2) the modern family mediated (or enforced) by the welfare state and institutions like the family wage, with a flowering of a-feminist heterosexual ideologies, including their radical versions represented in Greenwich Village around the First World War; and (3) the ‘family’ of the homework economy with its oxymoronic structure of women-headed households and its explosion of feminisms and the paradoxical intensification and erosion of gender itself.

This is the context in which the projections for world-wide structural unemployment stemming from the new technologies are part of the picture of the homework economy. As robodcs and related technologies put men out of work in ‘developed’ countries and exacerbate failure to generate male jobs in Third World ‘development’, and as the automated of fice becomes the rule even in labour-surplus countries, the feminization of work intensifies. Black women in the United States have long known what it looks like to face the structural underemployment (‘feminization’) of black men, as well as their own highly vulnerable position in the wage economy. It is no longer a secret that sexuality, reproduction, family, and community life are interwoven with this economic structure in myriad ways which have also differentiated the situations of white and black women. Many more women and men will contend with similar situations, which will make cross-gender and race alliances on issues of basic life support (with or without jobs) necessary, not just mice.

The new technologies also have a profound effect on hunger and on food production for subsistence world-wide. Rae Lessor Blumberg (1983) estimates that women produce about 50 per cent of the world’s subsistence food.17 Women are excluded generally from benefiting from the increased high-tech commodification of food and energy crops, their days are made more arduous because their responsibilides to provide food do not diminish, and their reproductive situations are made more complex. Green Revolution technologies interact with other high-tech industrial production to alter gender divisions of labour and differential gender migration patterns.

The new technologies seem deeply involved in the forms of’privatization’ that Ros Petchesky (1981) has analysed, in which militarization, right-wing family ideologies and policies, and intensified definitions of corporate (and state) property as private synergistically interact.18 The new communications technologies are fundamental to the eradication of ‘public life’ for everyone. This facilitates the mushrooming of a permanent high-tech military establishment at the cultural and economic expense of most people, but especially of women. Technologies like video games and highly miniaturized televi-sions seem crucial to production of modern forms of ‘private life’. The culture of video games is heavily orientated to individual compedtion and extraterrestrial warfare. High-tech, gendered imaginations are produced here, imaginations that can contemplate destruction of the planet and a sci-fi escape from its consequences. More than our imaginations is militarized; and the other realities of electronic and nuclear warfare are inescapable. These are the technologies that promise ultimate mobility and perfect exchange– and incidentally enable tourism, that perfect practice of mobility and exchange, to emerge as one of the world’s largest single industries.

The new technologies affect the social relations of both sexuality and of
reproduction, and not always in the same ways. The close ties of sexuality and instrumentality, of views of the body as a kind of private satisfaction- and utility-maximizing machine, are described nicely in sociobiological origin stories that stress a genetic calculus and explain the inevitable dialectic of domination of male and female gender roles.19 These sociobiological stories depend on a high-tech view of the body as a biotic component or cybernetic communications system. Among the many transformations of reproductive situations is the medical one, where women’s bodies have boundaries newly permeable to both ‘visualization’ and ‘intervention’. Of course, who controls the interpretation of bodily boundaries in medical hermeneubcs is a major feminist issue. The speculum served as an icon of women’s claiming their bodies in the 1970S; that handcraft tool is inadequate to express our needed body politics in the negotiation of reality in the practices of cyborg reproduction. Self-help is not enough. The technologies of visualization recall the important cultural practice of hundng with the camera and the deeply predatory nature of a photographic consciousness.20 Sex, sexuality, and reproduction are central actors in high-tech myth systems structuring our imaginations of personal and social possibility.

Another critical aspect of the social relations of the new technologies is the reformulation of expectations, culture, work, and reproduction for the large scientific and technical work-force. A major social and political danger is the formation of a strongly bimodal social structure, with the masses of women and men of all ethnic groups, but especially people of colour, confined to a homework economy, illiteracy of several varieties, and general redundancy and impotence, controlled by high-tech repressive apparatuses ranging from entertainment to surveillance and disappearance. An adequate socialist-feminist politics should address women in the privileged occupational categories, and particularly in the production of science and technology that constructs scientific-technical discourses, processes, and objects.21

This issue is only one aspect of enquiry into the possibility of a feminist science, but it is important. What kind of constitutive role in the production of knowledge, imagination, and practice can new groups doing science have? How can these groups be allied with progressive social and political movements? What kind of political accountability can be constructed to the women together across the scientific-technical hierarchies separating us? Might there be ways of developing feminist science/technology politics in alliance with and-military science facility conversion action groups? Many sciendfic and technical workers in Silicon Valley, the high-tech cowboys included, do not want to work on military science.22 Can these personal preferences and cultural tendencies be welded into progressive politics among this professional middle class in which women, including women of colour, are coming to be fairly numerous?

WOMEN IN THE INTEGRATED CIRCUIT

Let me summarize the picture of women’s historical locations in advanced industrial societies, as these positions have been restructured partly through the social relations of science and technology. If it was ever possible ideologically to characterize women’s lives by the disdnction of public and private domains– suggested by images of the division of working-class life into factory and home, of bourgeois life into market and home, and of gender existence into personal and political realms –it is now a totally misleading ideology, even to show how both terms of these dichotomies construct each other in practice and in theory. I prefer a network ideological image, suggesting the profusion of spaces and identities and the permeability of boundaries in the personal body and in the body politic. ‘Networking’ is both a feminist practice and a multinational corporate strategy — weaving is for oppositional cyborgs.

So let me return to the earlier image of the informatics of domination and trace one vision of women’s ‘place’ in the integrated circuit, touching only a few idealized social locations seen primarily from the point of view of advanced capitalist societies: Home, Market, Paid Work Place, State, School, Clinic-Hospital, and Church. Each of these idealized spaces is logically and practically implied in every other locus, perhaps analogous to a holographic photograph. I want to suggest the impact of the social relations mediated and enforced by the new technologies in order to help formulate needed analysis and practical work. However, there is no ‘place’ for women in these networks, only geometries of difference and contradiction crucial to women’s cyborg identities. If we learn how to read these webs of power and social life, we might learn new couplings, new coalitions. There is no way to read the following list from a standpoint of’ idendfication’, of a unitary self. The issue is dispersion. The task is to survive in the diaspora.

Home: Women-headed households, serial monogamy, flight of men, old women alone, technology of domestic work, paid homework, re-emergence of home sweat-shops, home-based businesses and telecom-muting, electronic cottage, urban homelessness, migration, module architecture, reinforced (simulated) nuclear family, intense domestic violence.

Market: Women’s continuing consumption work, newly targeted to buy the profusion of new production from the new technologies (especially as the competitive race among industrialized and industrializing nations to avoid dangerous mass unemployment necessitates finding ever bigger new markets for ever less clearly needed commodities); bimodal buying power, coupled with advertising targeting of the numerous affluent groups and neglect of the previous mass markets; growing importance of nformal markets in labour and commodities parallel to high-tech, affluent market structures; surveillance systems through electronic funds transfer; intensified market abstraction (commodification) of experience, resulting in ineffective utopian or equivalent cynical theories of community; extreme mobility (abstraction) of marketing/financing systems; inter-penetration of sexual and labour markets; intensified sexualization of abstracted and alienated consumption.

