From the Journal Artnode

Cryptobiologies
Eugene Thacker

Abstract:
this essay explores the relation between animality and biotechnology, focusing both on contemporary issues, such as “biodefence”, as well as historical issues, such as the Mediaeval bestiary. Animality—as the human capacity to “think the animal”—is found to exist within the networks and passages that both constitute and threaten social, economic and political life.

Keywords
biotechnology, animality, genetics, animal, epidemic, biological warfare, monster

Cryptobiologies

There is a great deal of code-making and code-breaking in biotechnology. we “crack” the genetic code, “decode” the genomes of various organisms, “encode” those codes into actual computer databases, all to help us decipher the information of disease-causing agents, which themselves are able to evade medicines by their rapid rate of genetic mutation. Yet, in the midst all this talk of codes, we often forget that many of the applications of industrial biotechnology result not in codes but the flesh of “life”: mice, sheep, pigs, goats, and so on. their use in livestock breeding, transgenics and medical research suggest to us that we have not only decrypted the “code of life”, but we have advanced to a level where we can “encrypt” life in the form of these unique animals.

However, our relationship to animals is at best a complicated one. the history of western thought on the topic can be viewed as a continued effort to separate the human from the animal (Aristotle’s description of man as a “political animal”, descartes’ formulation of the bête machine, the debates surrounding The Descent of Man). the search for the set of characteristics that would definitively separate human from animal often presumes a clear division between the natural and the artificial, or what we would refer to today as biology and technology. Yet even a cursory look at biotechnology today suggests that something is afoot. what happens when we produce animals that are not “natural”? what do we make of these biologies that are also technologies? Are they of nature, of technology, or of something else entirely? how do we relate to these non-natural, even super-natural animals?

What I would like to do here is to briefly present three cultural relationships between human and animal, relationships that not only challenge us to rethink the animal, but also the human. In an everyday sense, we coexist with animals of all types, from our domesticated dogs and cats to the animals displayed in the meat, poultry and seafood sections of the grocery. we call to animals, and we also eat animals. we develop, with our pets, unique modes of communication, and, with our food, we also develop unique modes of consumption. In this everydayness of the animal, in this quotidian relation we have with animals, we as human beings practise this dual form of orality— communicating and consuming, speaking and eating, word and flesh.

But what of animals that are not everyday? what of human-animal relationships that are far from ordinary, but are rather extraordinary? Of course, exotic animals can also be pets, in which case the exotic becomes everyday. so perhaps a better question to ask is, are there instances in which the human-animal relationship occupies a grey zone in between the everyday and the exceptional, the ordinary and the extraordinary?

Biotech Animality
Genetic engineering as applied to animals occupies a curious position in western, technologically-advanced cultures. It is at once the most hi-tech and esoteric method of working with nature, and yet its applications are the most quotidian (food, pets). Certainly, breeding techniques have been known for many, many years, and their applications in domestication and farming have been documented by archaeologists, anthropologists and historians. however the introduction of genetic engineering techniques into the biotech industry in the 970s has had a profound impact on the way we view the human-animal relationship—an impact we are undoubtedly still witnessing. to take a few well-known examples: genetically-modified organisms (gMOs), which, in the broadest sense, may be taken to include microbes (e.g. bacteria that digest oil spills), the whole range of cloned mammals in science research (dolly, but also cloned mice, cows, pigs, monkeys), the field of transgenics (e.g. goats genetically engineered to produce human insulin in their milk), biotech livestock (meatier chickens, fatter pigs, etc.), and of course genetic engineering applied to domestic pets (e.g. allergy-free cats).

These and other examples constitute our contemporary biotech “bestiary”, a whole new “natural history” of the biotech zoo, a whole new classification system of previously impossible creatures, hybrids and teratologies that would seem to be more the domain of fantasy than fact. Certainly, science fiction itself often speculates on the possibilities of such impossible beings, but what is equally fascinating is the moment at which such seemingly impossible biologies cross a certain threshold and become everyday technologies. Our perplexity in attempting to comprehend the very existence of GMOs, transgenic animals, cloned mammals and genetically engineered pets is an indicator of the grey zone occupied by this biotech bestiary.

Like the mediaeval bestiary, our contemporary biotech bestiary is filled with beings that resist category, animals that frustrate systems of classification—the “set” of all animals that have no set. by definition, the impossible animal, the fantastic being, the monster, are all forms of unnatural life, or even life that cannot—or should not—exist. but more than this, the monster also throws up a challenge to the very concept of “nature” and of our relation to and distance from that which we call “natural”. From the early modern era to the 9th century, the study of monsters (derived from the latin monstrum— “to warn”) is this attempt to comprehend the animal being that does not “fit”, the animal life that has no home, no “proper” place. teratology—the study of monsters—is a documentation of this animal displacement. From Ambrose Paré’s Des Monstres et prodiges (573) to Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire’s Histoire Générale et Particulière des Anomalies, ou Traité de Tératologie (832), the treatise on monsters is, in a sense, a classification of unnatural life or life that should not exist. such studies are positioned between naturalistic explanations of anomalies and a range of supernatural interpretations. Monsters oscillate between being divine prophecies, a display of the “wonders of nature” and medical-scientific errors deviating from a norm.

In his delightful Book of Imaginary Beings, the Argentinean author Jorge Luis Borges discusses our dual fascination with the “real” animal kingdom and with the impossible animals that inhabit myth and folklore: “let us now pass from the zoo of reality to the zoo of mythologies, to the zoo whose denizens are not lions but sphinxes and griffons and centaurs. the population of this second zoo should exceed by far the population of the first, since a monster is no more than a combination of parts of real beings, and the possibilities of permutation border on the infinite.” Borges compiled his book prior to the era of genetic engineering, but it is tempting to read his comments on hybrids and recombination in relation to our current biotech bestiary. we might even wonder if there exists a whole “micro- monstrosity” of viruses, bacteria, fungi. this is the term used by philosopher of science Georges Canguilhem, who, a few years after the Watson-Crick publications, wondered if the historical interest in teratologies has been transformed into a current concern with “information”, “noise” and “error.”

Becoming Microbial
Surely we as human beings are more than the microbes that inhabit our bodies and that sustain many of our biological processes. Microbes, strictly speaking, are not “animals”—they are microbes. we are animals… we think—except that our thinking about our animality makes us more than animals. Yes (we say to ourselves), we are more than our microbes. Except, of course, when “our” microbes are not ours (infection), or when “our” microbes are always coming-and-going (contagion). the biological processes of contagion and infection always elicit a certain anxiety and fear for us, and for good reason. Contagion and infection are more than mechanisms of antigen recognition and antibody response; they are, as our textbooks tell us, entire “wars” and “invasions” continuously fought on the battle lines of the human body (to which autoimmune disorders add degrees of metaphorical complexity).