Paid Work Place: Continued intense sexual and racial division of labour, but considerable growth of membership in privileged occupational categories for many white women and people of colour; impact of new technologies on women’s work in clerical, service, manufacturing (especially textiles), agriculture, electronics; international restructuring of the working classes; development of new time arrangements to facilitate the homework economy (flex time, part time, over time, no time); homework and out work; increased pressures for two-tiered wage structures; significant numbers of people in cash-dependent populations world-wide with no experience or no further hope of stable employment; most labour ‘marginal’ or ‘feminized’.

State: Continued erosion of the welfare state; decentralizations with increased surveillance and control; citizenship by telematics; imperialism and political power broadly in the form of information rich/information poor differentiation; increased high-tech militarization increasingly opposed by many social groups; reduction of civil service jobs as a result of the growing capital intensification of office work, with implications for occupational mobility for women of colour; growing privadzation of material and ideological life and culture; close integration of privatization and militarization, the high-tech forms of bourgeois capitalist personal and public life; invisibility of different social groups to each other, linked to psychological mechanisms of belief in abstract enemies.

School: Deepening coupling of high-tech capital needs and public educa-tion at all levels, differentiated by race, class, and gender; managerial classes involved in educational reform and refunding at the cost of

remaining progressive educational democratic structures for children and teachers; education for mass ignorance and repression in technocratic and militarized culture; growing and-science mystery cults in dissendng and radical political movements; continued relative scientific illiteracy among white women and people of colour; growing industrial direction of education (especially higher education) by science-based multinationals (particularly in electronics- and biotechnology-dependent companies); highly educated, numerous elites in a progressively bimodal society.

Clinic-hospital: Intensified machine-body relations; renegotiations of public metaphors which channel personal experience of the body, particularly in relation to reproduction, immune system functions, and ‘stress’ phenomena; intensification of reproductive politics in response to world historical implications of women’s unrealized, potential control of their relation to reproduction; emergence of new, historically specific diseases; struggles over meanings and means of health in environments pervaded by high technology products and processes; continuing feminization of health work; intensified struggle over state responsibility for health; continued ideological role of popular health movements as a major form of American politics.

Church: Electronic fundamentalist ‘super-saver’ preachers solemnizing the union of electronic capital and automated fetish gods; intensified importance of churches in resisting the militarized state; central struggle over women’s meanings and authority in religion; continued relevance of spirituality, intertwined with sex and health, in political struggle.

The only way to characterize the informatics of domination is as a massive intensification of insecurity and cultural impoverishment, with common failure of subsistence networks for the most vulnerable. Since much of this picture interweaves with the social relations of science and technology, the urgency of a socialist-feminist politics addressed to science and technology is plain. There is much now being tione, and the grounds for political work are rich. For example, the efforts to develop forms of collecdve struggle for women in paid work, like SEIU’s District 925,* should be a high priority for all of us. These efforts are profoundly deaf to technical restructuring of labour processes and reformations of working classes. These efforts also are providing understanding of a more comprehensive kind of labour organization, involving community, sexuality, and family issues never privileged in the largely white male industrial unions.

The structural rearrangements related to the social relations of science and technology evoke strong ambivalence. But it is not necessary to be uldmately depressed by the implications of late twentieth-century women’s relation to all aspects of work, culture, production of knowledge, sexuality, and reproduction. For excellent reasons, most Marxisms see domination best and have trouble understanding what can only look like false consciousness and people’s complicity in their own domination in late capitalism. It is crucial to remember that what is lost, perhaps especially from women’s points of view, is often virulent forms of oppression, nostalgically naturalized in the face of current violation. Ambivalence towards the disrupted unides mediated by high-tech culture requires not sorting consciousness into categories of clear-sighted critique grounding a solid political epistemology’

*Service Employees International Union’s office workers’ organization in the US.
versus ‘manipulated false consciousness’, but subtle understanding of emerging pleasures, experiences, and powers with serious potential for changing the rules of the game.

There are grounds for hope in the emerging bases for new kinds of unity across race, gender, and class, as these elementary units of socialist-feminist analysis themselves suffer protean transformations. Intensifications of hardship experienced world-wide in connection with the social relations of science and technology are severe. But what people are experiencing is not transparently clear, and we lack aufficiently subtle connections for collectively building effective theories of experience. Present efforts – Marxist, psychoanalytic, feminist, anthropological– to clarify even ‘our’ experience are rudimentary.

I am conscious of the odd perspecdve provided by my historical position – a PhD in biology for an Irish Catholic girl was made possible by Sputnik’s impact on US national science-education policy. I have a body and mind as much constructed by the post-Second World War arms race and cold war as by the women’s movements. There are more grounds for hope in focusing on the contradictory effects of politics designed to produce loyal American technocrats, which also produced large numbers of dissidents, than in focusing on the present defeats.

The permanent pardality of feminist points of view has consequences for our expectations of forms of political organization and participation. We do not need a totality in order to work well. The feminist dream of a common language, like all dreams for a perfectly true language, of perfectly faithful naming of experience, is a totalizing and imperialist one. In that sense, dialectics too is a dream language, longing to resolve contradiction. Perhaps, ironically, we can learn from our fusions with animals and machines how not to be Man, the embodiment of Western logos. From the point of view of pleasure in these potent and taboo fusions, made inevitable by the social relations of science and technology, there might indeed be a feminist science.

CYBORGS: A MYTH OF POLITICAL IDENTITY

I want to conclude with a myth about idendty and boundaries which might inform late twentieth-century political imaginations (Plate 1). I am indebted in this story to writers like Joanna Russ, Samuel R. Delany, John Varley, James Tiptree, Jr, Octavia Butler, Monique Wittig, and Vonda McIntyre.23 These are our story-tellers exploring what it means to be embodied in high-tech worlds. They are theorists for cyborgs. Exploring concephons of bodily boundaries and social order, the anthropologist Mary Douglas (1966, 1970) should be credited with helping us to consciousness about how fundamental body imagery is to world view, and so to political language.

French feminists like Luce Irigaray and Monique Wittig, for all their differences, know how to write the body; how to weave eroticism, cosmology, and politics from imagery of embodiment, and especially for Wittig, from imagery of fragmentation and reconstitution of bodies.24

American radical feminists like Susan Griffnn, Audre Lorde, and Adrienne Rich have profoundly affected our political imaginations – and perhaps restricted too much what we allow as a friendly body and political language.25 They insist on the organic, opposing it to the technological. But their symbolic systems and the related positions of ecofeminism and feminist paganism, replete with organicisms, can only be understood in Sandoval’s terms as oppositional ideologies fitting the late twentieth century. They would simply bewilder anyone not preoccupied with the machines and consciousness of late capitalism. In that sense they are part of the cyborg world. But there are also great riches for feminists in explicitly embracing the possibilides inherent in the breakdown of clean disdnctions between organism and machine and similar distinctions structuring the Western self. It is the simultaneity of breakdowns that cracks the matrices of domination and opens geometric possibilities. What might be learned from personal and political ‘technological’ pollution? I look briefly at two overlapping groups of texts for their insight into the construction of a potentially helpful cyborg myth: constructions of women of colour and monstrous selves in feminist science fiction.

Earlier I suggested that ‘women of colour’ might be understood as a cyborg idendty, a potent subjecdvity synthesized from fusions of outsider identities and in the complex political-historical layerings of her ‘biomythography’, Zami (Lorde, 1982; King, 1987a, 1987b). There are material and cultural grids mapping this potential, Audre Lorde (1984) captures the tone in the title of her Sister Outsider. In my political myth, Sister Outsider is the offshore woman, whom US workers, female and feminized, are supposed to regard as the enemy prevendug their solidarity, threatening their security. Onshore, inside the boundary of the United States, Sister Outsider is a potential amidst the races and ethnic identities of women manipulated for division, competition, and exploitation in the same industries. ‘Women of colour’ are the preferred labour force for the science-based industries, the real women for whom the world-wide sexual market, labour market, and politics of reproduction kaleidoscope into daily life. Young Korean women hired in the sex industry and in electronics assembly are recruited from high schools, educated for the integrated circuit. Literacy, especially in English, distinguishes the ‘cheap’ female labour so attractive to the multinationals.

Contrary to orientalist stereotypes of the ‘oral primidve’, literacy is a special mark of women of colour, acquired by US black women as well as men through a history of risking death to learn and to teach reading and wridng. Writing has a special significance for all colonized groups. Writing has been crucial to the Western myth of the distinction between oral and written cultures, primitive and civilized mentalities, and more recently to the erosion of that distinction in ‘postmodernist’ theories attacking the phallogo-centrism of the West, with its worship of the monotheistic, phallic, authoritative, and singular work, the unique and perfect name.26 Contests for the meanings of writing are a major form of contemporary political struggle. Releasing the play of writing is deadly serious. The poetry and stories of US women of colour are repeatedly about writing, about access to the power to signify; but this dme that power must be neither phallic nor innocent. Cyborg writing must not be about the Fall, the imagination of a once-upon-a-time wholeness before language, before writing, before Man. Cyborg writing is about the power to survive, not on the basis of original innocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them as other.

The tools are often stories, retold stories, versions that reverse and displace the hierarchical dualisms of naturalized identities. In retelling origin stories, cyborg authors subvert the central myths of origin of Western culture. We have all been colonized by those origin myths, with their longing for fulfilment in apocalypse. The phallogocentrie origin stories most crucial for feminist cyborgs are built into the literal technologies – teehnologies that write the world, biotechnology and microelectronics – that have recently textualized our bodies as code problems on the grid of C3I. Feminist cyborg stories have the task of recoding communication and intelligence to subvert command and control.

Figuratively and literally, language politics pervade the struggles of women of colour; and stories about language have a special power in the rich contemporary writing by US women of colour. For example, retellings of the stom~ of the indigenous woman Malinche, mother of the mesdzo ‘bastard’ race of the new world, master of languages, and mistress of Cortes, carry special meaning for Chicana constructions of identity. Cherrie Moraga (1983) in Loving in the War Years explores the themes of identity when one never possessed the original language, never told the original story, never resided in the harmony of legitimate heterosexuality in the garden of culture, and so cannot base identity on a myth or a fall from innocence and right to natural names, mother’s or father’s.27 Moraga’s writing, her superb literacy, is presented in her poetry as the same kind of violation as Malinche’s mastery of the conqueror’s language — a violation, an illegitimate production, that allows survival. Moraga’s language is not ‘whole’; it is self-consciously spliced, a chimera of English and Spanish, both conqueror’s languages. But it is this chimeric monster, without claim to an original language before violation, that crafts the erode, competent, potent identities of women of colour. Sister Outsider hints at the possibility of world survival not because of her innocence, but because of her ability to live on the boundaries, to write without the founding myth of original wholeness, with its inescapable apocalypse of final return to a deathly oneness that Man has imagined to be the innocent and all-powerful Mother, freed at the End from another spiral of appropriation by her son. Writing marks Moraga’s body, affirms it as the body of a woman of colour, against the possibility of passing into the unmarked category of the Anglo father or into the orientalist myth of ‘original illiteracy’ of a mother that never was. Malinche was mother here, not Eve before eating the forbidden fruit. Writing affirms Sister Outsider, not the Woman-before-the-Fall-into-Writing needed by the phallogocentric Family of Man.

Writing is pre-eminently the technology of cyborgs, etched surfaces of the late twentieth century. Cyborg politics is the struggle for language and the struggle against perfect communication, against the one code that translates all meaning perfectly, the central dogma of phallogocentrism. That is why cyborg politics insist on noise and advocate pollution, rejoicing in the illegitimate fusions of animal and machine. These are the couplings which make Man and Woman so problematic, subverting the structure of desire, the force imagined to generate language and gender, and so subverting the structure and modes of reproduction of ‘Western’ idendty, of nature and culture, of mirror and eye, slave and master, body and mind. ‘We’ did not originally choose to be cyborgs, but choice grounds a liberal politics and epistemology that imagines the reproduction of individuals before the wider replications of ‘texts’.

From the perspective of cyborgs, freed of the need to ground politics in ‘our’ privileged position of the oppression that incorporates all other dominations, the innocence of the merely violated, the ground of those closer to nature, we can see powerful possibilities. Feminisms and Marxisms have run aground on Western epistemological imperatives to construct a revolutionary subject from the perspective of a hierarchy of oppressions and/or a latent position of moral superiority, innocence, and greater closeness to nature. With no available original dream of a common language or original symbiosis promising protection from hostile ‘masculine’ separation, but written into the play of a text that has no finally privileged reading or salvation history, to recognize ‘oneself’ as fully implicated in the world, frees us of the need to root politics in identification, vanguard parties, purity, and mothering. Stripped of identity, the bastard race teaches about the power of the margins and the importance of a mother like Malinche. Women of colour have transformed her from the evil mother of masculinist fear into the originally literate mother who teaches survival.

This is not just literary deconstruction, but liminal transformation. Every, story that begins with original innocence and privileges the return to wholeness imagines the drama of life to be individuation, separation, the birth of the self, the tragedy of autonomy, the fall into writing, alienation; that is, war, tempered by imaginary respite in the bosom of the Other. These plots are ruled by a reproductive politics –rebirth without flaw, perfection, abstraction. In this plot women are imagined either better or worse off, but all agree they have less selflhood, weaker individuation, more fusion to the oral, to Mother, less at stake in masculine autonomy. But there is another route to having less at stake in masculine autonomy, a route that does not pass through Woman, Primitive, Zero, the Mirror Stage and its imaginaw. It passes through women and other present-tense, illegitimate cyborgs, not of Woman born, who refuse the ideological resources of victimization so as to have a real life. These cyborgs are the people who refuse to disappear on cue, no matter how many dmes a ‘western’ commentator remarks on the sad passing of another primitive, another organic group done in by ‘Western’ technology, by writing.28 These real-life cyborgs (for example, the Southeast Asian village women workers inJapanese and US electronics firms described by Aihwa Ong) are actively rewriting the texts of their bodies and sociedes. Sumival is the stakes in this play of readings.

To recapitulate, certain dualisms have been persistent in Western traditions; they have all been systemic to the logics and practices of domination of women, people of colour, nature, workers, animals – in short, domination of all constituted as others, whose task is to mirror the self. Chief among these troubling dualisms are self/other, mind/body, culture/nature, male/female, civilized/primitive, reality/appearance, whole/part, agent/resource, maker/ made, active/passive, right/wrong, truth/illusion, totaVpartial, God/man. The self is the One who is not dominated, who knows that by the semice of the other, the other is the one who holds the future, who knows that by the experience of domination, which gives the lie to the autonomy of the self. To be One is to be autonomous, to be powerful, to be God; but to be One is to be an illusion, and so to be involved in a dialectic of apocalypse with the other. Yet to be other is to be multiple, without clear boundary, frayed, insubstantial. One is too few, but two are too many.