Contagion and infection are paradoxical processes. they elicit a rigorous “defence” of the body’s boundaries, and yet we as living beings are defined by our continuous exchange of matter and energy with our surroundings. Only certain things are allowed to pass, only certain things are exchanged. All of this denotes a systems-wide, network perspective. It is no accident that computer networks, economic exchanges and cultural ideas have been described in terms of viruses (computer viruses, viral marketing, memes). there is an abstract topology, a network form, that pervades each of these systems. they are constituted by “nodes” and “edges” (dots and lines) that have variable rates of exchange and connectivity. such networks have several forms, or topologies, each with an analogous control structure: centralized, decentralized and distributed. It is for this reason that many “network science” perspectives have studied biological and computer viruses interchangeably: the microbe is the “message” that is passed along channels of contagion (the edges) between each person (the nodes).

Thus, the “war” that takes place in contagion and infection is not simply limited to the body’s interior; it is also a conflict that is scaled up, as it were, to the level of the population, and indeed, the nation. this is the point where virology and immunology fold onto epidemiology and public health. the task of public health agencies is thus to distinguish “good” circulations (travel, trade) from “bad” circulations (virulent microbes). what public health organizations such as the WHO and the CDC call “emerging infectious diseases” are networks in this way. Microbes establish networks of infection within a body, and networks of contagion between bodies, and our modern transportation systems extend that connectivity across geopolitical borders (“global health”). However, it is misleading to say that microbes “do” this or that they “do” that, as if they were little homunculi with malintent. but it is equally misleading to simply say that we humans “do” this or “do” that, especially as most epidemics involve many factors that include microbial evolution, drug-resistance and environmental factors, in addition to the more human concerns of education, preventive practices and prescription drugs. Indeed, if microbes are in some way synonymous with networks, then the whole question of agency is rendered problematic. It is this that incites the greatest discomfort. how is it started? how can it be stopped? how can it be prevented? not only do the networks of contagion and infection render human agency and control problematic, but, when we take into account all the factors that go into an epidemic, we see as many “nonhuman” agencies as human ones (e.g. viral mutation, bacterial resistance). representations of epidemics in popular culture—from Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year to contemporary zombie films such as George Romero’s Land of the Dead—can be understood as cultural reactions to this strange, fearful, “nonhuman life” of microbial networks.
In fact, we are still unsure as to whether viruses are living or non-living—they seem to be simple assemblages of matter without the ability to independently reproduce, and yet recent research has revealed their troubling ability to genetically mutate and exchange genetic material with a host organism. Virologists such as luis Villareal (echoing the work of Lynn Margulis) have suggested that the old question of the living/non-living status of viruses is superseded by another question: the role that viruses have played in evolutionary processes, whether or not they are “alive”. It seems that microbes are not only very, very old, but that they have developed innovative ways of living with (and inside) us human beings. should we say the reverse as well, that human beings have developed innovative ways of living with microbes?

Whatever life

One of the hallmarks of contemporary U.S. biodefence policies has been the implosion between emerging infectious disease and bioterrorism, a collapse of a distinction in cause in favour of a unity in effect. nowhere is this more evident than in the conceptual—even ontological—articulations performed in the language of biodefence. For instance, the U.s. 2002 bioterrorism Act contains at numerous points a refrain, one that can also be heard in other national and homeland security documents: “bioterrorism and emerging infectious disease”. the opening sections of the bioterrorism Act give public health administrators the ability to develop strategies “for carrying out health-related activities to prepare for and respond effectively to bioterrorism and other public health emergencies, including the preparation of a plan under this section”.2 here, the word “and” plays a central role in the document as a whole, implying a certain quality of whatever: the notion that “bioterrorism and emerging infectious disease, it makes no difference which”, that is also a notion of “whichever it is, it matters a great deal”.

However, the most remarkable consequence of this implosion is in what the “and” enables in the way of public health practices. As part of a broad endeavour to facilitate biodefence research, the U.s. Project bioshield has, since its announcement in 2002, allocated funding for the development of “next-generation medical countermeasures” such as drugs, vaccines and diagnostics. In 2003 the U.s. national Institute of Allergy and Infectious disease (nIAId), a department within the national Institute of health (nIh), received a multi-million dollar award for research into “human immunity and biodefence”. later that same year, nIAId officials released a progress report outlining their research goals. the report states that the “increased breadth and depth of biodefence research not only is helping us become better prepared to protect citizens against a deliberately introduced pathogen, it also is helping us tackle the continuous tide of naturally occurring emerging infections…”.4 distinctions in cause are effaced by the biological latency of the disease-causing agent, a latency that is also social, political and economic—precisely because it is biological. Indeed, it is this notion—that biology is more-than-biological because  the phrase “life itself” refers to a concept employed by molecular biology researchers in the 950s and 960s (foremost among them Francis Crick), as well as its more critical use in science studies by Richard Doyle, Sarah Franklin, Nicholas Rose and Donna Haraway.

It is biological—that can be said to be the conceptual foundation for the flurry of biodefence legislation in the U.s. since 9/: the bioterrorism Act, Project bioshield, the biosurveillance Project, the national Electronic disease surveillance system (nEdss), the national Pharmaceutical stockpile, as well as a host of classified bioweapons projects.
however, we can note a more fundamental issue at stake in these developments, and this surrounds the problematic of biological “life itself”. by this phrase I mean the ways in which the domain of the biological—a shifting and discontinuous domain, to be sure—is articulated as a problem of control, regulation, and modulation, a condition that Michel Foucault has described as “biopolitical”.5 the problematic of biological “life itself” also denotes the ways in which the domain of the biological is rendered as technically specific (in viruses, bacteria, genomes, vaccines) as well as a pervasive, general, even existential, condition (the presumed facticity or givenness of “life itself”). For Heidegger, one of the ways in which Dasein or being reveals itself is in the Angst associated with the very fact of existence. This Angst is to be differentiated from the fear of particular things and the particular threat they represent; thus Angst is not fear. “that about which one has Angst is being-in-the-world as such… what Angst is about is not an innerwordly being… the threat does not have the character of a definite detrimentality which concerns what is threatened with a definite regard to a particular factical potentiality for being what Angst is about is completely indefinite.”6

Except—and this is the crucial difference—Heidegger’s distinction revolved around the question of Dasein, and not the question of biological “life itself”. In fact, for Heidegger, the question of “life” was not a question at all, for the sciences of biology and psychology, in their asking of the question “what is life?” mistakenly presume to have already answered the more fundamental question “what is being?”.7 However, while Heidegger dismisses the question of biological “life itself”, what we are witnessing in the ontology of biodefence is a certain conceptual displacement. whereas Heidegger contrasted the question of being (in terms of Angst) with the question of life (as “fear”), today we have a reformulation of the latter in terms of the former—an Angst that is about biological “life itself”. In biodefence, Angst is correlated to biological “life itself”. that about which one has Angst is the pervasiveness of the biological as threat, as what is threatened, and as response. “the fact that what is threatening is nowhere characterizes what Angst is about.”8 the logic of biodefence—that “life itself” is an indefinite and indeterminate threat—culminates in a social, cultural and political Angst, a biological Angst, an Angst of “life itself”. Here the problematic of “life itself” is how to articulate, within the domain of the living, that which is threatening versus that which is threatened, resulting in a peculiar type of “existential biology”.

Occult Biologies

If contagion and infection can be seen as networks, and if such networks incite fear in us, in part due to their “nonhuman” character, how do we comprehend this ambivalent, affective dimension to biological “life”? writing about the politics of public health response to disease, Michel Foucault notes that plagues have historically elicited two responses: a “poetic fantasy of lawlessness” (social anarchy, the “dance of death”) and a “political fantasy of total control” (quarantines, pesthouses, death tables). Foucault’s comments ask us to view contagion and infection as being more-than-biological—as social, cultural and political as well.