High-tech culture challenges these dualisms in intriguing ways. It is not clear who makes and who is made in the relation between human and machine. It is not clear what is mind and what body in machines that resolve into coding practices. In so far as we know ourselves in both formal discourse (for example, biology) and in daily practice (for example, the homework economy in the integrated circuit), we find ourselves to be cyborgs, hybrids, mosaics, chimeras. Biological organisms have become biotic systems, communications devices like others. There is no fundamental, ontological separation in our formal knowledge of machine and organism, of technical and organic. The replicant Rachel in the Ridley Scott film Blade Runner stands as the image of a cyborg culture’s fear, love, and confusion.

One consequence is that our sense of connection to our tools is heightened. The trance state experienced by many computer users has become a staple of science-fiction film and cultural jokes. Perhaps paraplegics and other severely handicapped people can (and sometimes do) have the most intense experiences of complex hybridization with other communication devices.29 Anne McCaffrey’s pre-feminist The Ship Who Sang (1969) explored the consciousness of a cyborg, hybrid of girl’s brain and complex machinery, formed after the birth of a severely handicapped child. Gender, sexuality, embodiment, skill: all were reconstituted in the story. Why should our bodies end at the skin, or include at best other beings encapsulated by skin? From the seventeenth century dll now, machines could be animated – given ghostly souls to make them speak or move or to account for their orderly development and mental capacides. Or organisms could be mechan-ized – reduced to body understood as resource of mind. These machine/ organism relationships are obsolete, unnecessary. For us, in imagination and in other practice, machines can be prosthetic devices, intimate components, friendly selves. We don’t need organic holism to give impermeable whole-ness, the total woman and her feminist variants (mutants?). Let me conclude this point by a very partial reading of the logic of the cyborg monsters of my second group of texts, feminist science fiction.

The cyborgs populating feminist science fiction make very problematic the statuses of man or woman, human, artefact, member of a race, individual endty, or body. Katie King clarifies how pleasure in reading these fictions is not largely based on idendfication. Students facingJoanna Russ for the first time, students who have learned to take modernist writers like James Joyce or Virginia Woolf without flinching, do not know what to make of The Adventures of Alyx or The Female Man, where characters refuse the reader’s search for innocent wholeness while granting the wish for heroic quests, exuberant eroticism, and serious politics. The Female Man is the story of four versions of one genotype, all of whom meet, but even taken together do not make a whole, resolve the dilemmas of violent moral action, or remove the growing scandal of gender. The feminist science fiction of Samuel R. Delany, especially Tales of Neveyon, mocks stories of origin by redoing the neolithic revolution, replaying the founding moves of Western civilization to subvert their plausibility. James Tiptree, Jr, an author whose fiction was regarded as particularly manly undl her ‘true’ gender was revealed, tells tales of reproduction based on non-mammalian technologies like alternation of generations of male brood pouches and male nurturing. John Varley constructs a supreme cyborg in his arch-feminist exploration of Gaea, a mad goddess-planet-trickster-old woman-technological device on whose surface an extraordinary array of post-cyborg symbioses are spawned. Octavia Butler writes of an African sorceress pithug her powers of transformation against the genetic manipulations of her rival (Wild Seed), of dme warps that bring a modern US black woman into slavery where her actions in relation to her white master-ancestor determine the possibility of her own birth (Kindred), and of the illegidmate insights into idendty and community of an adopted cross-species child who came to know the enem’ as self (Survivor). In Dawn (1987), the first instalment of a series called Xenogenesis, Butler tells the story of Lilith Iyapo, whose personal name recalls Adam’s first and repudiated wife and whose family name marks her status as the widow of the son of Nigerian immigrants to the US. A black woman and a mother whose child is dead, Lilith mediates the transformation of humanity through genetic exchange with extra-terrestrial lovers/rescuers/destroyers/genetic engineers, who reform earth’s habitats after the nuclear holocaust and coerce surviving humans into intimate fusion with them. It is a novel that interrogates reproductive, linguishc, and nuclear politics in a mythic field structured by late twentieth-century race and gender.

Because it is particularly rich in boundary transgressions, Vonda McIn-tyre’s Superluminal can close this truncated catalogue of promising and dangerous monsters who help redefine the pleasures and politics of embodiment and feminist writing. In a fiction where no character is ‘simply’ human, human status is highly problematic. Orca, a genetically altered diver, can speak with killer whales and survive deep ocean conditions, but she longs to explore space as a pilot, necessitating bionic implants jeopardizing her kinship with the divers and cetaceans. Transformations are effected by virus vectors carrying a new developmental code, by transplant surgery, by implants of microelectronic devices, by analogue doubles, and other means. Lacnea becomes a pilot by accepting a heart implant and a host of other alterations allowing survival in transit at speeds exceeding that of light. Radu Dracul survives a virus-caused plague in his outerworld planet to find himself with a time sense that changes the boundaries of spatial perception for the whole species. All the characters explore the limits of language; the dream of communicating experience; and the necessity of limitation, partiality, and indmacy even in this world of protean transformation and connection. Superluminal stands also for the defining contradictions of a cyborg world in another sense; it embodies textually the intersection of feminist theory and colonial discourse in the science fiction I have alluded to in this chapter. This is a conjunction with a long history that many ‘First World’ feminists have tried to repress, including myself in my readings of Superluminal before being called to account by Zoe Sofoulis, whose different location in the world system’s informatics of domin-ation made her acutely alert to the imperialist moment of all science fiction cultures, including women’s science fiction. From an Australian feminist sensitivity, Sofoulis remembered more readily McIntyre’s role as writer of the adventures of Captain Kirk and Spock in TV’s Star Trek series than her rewriting the romance in Superluminal.

Monsters have always defined the limits of community in Western imaginations. The Centaurs and Amazons of ancient Greece established the limits of the centred polls of the Greek male human by their disruption of marriage and boundary pollutions of the warrior with animality and woman. Unseparated twins and hermaphrodites were the confused human material in early modern France who grounded discourse on the natural and supernatural, medical and legal, portents and diseases — all crucial to establishing modern identity.30 The evolutionary and behavioural sciences of monkeys and apes have marked the multiple boundaries of late twentieth-century industrial identities. Cyborg monsters in feminist science fiction define quite different political possibilities and limits from those proposed by the mundane fiction of Man and Woman.

There are several consequences to taking seriously the imagery of cyborgs as other than our enemies. Our bodies, ourselves; bodies are maps of power and identity. Cyborgs are no exception. A cyborg body is not innocent; it was not born in a garden; it does not seek unitary identity and so generate antagonistic dualisms without end (or until the world ends); it takes irony for granted. One is too few, and two is only one possibility. Intense pleasure in skill, machine skill, ceases to be a sin, but an aspect of embodiment. The machine is not an it to be animated, worshipped, and dominated. The machine is us, our processes, an aspect of our embodiment. We can be responsible for machines; they do not dominate or threaten us. We are responsible for boundaries; we are they. Up till now (once upon a time), female embodiment seemed to be given, organic, necessary; and female embodiment seemed to mean skill in mothering and its metaphoric exten-sions. Only by being out of place could we take intense pleasure in machines, and then with excuses that this was organic activity after all, appropriate to females. Cyborgs might consider more seriously the partial, fluid, sometimes aspect of sex and sexual embodiment. Gender might not be global identity after all, even if it has profound historical breadth and depth.

The ideologically charged question of what counts as daily activity, as experience, can be approached by exploiting the cyborg image. Feminists have recently claimed that women are given to dailiness, that women more than men somehow sustain daily life, and so have a privileged epistemo-logical position potentially. There is a compelling aspect to this claim, one that makes visible unvalued female activity and names it as the ground of life.

Locating Gesture: Leroi-Gourhan among the Cyborgs

Michael Chazan Department of Anthropology, University of Toronto

André Leroi-Gourhan is among the most enigmatic figures in the history of anthropology (Audouze 2002). His fieldwork ranged from ethnography in East Asia to archaeological excavation on Paleolithic sites in France. In France he has left a powerful imprint on anthropology and beyond and his impact is often considered on a par with that of Claude Levi-Strauss. Among his legacies are the Techniques et Cultures school of cultural anthropology, the chaîne opératoire approach to technology, and the decapage method of excavation. In North America Leroi-Gourhan is known only for his structural analysis of cave art.

Leroi-Gourhan never produced a succinct work that distills his key ideas as Marcel Mauss did in The Gift and Levi-Strauss did in The Savage Mind.    Rather his critical concepts are found buried in encyclopedic works. The twin books Milieu et Technique and L’Homme et la Matière are present an overview of all human techniques from cooking to metallurgy. The two volumes of Le Geste et la Parole present a synopsis of evolution from fish to computers. Unfortunately, much of the data presented in Le Geste et la Parole is no longer valid in light of ongoing archaeological research. The concepts that lie at the core of Leroi-Gourhan’s conception of technology are discussed in less than thirty pages spread through these four volumes.

A further difficulty of working through Leroi-Gourhan’s ideas is that they are based on a mixture of anachronistic ideas about evolution and path breaking ideas about technology. These two strands of thought are tightly intertwined so that the anachronism cannot be simply discarded without affecting the overarching concepts. Leroi-Gourhan’s view of evolution owed far more to Tielhard de Chardin and other late nineteenth century evolutionists than it did to Darwin. This line of evolutionary thought, often labeled neo- Lamackian evolution, was thoroughly discredited by the new evolutionary synthesis of that began in the 1950’s to integrate the insights of population genetics into evolutionary thought. Leroi-Gourhan’s view of evolution is unabashedly progressive and teleological. Much of the goal of Le Geste et la Parole is to discover the underlying direction of evolution. This is a project which finds little relevance today.

The teleological aspect of Leroi-Gourhan’s ideas is clearly expressed in his use of the concepts of tendance and fait in the study of technology. Tendance is defined as a an evolutionary phenomenon which underlies specific manifestations of technology. To quote from L’Homme et la Matière: “[La tendance…pousse le silex tenu à la main à acquérir un manche” (LHM 27). Another example of tendance is decoration of the self. For Leroi-Gourhan it is because of the underlying power of the tendance that there are parallels in the ways societies around the world decorate themselves. The fait is the inverse of tendance. The fait is the unpredictable local manifestation of the tendance. In Leroi-Gourhan’s words the faite “c’est un compromis instable qui s’établit entre les tendance et le milieu” (LHM 27). A forge is the compromise between fire, metal, combustion, fusion, commerce, fashion, religion that is the concrete manifestation of the tendance of metallurgy.

The idea that there is a metaphysical evolutionary tendency underlying human action is sharply reminiscent of de Chardin conception of evolution (Kopp 1964). Certainly this has foreign to Darwin’s ideas as expressed in The Origin of Species. How can we possibly accept the idea that there was an evolutionary force which made the tool want to have a handle? While it is tempting to quickly reject these concepts and insist that we must search deeper for Leroi-Gourhan’s such an undertaking must be undertaken with care. The contrast between tendance and fait is at the core of Leroi-Gourhan’s view of technology.    Mixed with the teleology is a view of the tool as a materialization of the interaction between humans and their environment.

The critical concept Leroi-Gourhan brought to the study of technology is the chaîne opératoire.    Contemporary prehistoric archaeologists draw heavily on this concept to recognize the dynamic process of tool manufacture and use.    However, the utility of this concept has led many archaeologists, particularly in North America, to avoid its broader meaning and implications. Again we are hindered by the lack of a clear definition and discussion of the chaîne opératoire in Leroi-Gouhan’s work. Rather than clearly introduce and define the concept he rushes headlong into its implications (GP 2)!
In order to ground the discussion of the chaîne opératoire it is useful to focus on the manufacture of stone tools. This is a critical technology as it provides the earliest archaeological evidence for tool manufacture. Thus within Leroi-Gourhan’s conception stone tool manufacture bridges between the animal world where the body is the tool and the human world in which the tool is ‘liberated’ from the body. Recent research on tool use by animals throws this basic distinction between animal and human techniques into question however I will not focus on this issue here.

North American archaeologists have long recognized that the manufacture of chipped stone tools is a sequence of operations in which a block of stone is reduced to form desired tools (Bleed 2001). Already in the 19th century William Henry Holmes demonstrated that allegedly ‘primitive’ tools were in fact spear and arrowhead points that were discarded in an early stage of production. The term reduction sequence is used to refer to the sequence of steps involved in the manufacture of a stone tool. Steps might include roughing out a core, removing blades, and then shaping the blades. Stone tool analysts are very adept at identifying the byproducts of each stage in the sequence.

A similar recognition of the dynamic nature of chipped stone tool manufacture focuses on the life history of the tool itself. The ‘frison effect’ recognizes that refashioning the edges, in a process known as retouch, can continuously resharpen chipped stone tools. The ‘frison effect’ recognizes that the shape of tools will change through use life to reflect this process of resharpening.

The pioneering efforts at applying the concept of the chaîne opératoire to the manufacture of stone tools have been made in the context of the archaeology of the Middle Paleolithic, the period when Neanderthals inhabited Europe. The critical insight derived from Leroi-Gourhan is that the dynamic process of manufacture is guided by a concept in the mind of the person carrying out the action. The knowledge (connaissance) of how to carry out the process is enacted through the skills (savoir faire) of the artisan. The chaîne opératoire is the acting out in time of knowledge and skill.

The great breakthrough of recent years in the study of stone tool technology has been the recognition that the knowledge involved in manufacture is a three dimensional concept of the mass. This mass can be considered as a volume or as a set of surfaces depending on the method one is following. The method refers to the rules guiding manufacturing process. These rules are not of a sequential nature (i.e., press botton a then pull lever b) but rather they are rules about relationships that define the spatial organization of knapping. If these rules are not respected the artisan will not have control over the manufacturing process.

The concept of a reduction sequence recognizes only the dynamic process of tool production. The result is often presented as a flow chart of a series of stages. Publications of chaîne opératoire analysis also often use flow charts.    However, these flow charts encompass only one aspect of the analysis. The strength of the chaîne opératoire approach is that it recognizes that the dynamic enactment of the technical process takes place in interaction with static concepts or sets of rules. In fact if we look deeper the concept of the chaîne opératoire is far more complex than simply the interaction between knowledge and skill. I would like to argue here that the ideas presented by Leroi-Gourhan lead to a recognition of the fundamentally ambiguous position of the gesture. The gesture is at once individual and collective, concrete and abstract. The gesture is the place where human technique comes into being.