A historical look at epidemics reveals this aspect of the more-than- biological. For instance, epidemics are often found where there is war or military conflict. Thucydides remarks that, during the Peloponnesian war, there were rumours of the wells being intentionally poisoned—a possible early example of biological warfare. the mediaeval practice of catapulting diseased and/or decaying cadavers of soldiers and animals would carry this further. the great Plague of london in 665 took place in the midst of civil war, and it was no accident that thomas hobbes would compare civil dissent with a “diseased” body politic in his Leviathan. Epidemics are not only found in the midst of war but they are often interpreted in ways that are more than medical or natural. during the black death, which ravaged most of Europe in the mid-4th century, the predominant explanations were, unsurprisingly, religious. Italian and German chroniclers of the period note the predominance of religious processionals, “flagellant” groups, and the apocalyptic exhortations of popular soothsayers. In the era of European expansionism, disease—which often accompanied imperial and colonial enterprises—was often interpreted by both colonizer and colonized as a sign of divine retribution or providence, depending on the point of view.

It is with scientific hindsight that we have since “historicized” such supernatural interpretations of epidemics: the plague bacillus, we explain, was carried in fleas, living on rats, themselves populous aboard merchant ships travelling between southern Europe and the Mongol region. but an exclusive reliance on medical facts—however useful—obscures the ambivalent, affective cultural dimensions of epidemics. the bacillus-flea-rat connection is perhaps culturally reflected in religion, myth, folklore—from the Brothers Grimm modernization of the “Pied Piper of Hamelin” to Werner Herzog’s expressionist tribute Nosferatu—there is an entire cultural history of plague to be written. such a history would have to feature animals, not just as carriers of disease, but as carriers of disorder, filth, impurity—even as carriers of divine retribution. rats, bats and packs. there are always many of them; it is rarely a single rat, a single flea, a single bacillus that is the harbinger of disease. French philosopher Gilles Deleuze notes that there are three types of animals: anthropomorphic, domesticated pets (the mirror of the human), our scientific species (official, institutional, “state” animals), and finally there is a third type of animal, the “pack” or the “swarm” animals, the animals that do not exist except as many—animal multiplicities. they are not “a” bee, but a swarm, not “a” bird but a flock, not “a” bacterium but an epidemic. this latter animal is traditionally interpreted as an underworld animal, an animal without head or face, a demonic animal—“I am legion”.

Weird Biology

We return again to the question of the animal—or rather, of “animality”. In the case of “emerging infectious disease”, animals as groups often become the links between human and human (mad cow, monkeypox, bird flu, etc.). but beneath this is another level of animality, that of microbes passing between organisms, microbes exchanging genetic material in networks of contagion and infection. Is this too an instance of animality? In modern fiction, the under- appreciated genre of “supernatural horror” is replete with examples of a contagious, swarming “life” that is also radically non-human and unnatural—H.P. Lovecraft’s ancient, formless “shoggoths”, Clark Ashton smith’s primordial, amorphous “Ubbo-sathla”, Frank Belknap long’s surrealistic “Space Eaters” and the entire dark matter bestiary of William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land. For this reason, formless, pack or swarm animals—even when presented as epidemics—show us an animality that we apprehend but do not comprehend. The writer Georges Bataille reiterates this: “the animal opens before me a depth that attracts me and is familiar to me. In a sense, I know this depth: it is my own. It is also that which is farthest removed from me, that which deserves the name depth, which means precisely that which is unfathomable to me.”9 And our apprehension of such animals is ambivalent, precisely because they symbolize radical, non-human transformations. this is why supernatural explanations predominate in historical instances of plague, and this is also why the genre of supernatural horror is the domain in which we find “nameless offspring” and “logical monsters”. to say that we as human beings cannot really know what it is like to be an animal would be commonplace. But to ask what it would be like to be a pack, a swarm, a flock—this is the question of animality. It is a more “abstract” question, a question not of species, genus and organism, but of topologies or patterns that effortlessly cut across species. the threshold of our understanding is not between human and animal, but rather between humanity and animality. As Jorge Luis Borges notes, “we are ignorant of the meaning of the dragon in the same way that we are ignorant of the meaning of the universe, but there is something in the dragon’s image that fits man’s imagination, and this accounts for the dragon’s appearance in different places and periods”.

Thacker Eugene (2006). “Cryptobiologies”. In: “Organicities” [online node]. Artnodes. Iss. 6. UOC. [date of citation: dd/mm/yy]. <http://www.uoc.edu/artnodes/6/dt/eng/thacker.pdf> Issn 695-595

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Eugene Thacker

Assistant Professor at the school of literature, Communication and Culture, georgia Institute of technology (Atlanta) eugene.thacker@lcc.gatech.edu
Assistant Professor at the school of literature, Communication and Culture (georgia Institute of technology, Atlanta). his research interests include cyberculture, media studies, science studies, biomedicine and biotechnology, science fiction an

The Erasure of Technology in Cultural Critique

by

Belinda Barnet

Isaac Asimov once suggested that it would make far more difference in our everyday lives if the automobile had not been invented than if Einstein had failed to formulate the theory of relativity (Hansen, 2003: 1). Theory and technology are very different things. Likewise, language and technology are very different things. According to US critic Mark Hansen, technology should be assessed according to its concrete experiential effects, not just its symbolic or cultural significance; it is more than just an effect of language.

This is a tall order, because we have little to draw upon in taking such an approach: contemporary critical theory treats technology as a trope or representation rather than a physical reality in the world. The “machine” is not just a metaphor for a particular technology, but for technology itself. And at a deeper level, this metaphor enframes technology within a semiotically constituted field. One could be forgiven for thinking that contemporary critical discourse on technology ‘begins and ends with a critique of language’ (Lovink, 2002: 295). In his new book Embodying Technesis, Hansen calls this perspective ‘the machine reduction’, or the putting into discourse of technology.

Hansen has a powerful argument. According to him, twentieth century discourse on technology – from Heidegger to Derrida and beyond – comprises an ever increasing ontic turn; a fixation with technology as material support for the more pressing account of subject-constitution. We have erected language as the irreducible background for understanding technologies, and in light of this, more recent critics like Donna Haraway and Sandy Stone have deftly reduced the significance of particular technologies to the impact they have on ideology and subject-constitution. Technology as a material artifact disappears in a puff of signifiers. As Hansen sees it, such critics assert the primacy of the material over the theoretical, and yet they engage in a pervasive culturalist assimilation of technology, claiming that technology doesn’t exist outside of the discourse in which it is embedded.

It’s a serious charge, and although the argument has its problems, it deserves to be elaborated. In her introduction to the book, Katherine Hayles admits that although she has her reservations about such broad claims, ‘Hansen’s project fulfills an important role that could not be accomplished in any other way’ (Hayles, 2003: viii). It takes the argument into the high-ground of theory and ‘uncovers the moves by which technology is not just embedded in language but erased by language’ (Hayles, 2003: viii). In other words, it clears the ground; it allows us to ask what technology might be outside of its embeddedness in social discourse. What exactly is technology outside of our own language and thought processes? So although I will be critiquing this argument, I wish to acknowledge its contribution: Hansen has clearly articulated this question and established it as both ‘important and legitimate’ (Hayles, 2003: ix).

Hansen’s own answer, unfortunately, is to abandon the systemic-semiotic approach in its entirety. I will be arguing that this is to nullify our project in advance, especially in relation to new media: the technology is literally built on symbolic logic and a cybernetic methodology. Insofar as it trades exclusively (and again, literally) in images and symbols, transient puffs of phosphor invested with meaning, our experience of it is entirely mediated by representation. Now is not a good time to set up camp outside of discourse. In order to retain this reflexivity, to retain what Derrida calls a ‘politics’ in relation to the image, I will be arguing that we must articulate these technologies as they exist in a dual space: they exist at once as representations and as material opacities. This statement seems obvious, almost trivially true – yet Hansen has constructed it as a choice. We approach technology through language, or we approach it through the body, as a prelinguistic experience; it would seem we must take sides.

But first let us understand Hansen’s argument. I will do this by exploring in detail one small (but pertinent) example of this apparent erasure of technology: Derrida’s sacrifice of technological materiality in his book on machines and on forgetting, Archive Fever. This book is important not simply, or not only, because it has inspired a recent critical sojourn into technology and memory; but also because in it Derrida offers his first major statement on the impact of electronic media on our embodied lives. Hansen claims that this statement exemplifies Derrida’s deeper assumption: the homology of language and technology.

Derrida, Thought and Technology Freud’s model of the human memory as outlined in his 1925 essay, A Note Upon the Mystic Writing Pad, has always been a touchstone for critical excursions into the relationship between thought and technology. But there has been a heightened interest in it of late. This is due in large part to Derrida’s  (re)reading of the essay in Archive Fever, where he focuses on Freud’s recourse to a machine metaphor for the mind. In this book, he highlights Freud’s tendency to slip from seeing the machine as an analogy for the psyche to his vindication of it as the actual structure of the psyche.

This slip is no typo, holds Derrida: it is an admission. Machines like the one Freud tropes for the human psyche can represent the psyche precisely because they embody it; technology is always already under our skin. The boundary between thought and technology retreats upon inspection:‘The machine – and consequently, representation – is death and finitude within the psyche’ (Freud, 1971: 14).

The tendency to problematise the dissociation between thought and technology has always been at the heart of deconstruction. But Derrida’s textualisation of Freud here locates technology inside thought as a relative interiority: memory is a prosthesis of the inside. This means that it is no longer possible to distinguish technology from human memory; both are forms of archivisation, and both are forms of that most intimate technology, writing.

Herein lies Hansen’s charge: in reducing ‘technology [to] a form of memory, or more exactly, its enabling supplement’ (2003: 146), it is erased by language. In the next section we will explore this movement in more detail.

Archive Fever: a Freudian Impression The evolution in the Freudian oeuvre, argues Derrida, has witnessed an increasing convergence between psyche and its technological analogues. From ‘the Sketches up to the Beyond, from the Mystic Pad and beyond’ Freud has had problems staying within the realm of metaphor, and there seems no limit to this problematic of the impression (Derrida, 1996: 27). Everywhere it is writing machines.

This tendency, claims Derrida, becomes explicit in Freud’s short essay on the mystic pad. Here Freud mobilises a seemingly innocent metaphor for the human psyche – a child’s writing toy called the Wunderblock.

This is a slab of resin or wax with a thin, transparent sheet laid over it, which is secured to the slab on the top end without being fixed to it. The sheet is itself divided into two – the “upper layer is a transparent piece of celluloid; the lower layer is made of thin translucent waxed paper. (Freud, 1971: 229, cited in Tofts, 1998)

To write on the Wunderblock, one scratches the surface of the cover-sheet with a stylus, and lifts it to erase the marks. Importantly, traces are always left on the slab of previous inscriptions, just as marks are left on the Unconscious; the wax slab is the writing space of that most radical form of forgetting, repression. When the covering sheet is lifted, these partial, hieroglyphic inscriptions remain on the slab underneath, and they influence all future inscriptions. Freud obviously intends to mobilise this as a metaphor for the psyche, but what Derrida highlights is his tendency to shift into a literal reading (Tofts, 1998: 61).

Freud begins this essay with a common description of writing as an external technology, a supplement to the human memory:

If I distrust my memory… I am able to supplement and guarantee its working by making a note in writing. In that case the surface upon which the note is preserved is as it were a materialized portion of my mnemic apparatus, which I otherwise carry about with me invisible. (Freud, 1971: 227)

The problem with writing, however, is that it is limited in its storage capacity. The ultimate memory machine would be unlimited in that it would allow for both preservation and erasure at once – a difficulty that is overcome by the Wunderblock. What this model allows to be thought is a writing surface that preserves and erases, but erases in a special way – it maintains traces of old inscriptions. For Freud, the mystic pad is an apt and useful analogy, but it remains a metaphor; at some point it must come to an end. The originality of Derrida’s reading, claims Hansen, lies precisely in his rejection of this Freudian restriction: ‘For Derrida, the mind-machine analogy is not simply one analogy among others but… the analogy that founds the psychic system as such’ (Hansen, 2003: 143).

According to Hansen, this is why Derrida pursues four sentences in the essay, where Freud ‘is inclined to press the comparison [with the Wunderblock] still further’:

I do not think that it is too far-fetched to compare the celluloid and waxed paper cover with the system Pcpt.-Cs. and its protective shield, the wax slab with the unconscious behind them…[t]his agrees with a notion I have long had about the method by which the perceptual apparatus of our mind functions, but which I have hitherto kept to myself.

(Freud, 1971: 231)

But now it has been said, claims Derrida, by the father of psychoanalysis. Memory is the original palimpsest, and comes before speech; it is a prosthesis of the inside. Memory is now a relative interiority, and technology a relative exteriority. For Derrida, this opens a universe of problems; not least among them, where is the real, lived memory? If memory is a prosthesis, a writing machine, then these tracings on the “wax slab” augment perception before perception even appears to itself.

There is no lived memory, no originary, internal experience stored somewhere that corresponds to a certain event in our lives. Memory is entirely reconstructed by the machine of memory, by the process of writing; it retreats into a prosthetic experience, and this experience in turn retreats as we try to locate it. But the important point is this: our perception, and our perception of the past, is merely an experience of the technical substrate. It is a writing with traces, a writing of traces.

It is only by creating a prosthesis of human memory like this, Hansen claims, by fetishising the philosopheme of memory, that Derrida can ‘replace the disjunction between technology as a thing-in-the-world and lived human memory with relative exteriority (the technology of writing) and relative interiority (thought as writing)’ (Hansen, 2003: 126). And textual structures being what they are – always already technological – it is not much of a leap to reduce technology to thought itself, as Hansen observes of Derrida in Of Grammatology.

So where does this leave the assemblage of steel and plastic that I am typing on and into at this moment, in its material specificity? According to Hansen, it has disappeared. Technology remains a process of archivisation, of writing: it is a function within thought. For this reason, Hansen charges that Derrida’s work on the relationship between thought and technology ultimately reinstates the cognisant, thinking subject as the tribunal through which we judge (and create) technology.