Before launching into an attempt to justify these rather vague and grandiose statements it is necessary to clarify what is meant by gesture. For Leroi-Gourhan gesture is the equivalent of speech. Gesture is not simply the movement of the body anymore then speech is the movement of air through the larynx. Gesture is usefully defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as “a manner of carrying the body” (OED 2). Examples of the use of this term indicate that gestures are often used to express an attitude or an emotion. Essential to the concept of the gesture is that it is a trained and controlled movement of the body. Marcel Mauss brought attention to gesture in his discussion of technique du corpes.    The chaîne opératoire deals with the subset of gestures that can be termed technical gestures. Technical gestures are those trained and controlled movements of the body which have as a goal a physical effect on the environment or which are part of a sequence of gestures meant to have such an effect. Thus, although one could describe the sequence of gestures involved in a dance these would not necessarily be a chaîne opératoire unless they are an element in a technical process. On the other hand the process of butchery or tilling a field would fit within the frame of the chaîne opératoire.

The chaîne opératoire recognizes that the point of interaction between the trained human body and the physical world is a sequence of events. With these points as background it is possible to return to the rather vague and grandiose statements about gesture. Leroi-Gourhan emphasizes the collective knowledge that stands behind human action. Humans do not act on the basic of instinct, as is true of many animals, but rather on the basis of learned patterns of behavior. These patterns are at times conscious and coded in language but we are often not aware of the basis of our actions. Human gesture only exist in concrete instances carried out by individuals. Although we might in rare cases label a certain gesture, i.e., forechecking in hockey, this label has no meaning apart from the reality of the gesture. Although it is an absurdly obvious point, it is important to stress that a gesture can only be carried out by an individual. Although terms like “a collective gesture of atonement” have a certain metaphoric appeal such a collective gesture would only be possible if we were able to collectively inhabit a single body! Let us take the example of a dragon boat powered by a team of synchronized rowers. Here the trained movements of the team, acting in unison through the medium of manufactured tools, propel a boat through water. The gesture here exists in the movements of the individual rower.

However, the ambiguity of the gesture lies in the fact that it is the trained body that carries out the gesture.    The training of the body is based on behavioral patterns learned from participating in the social life of a group. In some cases the training is conscious and delibarate but in many cases the training of the human body takes place within the context of the ordinary daily-life. Moreover, the gesture is not simply the skilled movement of the body but also the knowledge that guides the skillful sequence of actions. Leroi-Gourhan stressed the social nature of memory in human societies. Memory is not the property of the individual but rather of the collective members of society. Thus, to say that gesture is concrete and individual presents only one side of the coin. While this is true, it is equally true that gesture is necessarily collective and abstract in the sense that gesture involves not only the movement of the body but also the knowledge that structures this movement.

The chaîne opératoire is a framework for recognizing the ambiguity of the gesture. However, the attention specifically to technical gesture adds another level of complexity beyond the individual/concrete and collective/abstract dualism. Technical gesture involves the interaction of gesture with the material world. Thus beyond the constituents of knowledge and skill one must also take into consideration the material world beyond the body. The chaîne opératoire only comes into being in the process of transforming the material world. The complication (if any more were needed) is that the physical world is often structured as the result of gesture. Leroi-Gourhan recognized this aspect of technology by stressing the tendency towards the emergence of machines which themselves replace elements of gesture. The tool itself is a first move in this tendency towards the machine.

Much of La Geste et la Parole is taken up with the idea of liberation. The first step in human evolution is the liberation of the hand from the mouth. Once independent the mouth and hand follow similar trajectories towards the evolution of language and gesture. It is here that Leroi-Gourhan approaches Teihard de Chardin, although lacking de Chardin’s optimism.    Leroi-Gourhan writes towards the end of La Geste et la Parole: “Il faut donc concevoir un homo sapiens complètement transposé et il semble bien qu’on assiste aux derniers rapports libres de l’homme et du monde naturel. Libéré de ses outils, de ses gestes, de ses muscles, de la programmation de ses actes, de sa mémoire, libéré de son imagination par la perfection des moyens télé-diffusés, libéré du monde animal, vegetal, du vent, du froid des microbes, de l’inconnu des montagnes et des mers, l’homo sapiens de la zoologie est probablement près de la fin de sa carrière” (GP 2: 266).
There is much more that could be written about Leroi-Gourhan’s concept of liberation, particularly in terms of placing it within the intellectual milieu in which he was writing. What I would like to do here is to argue that by stressing a trajectory towards increasing liberation Leroi-Gourhan missed some of the power of his own ideas. Rather than becoming irrelevant in a world of computers the recognition inherent in the concept of the chaîne opératoire of the ambiguous position of the gesture has relevance to recent discussions of the interaction between the human body and machines. Much of this discussion takes place in the context of artificial intelligence and cyborgs.

As opposed to Leroi-Gourhan’s prediction that we are near the end of our evolutionary trajectory as the human body become irrelevant and we become beings of mind alone in a sea of technology recent work on cyborgs highlights specifically the essentially ambiguous nature of the relationship between social knowledge, the individual mind, the body, and the physical world.    The cyborg is the image of the penetration of the machine into the human body. The cyborg points to a trajectory very different from the liberation of the mind from the body envisioned by Leroi-Gourhan. Rather than leading to an increasing externalization of the mind through technology, the cyborg represents the blurring of the line between the mind and the external world.

One passage from a recent book on cyborgs provides a sense of how far contemporary ideas are from Leroi-Gourhan’s concept of ‘liberation’.    In the final section of Natural Born Cyborgs Andy Clark writes: Human thought and reason emerges from a nest in which biological brains and bodies, acting in concert with nonbiological props and tools, build, benefit from, and then rebuild an endless succession of designer environments (Clark 2003: 197) .

From such a conception of the human mind, liberation from the body and the material world is not an option. The theoretical issues raised by the cyborg are vast and beyond the scope of this discussion. However, it is important to point out that the penetration of the body by the machine can be viewed as a threat to the essential centrality of the gesture. Experiments with animals have enabled movements of machines in the external world, often at a great distance, to be caused by brain impulses transmitted by implanted electrodes.    The performance artist Stelarc has experimented with a mechanical hand that is controlled by signals received from electrodes that detect motion in four muscles in the leg and abdomen (Clark 2003: 115).    In Stelarc’s performances muscles in the abdomen and the leg control the movements of an artificial hand. In this case we could argue that the gesture has simply been displaced from one muscle group to another. However, the possibility of ‘gestures’ that bypass the body certainly raise major questions.

The concept of the cyborg challenges the concept of liberation as found in the writing of Leroi-Gourhan. At the same time, the concept of the chaîne opératoire emerges with renewed relevance. The central aspect of the chaîne opératoire is that the interaction between the technical gesture is at the confluence of the mind, body, social world, and material world. The gesture cannot be understood in isolation but rather as a dynamic process.

Both the strength and the weakness of Leroi-Gourhan’s thought on technology was his understanding that the gesture is more than a movement, the tool more than an object. The weakness was his insistence on a highly teleological model of evolution tending towards the liberation of the mind from the body. This aspect of his thought, most clearly embodied in the concept of tendance is very much a product of the times in which he wrote and finds an interesting resonance in the ideas of Teilhard de Chardin. The strength of Leroi-Gourhan was his understanding of the centrality of gesture and of technology as more than simply objects and information. The chaîne opératoire is a concept with enduring value, not only for archaeology but for many aspects of the study of technology.

….

References Works by André Leroi-Gourhan
L’Homme et la Matière (1943). Paris: Albin Michelle Milieu et Technique (1945). Paris: Albin Michelle Le Geste at la Parole (1964). Paris: Albin Michelle.
Auduze, François (2002) Leroi-Gourhan, a philosopher of technique and evolution. Journal of Archaeological Research 10(4): 277-306.
Bleed, Peter (2001) Trees or chains, links or branches: conceptual alternatives for consderation of stone tool production and other sequential activities. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 8(1): 101-127.
Clark, Andy (2003) Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies and the Future of Human Intelligence. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kopp, Joseph V. (1964) Teilhard de Chardin: A New Synthesis of Evolution. Glen Rock, N.J.: Deus Books.

Publishing: The Revolutionary Future

New York Review of Books

By Jason Epstein

The transition within the book publishing industry from physical inventory stored in a warehouse and trucked to retailers to digital files stored in cyberspace and delivered almost anywhere on earth as quickly and cheaply as e-mail is now underway and irreversible. This historic shift will radically transform worldwide book publishing, the cultures it affects and on which it depends. Meanwhile, for quite different reasons, the genteel book business that I joined more than a half-century ago is already on edge, suffering from a gambler’s unbreakable addiction to risky, seasonal best sellers, many of which don’t recoup their costs, and the simultaneous deterioration of backlist, the vital annuity on which book publishers had in better days relied for year-to-year stability through bad times and good. The crisis of confidence reflects these intersecting shocks, an overspecialized marketplace dominated by high-risk ephemera and a technological shift orders of magnitude greater than the momentous evolution from monkish scriptoria to movable type launched in Gutenberg’s German city of Mainz six centuries ago.

Though Gutenberg’s invention made possible our modern world with all its wonders and woes, no one, much less Gutenberg himself, could have foreseen that his press would have this effect. And no one today can foresee except in broad and sketchy outline the far greater impact that digitization will have on our own future. With the earth trembling beneath them, it is no wonder that publishers with one foot in the crumbling past and the other seeking solid ground in an uncertain future hesitate to seize the opportunity that digitization offers them to restore, expand, and promote their backlists to a decentralized, worldwide marketplace. New technologies, however, do not await permission. They are, to use Schumpeter’s overused term, disruptive, as nonnegotiable as earthquakes.

Gutenberg’s technology was the sine qua non for the rebirth of the West, as if literacy, scientific method, and constitutional government had been implicit all along, awaiting only Gutenberg to throw the switch. Within fifty years presses were operating from one end of Europe to the other, halting only at the borders of Islam, which shunned the press. Perhaps from the same fear of disruptive literacy that alarmed Islam, China ignored a phonetic transcription of its ideographs, attributed to a Korean emperor, that might have permitted the use of movable type.

The resistance today by publishers to the onrushing digital future does not arise from fear of disruptive literacy, but from the understandable fear of their own obsolescence and the complexity of the digital transformation that awaits them, one in which much of their traditional infrastructure and perhaps they too will be redundant. Karl Marx wrote of the revolutions of 1848 in his Communist Manifesto that all that is solid melts into air. His vision of a workers’ paradise was of course wrong by 180 degrees, the triumph of wish over experience. What melted soon solidified as industrial capitalism, a paradise for some at the expense of the many. But Marx’s potent image fits the publishing industry today as its capital-intensive infrastructure—presses, warehouses stacked with fully returnable physical inventory, its retail market constrained by costly real estate—faces dissolution within a vast cloud in which all the world’s books will eventually reside as digital files to be downloaded instantly title by title wherever on earth connectivity exists, and printed and bound on demand at point of sale one copy at a time by the Espresso Book Machine^[1] as library-quality paperbacks, or transmitted to electronic reading devices including Kindles, Sony Readers, and their multiuse successors, among them most recently Apple’s iPad. The unprecedented ability of this technology to offer a vast new multilingual marketplace a practically limitless choice of titles will displace the Gutenberg system with or without the cooperation of its current executives.

Digitization makes possible a world in which anyone can claim to be a publisher and anyone can call him- or herself an author. In this world the traditional filters will have melted into air and only the ultimate filter—the human inability to read what is unreadable—will remain to winnow what is worth keeping in a virtual marketplace where Keats’s nightingale shares electronic space with Aunt Mary’s haikus. That the contents of the world’s libraries will eventually be accessed practically anywhere at the click of a mouse is not an unmixed blessing. Another click might obliterate these same contents and bring civilization to an end: an overwhelming argument, if one is needed, for physical books in the digital age.

Amid the literary chaos of the digital future, readers will be guided by the imprints of reputable publishers, distinguishable within a worldwide, multilingual directory, a function that Google seems poised to dominate—one hopes with the cooperation of great national and university libraries and their skilled bibliographers, under revised world copyright standards in keeping with the reach of the World Wide Web. Titles will also be posted on authors’ and publishers’ own Web sites and on reliable Web sites of special interest where biographies of Napoleon or manuals of dog training will be evaluated by competent critics and downloaded directly from author or publisher to end user while software distributes the purchase price appropriately, bypassing traditional formulas. With inventory expense, shipping, and returns eliminated, readers will pay less, authors will earn more, and book publishers, rid of their otiose infrastructure, will survive and may prosper.

This future is a predictable inference from digitization in its current stage of development in the United States, its details widely discussed in the blogosphere by partisans of various outcomes, including the utopian fantasy that in the digital future content will be free of charge and authors will not have to eat.

Digitization will encourage an unprecedented diversity of new specialized content in many languages. The more adaptable of today’s general publishers will survive the redundancy of their traditional infrastructure but digitization has already begun to spawn specialized publishers occupying a variety of niches staffed by small groups of like-minded editors, perhaps not in the same office or even the same country, much as software firms themselves are decentralized with staff in California collaborating online with colleagues in Bangalore and Barcelona.

The difficult, solitary work of literary creation, however, demands rare individual talent and in fiction is almost never collaborative. Social networking may expose readers to this or that book but violates the solitude required to create artificial worlds with real people in them. Until it is ready to be shown to a trusted friend or editor, a writer’s work in progress is intensely private. Dickens and Melville wrote in solitude on paper with pens; except for their use of typewriters and computers so have the hundreds of authors I have worked with over many years.

In preliterate cultures, the great sagas and epics were necessarily communal creations committed to tribal memory and chanted under priestly supervision over generations. With the invention of the alphabet, authors no longer depended on communal memory but stored their work on stone, papyrus, or paper. In modern times, communal projects are limited mainly to complex reference works, of which Wikipedia is an example. Though social networking will not produce another Dickens or Melville, the Web is already a powerful resource for writers, providing conveniently online a great variety of updated reference materials, dictionaries, journals, and so on instantly and everywhere, available by subscription or, like Google search and Wikipedia, free. Most time-sensitive reference materials need never again be printed and bound.

Informed critical writing of high quality on general subjects will be as rare and as necessary as ever and will survive as it always has in print and online for discriminating readers. Works of genius will emerge from parts of the world where books have barely penetrated before, as such works after Gutenberg emerged unbidden from the dark and silent corners of Europe. Gutenberg’s press, however, did not give Europe, with its tight cultural boundaries, a common tongue. Digitization may produce a somewhat different outcome by giving worldwide exposure to essential scientific and literary texts in major languages: Rome redux, while translators will still find plenty of work.