Technological exteriority is subsumed back into the thinking subject; it has become language. And according to Hansen, this tendency has been inherited by contemporary critical theory: ‘Whether acknowledged or not, the Derridean motif of the closure of representation serves as the philosophical basis for current forms of cultural studies that privilege representation as the raw material for analysis’ (Hansen, 2003: 123).

Technology Beyond Semiotics? A Critique of Hansen But before we dismiss Derrida’s work as irretrievably on the side of semiotics, we need first to understand what is at stake, what we might lose by remaining inside what Hansen calls the ‘systemic-semiotic framework’.

As Hansen sees it, if we treat technology as a language and not a physical thing in the world, we lose the ability to mark out its concrete experiential effects. Technology disappears in a puff of signs; it disappears back into the thinking subject. This is an important point. What Hansen is after, as Hayles observes, is a theory for the ‘process of embodied reception – of reception as embodiment – that culminates in a nonrepresentational experience of physiological sensation’ (Hayles, 2003: vii); a radical project indeed, and one that Hayles sympathises with.

This is why Hansen explores Benjamin’s work on Baudelaire’s poetics, in which Benjamin develops the idea of material interventions or “shocks” to the human nervous system that operate below the level of the neocortex, below the level of conscious experience; the idea is to bypass language and cognition altogether. Hansen wants to think technology as something that happens in its sensory immediacy, as something that happens across the body. This is an approach which is very difficult to take without appealing to a pure outside of language, without creating a choice between material experience (even if it is in the form of prelinguistic “shocks”) and consciousness.

The approach, of course, is not exclusively Hansen’s: it has been happening for quite a while in the realm of queer theory, as Brigham observes (2002: 3). For over a decade, theorists such as Judith Butler and Elizabeth Grosz (not to mention Kate Hayles herself, in the field of science studies) have been seeking a way to theorise the impact technology has on our bodies below the level of representation – and perhaps Hansen could learn from what has been happening there. For if we go too far in the direction of non-reflexive experiential immediacy, we end up with a subject who exists outside of discourse: an embodied, engaged and sensual position to be sure, but also a non-critical one. The prelinguistic subject is mute.

For feminist discourse in particular, this abandonment of reflexivity is critically akin to bioligism or naturalism. It ‘silences and neutralises the most powerful of theoretical weapons, the ability to use patriarchy [against] itself’ (Grosz, 1995: 57). The same may be said for technology, and in particular new media technology. For although Derrida’s work focusses on language, it has much to offer us in approaching a technology which, like it or not, actually does structurally operate on the level of mathematics, binary logic and iterability, and most importantly whose major currency is the seriated image. Computer science evolved out of cybernetics, systems theory and information theory – theories which undoubtedly privilege information as a ‘disembodied’ entity (Hayles, 1999), but theories which have nonetheless become embodied as technical artifact.

The archive exists, as Derrida observes only ‘by virtue of a privileged topology’ (Derrida, 1996: 3); it cannot function without a substrate or without a residence. For computer-based new media, this substrate is invested in a systemic episteme: the ‘content’ must translate itself through several layers of code, ROM and microcode as serialised information, a quantity which also has its origins in the science of cybernetics. By definition and in practice, new media (and here I mean computer-based new media) must be machine-readable. This means that the user must also follow articulated rules for interaction and retrieval, a ‘behavioural logic’ that the machine might understand: as anyone who has used a computer will attest, this means that things must be done in a certain order and according to a certain logic, a logic which shapes our experience in advance. On both a technical and an experiential level, new media is inextricably invested in a systemic episteme.

This is why I am arguing that if we wish to retain a politics in relation to the medium, then now is not a good time to discard the systemic-semiotic framework. There is work to be done – work which would be nullified in advance if it neglected the basic structure of the technology it is aimed at, and work which could not be done from the perspective of non-reflexive experiential immediacy. Much as I sympathise with Hansen’s project, a theory based on prelinguistic ‘shocks’ will tell us nothing about what happens across a computer screen.

Derrida, in fact, would complicate our understanding of systemic ‘reflexivity’ here in relation to technology. Firstly he would say that reflexivity is not simply, or not only, a question of control and intelligibility. It is always and also about our relationship to the future. There is a dual aspect to reflexivity: it creates an intelligible future for us on the one hand by mastering the archive, the past, and on the other it ‘is also mastery of a future neutralised by calculation and foresight’ (Derrida, 2002: 103). It’s a matter of degree. So for critical practice, this means developing an awareness of the limits and dangers of reflexivity, but also understanding the dual movement of the impulse itself. Secondly, in response to Hansen (and myself, I’m afraid to say) Derrida would complicate what is essentially an artificial choice between reflexivity and non-reflexivity. We can’t just choose to be non-reflexive in our critical practice: not only is this denying ourselves access to language and to the future, but as humans we cannot but approach the world through the technologies of our own perception. So ‘the imperative distinction is not between reflexivity and nonreflexivity, but rather between two different experiences of reflexivity, to the extent that both are tied to technics’ (Derrida, 2002: 103).

Reflexivity aside, there is a more serious problem with Hansen’s reading, which I have only been hinting at; for those of you who are familiar with Derrida, it will have been obvious from the very beginning. Hansen mobilises an enabling opposition between materiality and language, materiality and cognition: he brackets off a repressed materiality and poses it as a question. (Why else would he offer as an “answer” the critical pursuit of physiological shocks and precognitive sensation?) And among other theorists, he directs this question at Derrida – who, of course, complicated the opposition long ago in Of Grammatology. Hansen well and truly acknowledges this, and in fact points out that this very obfuscation has been inherited by contemporary critical theory and used to erase embodied experience: but in all honesty it isn’t wise to come at Derrida with an argument for the radical disjunction of thought and materiality. Where is this precognitive human? And if we could even find it, would it be human any longer?

This is an attempt to demarcate an embodied, “natural” human from its various prostheses: language, representation and technology. To demarcate the human body from what Stiegler calls its ‘epiphylogenetic’ memory – the memory which makes us human. This approach has numerous complications, one of which is that we are left with an essentially anthropocentric conception of technological dynamics (Stiegler, 1998: 143) that denies the role of technology in constituting this human in the first place. Surely Hansen would not want to wind up here. All human action has something to do with tekhne, is after a fashion tekhne (Stiegler, 1998: 94); we cannot but approach the world through the technologies of our own perception. Humans invent themselves within language and technology; they invent themselves within technics. Stiegler’s work actually radicalises Derrida’s logic of the supplement; his critique of this position would run even deeper.¹

I should note at this point that the ‘erasure of technology’ in cultural critique actually has a much larger place than just Derrida in Hansen’s book. As he sees it, the problem is endemic to twentieth century discourse on technology. Hansen surveys the work of Heidegger, Deleuze and Guattari, Lacan and even (oddly) Kittler; the argument is the same, at times repetitive. As Brigham writes:

Science studies, deconstruction, psychoanalysis and (I know no appropriate label) Deleuze and Guattari all loom up, only to be beaten back, beaten down by a very similar series of strokes. The hero proves himself in trial with a serially returning repressed. (Brigham, 2002: 1)

When you are a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Derrida, however, is afforded a special place in Hansens’ work: he is like the Grandpappy of the machine reduction.

But Hansen does have a point – a point that I feel needs to be made in relation to deconstruction. At first blush, technology seems to disappear into thought itself. It would seem that the rich experiential impact of technology remains abstract and difficult to grasp, that we are left with no means for articulating its impact on our embodied lives. So there are problems with Hansen’s argument, particularly its appeal to a nonrepresentational, precognitive or prelinguistic state. However, there does appear to be a reduction taking place in Derrida’s work, and Hansen has articulated this problem quite clearly.

So I am calling for a different reading: a reading which does not create a choice between text and materiality, between text and technology – but at the same time, a reading which does not depend entirely on cognition and representation, which does not dissolve materiality into thought. I want to keep the power of the systemic-semiotic approach, but to acknowledge materiality too. And I believe that the elements for this can actually be found in Derrida’s work, particularly his interviews with Bernard Stiegler.

Derrida and Technological Exteriority There is no archive without a place of consignation, without a technique of repetition, and without an exteriority. No archive without an outside. (Derrida, 1996: 11)

First let us briefly recall the main elements of deconstruction’s antilogocentric side. This recall is as much for my own benefit as for yours; it will help me in elaborating Derrida’s concept of exteriority as it relates to the archive.

Derrida argued that speech provides the illusion of self-presence, for both thought and meaning (1974, 1978). This is a precondition for the self-cognisant subject, a subject who can control his or her own behaviour, who can control his or her own speech, who can attribute self-identical meanings to the world and to the text. It emphasises an instrumental relationship to language: language as a mediating thing, a thing that makes the world intelligible.

For if the world can be captured and spoken, if it can be pinned down, then language itself can be exempted from the destabilising effects of time. It can, in a sense, transcend time; it can control the flux. At the very least we would ‘know what the property of “my life” is, and who could be its “master”’ (Derrida, 1993: 3); the world and its workings might become transparent to us.

Allow me to simplify this further for my purposes. As human beings, we fear time and ephemerality, and seek to stem the flow (a concept which is a recurrent theme in Derrida’s work, and also the basis of archive fever, the pack-rat illness we are all afflicted with). Given this basic desire, and

the ephemeral status of sounds that constitute speech, logocentrism tends to neglect the physical side of language, the exteriority of language. Although the logocentric exclusion of exteriority is extremely important… Derrida pays astonishingly little attention to it… and exteriority almost disappeared as an element of antilogocentrism from subsequent forms of deconstructive practice. (Gumbrecht and Pfeiffer, 1994: 394)

Which again, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, just that “exteriority” as either a world of reference or a mediating thing (the instrumental dimension of technology) is dependent on its being opposed to the subject as a coherent figuration. As Derrida puts it, there is no archive without an outside: we can’t comprehend or grasp it any other way. Stanford theorist Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht has in fact erected this exteriority as a central point of reference for a new field of critical inquiry – the materiality of communication, which is also the title of his book (1994). We will explore this in more depth presently.

For now, we should realise that exteriority is always and also what logocentrism seeks to bracket off from consciousness and control; it’s a dual movement. So Hansen’s task has already been acknowledged, albeit not thoroughly explored, by Derrida. The erasure of the physical world is one of the symptoms of logocentrism: an expression of our fear of time, ephemerality and aging, our fear of death.

So let me begin again with Derrida, and with the archive. And begin at that very simple level, the concept of our own death. For it is this question and this awareness that mark us as human, as humans that create archives and modes of capture: ‘the difference… between the animal and the human is the relation to death’ (Derrida, 1993: 44). It is this question and this awareness that expresses itself through language and technology – the desire to pin down and make the world intelligible.

In fact for Derrida, the primary function of technology is to increase intelligibility, to create representations. Technology, and by extension the archive itself, are machines for making representations. So technology is always and also an expression of this desire to demarcate and capture the physical world. Through technologies we produce meaning in and for the world, and we attribute these meanings as self-identical to the world. Which is, of course, an illusion. When Derrida says our experience of the world is an experience of the technical substrate, and that this substrate is death and finitude within the psyche, this is (at least in part) what he means (1996: 14). In fact, the first question we must ask of the new ‘teletechnologies’ as Derrida calls them, is what new forms of intelligibility they make possible (Derrida and Stiegler, 2002: 105).

So technology makes possible representation, as Hansen observes of Derrida. But at the same time, and this is something Hansen does not adequately acknowledge, it is not itself representation. As Derrida puts it in Echographies of Television: the ‘machine itself is constituted outside the field of meaning that it makes possible’ (Derrida and Stiegler, 2002: 108). And it is due to this constitution that the machine makes no sense in and of itself – or more precisely, we can make no sense of it. This must apply even if, for us, technology exists to augment knowledge or to increase intelligibility:

That which bears intelligibility, that which increases intelligibility, is not intelligible – by virtue of its topological structure…. hence a machine is, in essence, not intelligible. No matter what, even if it makes possible the deployment or production of meaning. (Derrida and Stiegler, 2002: 108)

This is a topological structure which not only cannot be known, but which moves according to a different rhythmics, with its own contingencies and resistances. This does not mean that technology is at base irrational or obscure, that it is an absurdity: ‘it is not negative, but it is not positive either’ (Derrida and Stiegler, 2002: 108). What it means, if we push upon Derrida slightly, is that technologies qua material artifacts are not themselves constituted within a systemic-semiotic field. This is a paradox, but it is not a paradox that denies the material world – just our capacity to render it transparent.

Gumbrecht reads this exteriority literally – as a material opacity. Literally, the physical side of language, the point where materiality intervenes in the process of observation. Accordingly, he defines the materialities of communication as ‘the totality of phenomena contributing to the constitution of meaning without being meaning themselves’

(1994: 398). This is phenomena which, Derrida would contend, technology also seeks to deny, for they interfere with representation at the same time as they enable it.

For us and also for Gumbrecht, this is not the same as sanitising and keeping separate an essence of technology from technology itself (what Derrida charges Heidegger with), or appealing to a pure outside of language. Exteriority cannot be demarcated from perception, cannot be captured or known, cannot be bracketed off from representation or realised as a pure presence, much as we would like it to. Nor can it be posed as a question. It is neither objectifying nor objectifiable. Yet as Stiegler suggests, it influences our experience of both the technology itself and the event it produces, by ‘participating in the construction of sense’ (Derrida and Stiegler, 2002: 109), by shaping it in advance.

For critical practice, as we shall explore in a moment, this means it is important to recognise the duality of technology. That is, to recognise that technologies exist, for us, at once as representations and as (essentially unintelligible) material opacities. This is what I am arguing here; that along with process, we must also think the stases, states, halts and structures that constitute particular technologies and consequently the events they produce. As Derrida is fond of saying, along with process, we must also think singularity (see Derrida and Stiegler, 2002: 76, 77, 39).