The cost of entry for future publishers will be minimal, requiring only the upkeep of the editorial group and its immediate support services but without the expense of traditional distribution facilities and multilayered management. Small publishers already rely as needed upon such external services as business management, legal, accounting, design, copyediting, publicity, and so on, while the Internet will supply viral publicity opportunities of which YouTube and Facebook are forerunners. Funding for authors’ advances may be provided by external investors hoping for a profit, as is done for films and plays. The devolution from complex, centralized management to semi-autonomous editorial units is already evident within the conglomerates (for example, Nan A. Talese at Random House and Jonathan Karp at Hachette), a tendency that will strengthen as the parent companies fade. As conglomerates resist the exorbitant demands of best-selling authors whose books predictably dominate best-seller lists, these authors, with the help of agents and business managers, will become their own publishers, retaining all net proceeds from digital as well as traditional sales. With the Espresso Book Machine, enterprising retail booksellers may become publishers themselves, like their eighteenth-century forebears.

Traditional territorial rights will become superfluous and a worldwide, uniform copyright convention will be essential. Protecting content from unauthorized file sharers will remain a vexing problem that raises serious questions about the viability of authorship, for without protection authors will starve and civilization will decline, a prospect recognized by the United States Constitution, which calls for copyright to sustain writers not primarily as a matter of equity but for the greater good of public enlightenment.

Some musicians make up for lost royalties by giving concerts, selling T-shirts, or accompanying commercials. For authors there is no equivalent solution. Refinements of today’s digital rights management software, designed to block file sharing, will be an ongoing contest with file sharers who evade payment for themselves and their friends, often in the perverse belief that “content wants to be free”—much as antiviral software is engaged in a continuing contest with hackers. Unauthorized file sharing will be a problem but not in my opinion a serious one, perhaps at the level that libraries and individual readers have always shared books with others.

These and other solutions will emerge opportunistically in response to need, as such solutions usually have. It is futile at this early stage, however, to anticipate the new publishing landscape in detail or to specify the rate of evolution, which will be sporadic and complex, or the future role of traditional publishers as digitization advances along a ragged and diverse front, while publishers, writers, and readers adapt accordingly. Timing will be apparent only in retrospect.

So far I have attempted to foresee the digital future in instrumental terms. There is also a moral dimension, for we are a troublesome species with a long history of self-destruction. The industry that Gutenberg launched eventually made possible wide distribution of Montaigne, Shakespeare, and Cervantes, to say nothing of Babar the Elephant and The Cat in the Hat. But his technology also gave us The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Mein Kampf, and the nonsense that turned Pol Pot in Paris from a mere fool into a mass murderer. Digitization will amplify our better nature but also its diabolic opposite. Censorship is not the answer to these evils.

Digital content is fragile. The secure retention, therefore, of physical books safe from electronic meddlers, predators, and the hazards of electronic storage is essential. Amazon’s recent arbitrary deletion of Orwell’s 1984 at its publisher’s request from Kindle users who had downloaded it suggests the ease with which files can be deleted without warning or permission, an inescapable hazard of electronic distribution.^[2] In Denmark music downloaded by subscription self-destructs when the subscription expires. So does my annual subscription to the online Oxford English Dictionary unless I renew it. Much other reference material that is usually time-sensitive and for that reason need never be printed and bound is already sold by renewable subscription. If I were a publisher today I would consider a renewable rental model for all e-book downloads—the “lending library” technique of the Depression era—that more accurately reflects the conditional relationship, enforced by digital rights management software, between content provider and end user.

I would like to add a few words about the evolution of my own interest in digitization. From the beginning of my career I have been obsessed with the preservation and distribution of backlist—the previously published books, still in print, that are the indispensable component of a publisher’s stability and in the aggregate the repository of civilizations. In this sense, it is fair to say that book publishing is more than a business. Without the contents of our libraries—our collective backlist, our cultural memory—our civilization would collapse.

By the mid-Eighties I had become aware of the serious erosion of publishers’ backlists as shoals of slow-moving but still viable titles were dropped every month. There were two reasons for this: a change in the tax law that no longer permitted existing unsold inventory to be written off as an expense; but more important, the disappearance as Americans left the cities for the suburbs of hundreds of well-stocked, independent, city-based bookstores, and their replacement by chain outlets in suburban malls that were paying the same rent as the shoe store next door for the same minimal space and requiring the same rapid turnover.

This demographic shift turned the book business upside down as retailers, unable to stock deep backlist, now demanded high turnover, often of ephemeral titles. Best-selling authors whose loyalty to their publishers had previously been the norm were now chips in a high-stakes casino: a boon for authors and agents with their nonrecoverable overguarantees and a nightmare for publishers who bear all the risk and are lucky if they break even. Meanwhile, backlist continued to decline. The smaller houses, unable to take these risks, merged with the larger ones, and the larger ones eventually fell into the arms of today’s conglomerates.

To offset the decline of backlist I launched in the mid-Eighties the Reader’s Catalog, an independent bookstore in catalog form from which readers could order 40,000 backlist titles by telephone. The Internet existed but had not yet been commercialized. The Reader’s Catalog was an instant success, confirming my belief in a strong worldwide market for backlist titles. But I had underestimated the cost of handling individual orders and concluded, with my backers, that if we continued our losses would become intolerable. The Internet was now available commercially. Amazon bravely took advantage of it and in the beginning suffered the losses that I feared. But by this time I had begun to hear of digitization and its buzzword, disintermediation, which meant that publishers could now look forward to marketing a practically limitless backlist without physical inventory, shipping expense, or unsold copies returned for credit. Customers would pay in advance for their purchases. This meant that even Amazon’s automated shipping facilities would eventually be bypassed by electronic inventory. This was twenty-five years ago. Today digitization is replacing physical publishing much as I had imagined it would.

Relatively inexpensive multipurpose devices fitted with reading applications will widen the market for e-books and may encourage new literary forms, such as Japan’s cell-phone novels. Newborn revolutions often encourage utopian fantasies until the exigencies of human nature reassert themselves. Though bloggers anticipate a diversity of communal projects and new kinds of expression, literary form has been remarkably conservative throughout its long history while the act of reading abhors distraction, such as the Web-based enhancements—musical accompaniment, animation, critical commentary, and other metadata—that some prophets of the digital age foresee as profitable sidelines for content providers.

The most radical of these fantasies posits that the contents of the digital cloud will merge or be merged—will “mash up”—to form a single, communal, autonomous intelligence, an all-encompassing, single book or collective brain that reproduces electronically on a universal scale the synergies that occur spontaneously within individual minds. To scorn a bold new hypothesis—the roundness of the earth, its rotation around the sun—is always a risk but here the risk is minimal. The nihilism—the casual contempt for texts—implicit in this ugly fantasy is nevertheless disturbing as evidence of cultural impoverishment,^[3] more offensive than but not unrelated to the assumption of e-book maximalists that authors who spend months and years at their desks will not demand physical copies as evidence of their labors and hope for posterity.

The huge, worldwide market for digital content, however, is not a fantasy. It will be very large, very diverse, and very surprising: its cultural impact cannot be imagined. E-books will be a significant factor in this uncertain future, but actual books printed and bound will continue to be the irreplaceable repository of our collective wisdom.

I must declare my bias. My rooms are piled from floor to ceiling with books so that I have to think twice about where to put another one. If by some unimaginable accident all these books were to melt into air leaving my shelves bare with only a memorial list of digital files left behind I would want to melt as well for books are my life. I mention this so that you will know the prejudice with which I celebrate the inevitability of digitization as an unimaginably powerful, but infinitely fragile, enhancement of the worldwide literacy on which we all—readers and nonreaders—depend.

Notes

^[1]A project that I helped found.

^[2]See also Amazon’s more recent attempt to block sales of books by a major publisher because of a pricing dispute.

^[3]For a critical account of this view, see Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto (Knopf, 2010), pp. 26, 46.