Hansen does acknowledge Gumbrecht’s contribution in his book – acknowledges it as a way of introducing chance and contingency into the heart of meaning, marking an internal limit to the traditional hermeneutic project (2003: 225). But he passes over Gumbrecht’s main argument: that although at first blush Derrida seems to deny the physicality of technology, this is simply not the case. Derrida is not arguing that technology qua technical artifact is a soup of signifiers: just that language can never capture or locate it as a world of reference. We might still contend that this makes it very hard to articulate the materiality of technology as theorists: it is frustratingly out of reach. But this would be to state the obvious: we can never articulate something which exists outside the field of meaning it makes possible. As I see it, this means we need to accept that our understanding of technology will always be partial – which is to say, it will always be human.

My contribution here has been to strengthen Gumbrecht’s argument by drawing on some of Derrida’s later work in Echographies and Archive Fever, and to confirm that although exteriority has disappeared from subsequent forms of deconstruction, it has always been there. I have been arguing that Derrida understands technology to have a dual nature: it makes possible representation, but it is not itself representation. And due to this very constitution, not in spite of it, technology as a material thing is not accessible to us. Yet at the same time this very constitution shapes our experience of particular technologies and the events they produce.

In another rhythm, in another style… If you have read this far, you may now be asking how this perspective might contribute to our understanding of technologies as they exist in the world. What might we do with this temporal dimension, this ‘material opacity’ that we can neither locate nor demarcate from perception? I feel our task as media and cultural theorists, if we wish to retain the explanatory power of semiotics and systems theory, is to articulate the specificities of particular technologies as they exist in a dual space. As I explained earlier, this means recognising that technologies exist, for us, at once as representations and as (essentially unintelligible) material opacities. We cannot understand them any other way. But at the same time, we should recognise that this exteriority is precisely the point where materiality intervenes in the process of representation. This statement seems obvious, yet it has been neglected by contemporary critical theory. Hansen has highlighted the need for such a perspective, and we must acknowledge the importance of this contribution; yet ultimately he constructs a choice between physicality and representation, as though it were even possible to make such a choice.

Technological exteriority cannot be bracketed off and posed as a question. In particular, it cannot be bracketed off from the human being as a creature that invents itself within technics (Stiegler, 1998: 134, and for Stiegler, as for Derrida, language is a form of technics). Technology infiltrates agency, it interferes with the way in which we formulate the question – and not just in Haraway’s sense of the polymorphic, semi-permeable cyborg. This is not a metaphor for subject-constitution, or more precisely, this is not a choice. These machines have always been here, they are always there ‘even when we write by hand, even during so-called live conversation’ Derrida says, with a television camera pointing in his face, transmitting an image that is always already edited and reconstituted around the globe as a ‘live’ broadcast (Derrida and Stiegler,

2002: 38). We must at once mark this constraint and also respect the specificity of particular technologies as they produce our experience.

Allow me to use a personal example. Even as I am recording my reflections here on the question of technological exteriority, even as each letter falls across the page, the media itself is forcing these reflections to yield to its own constraints (to paraphrase Stiegler concerning broadcast television, Derrida and Stiegler, 2002: 103). Each letter is being translated through several layers of code, ROM and microcode, each movement carefully shaped in advance so that the machine might understand it. This experience is inextricably invested in a systemic episteme – one which has its own behavioural logic.

Derrida uses the example of broadcast television in Echographies – and precisely because at the moment that he is speaking this particular technology is forcing his reflections to yield to its constraints. One might criticise him for obsessing over these constraints in the interview, to the neglect of answering Stiegler’s questions.¹ Yet I think he does answer them, in the process highlighting that we must mark the way in which any answer is necessarily shaped in advance. So what does Derrida say about the impact of this technology on our embodied lives?

With broadcast television, he says, there is this initial experience of the technology, this feeling that we are ‘overcome by a total image, impossible to analyze or break into parts’ (Derrida and Stiegler, 2002: 59). We are spectralised by the shot, captured or possessed in advance (117). This is due in part to our essential relation of technical incompetence to its mode of operation, ‘for even if we know how it works, our knowledge is incommensurable with the immediate perception… we don’t see how it works’

(Derrida and Stiegler, 2002: 117), due to our lack of total mastery or reflexivity. As explained previously, there is always something that is neither objectifying nor objectifiable in our experience of technology. But it is also due to the fact that we receive this across our body, that we are caught by the ‘living image of the living’, by what appears to be most live: ‘the timbre of our voices [in this interview], our appearance, our gaze, the movement of our hands’ (Derrida and Stiegler, 2002: 38). Broadcast television creates (or more precisely, restitutes) a living present: it is mimetic, it mimics a living flux.

Hansen also explores the mimetic aspect of the moving image, through film as opposed to broadcast television. He does this by mobilising Benjamin’s revalidation of the term Erlebnis. Erlebnis “experiences” the other – including the technological other – through mimesis, the registry of the other in the body rather than in representation. So film, as a mimetic rendering of its object, has a direct sensory appeal that undermines and precedes understanding, and in this respect it poses for Benjamin and Hansen the potential of bypassing interiority and representation (Brigham, 2002: 3). This “living flux” is experienced through the body.

But at the same time, and this is something Derrida feels it is important we should mark, this living present is not at all live, this total image is in fact nothing of the sort. There may be a certain ‘sensual’ immediacy in its reception, but it only appears this way: images can be cut, fragment of a second by fragment of a second…. There is also, if not an alphabet, then at least a discrete seriality of the image or images (Derrida and Stiegler, 2002: 59).

This blissfully embodied experience has been created for us; it is in fact a restitution of what is dead. This interview, Derrida points out, is a very ‘singular, unrepeatable moment, which you [Stiegler] and I will remember as a contingent, breathing moment, which took place only once’ (38). Yet it will be reproduced as live, mimicking this sensual moment, this unfolding now, always already serialised, reconstituted, cut and translated, to be reinscribed infinitely in other frames or contexts. We should not lose awareness of this future. For if there is selectivity, there is also forgetting. Derrida marks this ‘restitution as a living present of what is dead’ as a specificity of broadcast television (39).

So Derrida in fact calls for more reflexivity in relation to our experience of television. And in particular, for an awareness of the selective nature of this all-embracing “mimetic” experience – in other words, a politics of the archive, of memory. He would not agree that we should focus on experiential immediacy: we should mark its impact, but this is not the end of our task as theorists. As I have been arguing in relation to computer-based new media, now is not a good time to set up camp outside of discourse.

With respect to broadcast television, ‘we must learn, precisely, how to discriminate, compose, edit’ (Derrida and Stiegler, 2002: 59), and if not then we must at least develop an awareness that this living present is in fact reconstituted. What has been lost or forgotten in this experience, what has been written out? Without this understanding, we not only lose our critical positioning (as queer theory has discovered), but we lose our relationship to the future. People should know that in the creation of this event there was a politics of memory, a particular politics, and that this is in fact a politics (Derrida and Stiegler, 2002: 63). I put this question to Hansen – do we really want to lose this politics in relation to the image? This is the price of abandoning the systemic-semiotic approach.

Derrida approaches the materiality of technology through the concept of the archive. Regardless of the way in which one relates to a particular media, its materiality – its specificity – is always already at work by virtue of a privileged topology, not simply structuring the memories it contains, but literally creating them. He argues that we need to develop an awareness of this process, to at once recognise and articulate the politics behind particular technologies, the politics of the archive. At another time and in a different rhythm, I would like to address the specificities of new media technology through the concept of the archive.

But I will leave you now with Derrida’s call to think the archive. We are given this imperative to think technology in its dual aspect, both as an embodied experience and as a politics ‘concretely, urgently, every day – both as a threat and as a chance’ (Derrida and Stiegler, 2002: 65).

Notes

1. Derrida thinks the relation between humans and technics in terms of an ‘originary supplementarity’. Stiegler’s thinking may be seen as a radicalisation of this concept. Whereas Derrida is concerned to articulate the tension in terms of a “logic”, here elaborated as the logic of the archive, Stiegler is concerned to articulate this logic in terms of its historical differentiations in different technical systems. The logic will only appear in its differentiation; the ‘interiority is nothing outside of its exteriorisation’ (Stiegler, 1998: 152). Stiegler, too, would be useful to any approach to a materiality of technics.^{^}
2. Richard Beardsworth, for one, believes Derrida ‘consistently resists’ answering one of Stiegler’s questions (1998: 3).^{^}

Bibliography

• Beardsworth, Richard. ‘Towards a Critical Culture of the Image – J. Derrida and B. Stiegler, Echographies de la télévision’, Tekhnema 4 (1998), http://tekhnema.free.fr/4Beardsworth.html
• Brigham, Linda. ‘Further Notes from the Prison House of Language’, The Electronic Book Review 12 (2002), http://www.electronicbookreview.com/reviews/rev12/r12bri.htm
• Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology, trans. G. C. Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974).
• ____. Aporias, trans. T. Dutoit (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993).
• ____. Archive Fever: a Freudian Impression, trans. E. Prenowitz (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996).
• ____. Demeure: Fiction and Testimony, trans. E. Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002).
• Derrida, Jacques and Stiegler, Bernard. Echographies of Television, trans. Jennifer Bajorek (Oxford: Polity Press, 2002).
• Freud, Sigmund. ‘A Note Upon the Mystic Writing Pad’, in The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 19, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1971).
• Grosz, Elizabeth. Space, Time and Perversion: The Politics of Bodies (St. Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1995).
• Gumbrecht, Hans and Pfeiffer, Ludwig (eds). Materialities of Communication (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994).
• Hansen, Mark. Embodying Technesis: Technology Beyond Writing (Chicago: University of Michigan Press, 2003).
• Hayles, Katherine. ‘How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies’, in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
• ____. ‘Foreword: Clearing the Ground’, in Mark Hansen, Embodying Technesis: Technology Beyond Writing (Chicago: University of Michigan Press, 2003).
• Lovink, Geert. Uncanny Networks: Dialogues with the Virtual Intelligentsia (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002).
• Stiegler, Bernard. Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus (Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press, 1998).
• Stone, Allucquere Rosanne. The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996).
• Tofts, Darren. Memory: Trade, a Prehistory of Cyberculture (North Ryde: Interface Books, 1998).

(Barack Obama)

Another excellent article from C Theory  see original at: C Theory

The Obama Code: Ghosts and Monsters in the Visual Datasphere

Carolyn Erler

Introduction

“Historic” was the headline word of November 5th, 2008, the day Barack Obama became the next President of the United States. The international embrace of Obama was, of course, partly a response to his skin color and the historically racialized structure of American society, which for five centuries denied some or all of the rights of Americans not properly male, propertied and of Anglo-European descent. [1] In America and throughout the world, the idea of “race” is inescapably knotted with visible markers such as hair and skin color. Color stands in metonymic relation to a vast complex of stories, mythologies, images, emotions, scientific discourses and genomic sequences — visible and invisible — of what we know and define as race.

The concept of “color” is much easier to represent in pictures than in words, especially given the complexity of racial discourse in the United States; this may be why some voters who strongly opposed the new leader used the graphics software on their computers to express their concerns. Picturing is a form of speech, and in the context of an affluent, technologically advanced society that allegedly protects its citizens’ right to free speech, voters use the Internet as a public arena for broadcasting messages of political dissent. Visual messages are valued for their ability to deliver high extra-linguistic impact with little or no exact meaning.

Many of these messages act as pictorial fictions. [2] Like the depictions of Catholic saints, the images rely on visual cues to reference well-known narratives from history (Obama-Hitler), science fiction (Obama-Alien), horror (Obama-Monster) and religion (Obama-Antichrist). The jumble of images and fragmented chat on the Internet suggests that McLuhan’s age of multisensory “electric” media has successfully brought post-literacy and re-tribalization to Western societies. [3] The latter is particularly evident in far right wing Internet communities that view Obama in light of the antichrist legend. As my analysis of some of the most virulent imagery will show, McLuhan’s view of the media as extensions of the nervous system can be rethought as even more deeply marked in the flesh, not just as extensions of the body, but as the body — the genomic body — itself. [4]

To explore the idea of genomic embodiment in Internet images of Barack Obama, I will examine how visual codes, Hebrew lettering and imaginary genetic sequences loop into and through one another in a seemingly post-literate, biotechnological blur. In this richly vague space, where something primordial appears to be happening, I find trace elements of Arthur Kroker’s posthuman universe in which “the missing mass of God touches the full-spectrum dominance of cyberculture.” In Kroker’s view, this touch is of a magnitude to bend space-time relations into a new fabric “simultaneously mythic and historical, past and future, technocratic and religious.” [5] The images in this essay are considered in light of this theoretical possibility: a dimensional infolding of visible spaces becoming touched by God.

Categories of Digital Collage Images of Barack Obama

Digital pictorial fictions of Obama tend to fall into general categories, give or take some inevitable slippage. In every category, color stands in part-whole relationship to race, and visual cues refer the viewer to cautionary tales culled from history, popular culture, science fiction, horror and religion. The purpose in this section is to show that visual conflations of Obama with infamous characters extend beyond antichrist, and that such conflations reflect more than the individual viewpoints of their makers. Each image relies upon the momentum established by the others to hold its place in a pattern of figures enmeshed in the mytho-historical fabric of western culture.

One of the great cautionary tales of the 20th century was the rise of Hitler and the Nazi Party in Germany. The instantly recognizable visual metonym for this horror is Hitler’s toothbrush mustache. To transpose Hitler’s mustache onto an image of Obama is to metaphorically resurrect Hitler as an American Black supremacist with secret ambitions to ethnically cleanse the U.S. of its White population as punishment for the sins of slavery. Like the theory of paranormal activity in which ghosts are said to emanate from emotional memories or imprints in physical matter, here the “slave revolt” mentality seems to resonate in the fibrous mass of some bodies, communities and landscapes. [6] Racist extremists like the followers of Lyndon LaRouche share an invisible membrane with poltergeists. The molecular cluster of part-objects spin in vanishingly small registers. This could be considered evidence that myth and history, past and future, are indeed infolding or being folded by God at the threshold of an emerging universe, as Kroker suggested.

Another figure is Obama the Joker, which owes its visual style to Heath Ledger’s portrayal of Batman’s arch-nemesis in the 2008 crime thriller film, The Dark Knight. According to the Joker’s fictional biography, the villain fell into a river of chemical waste that left him with bleached white skin, red lips, green hair and a permanent evil grin. [7] The (deceased) movie star Ledger managed to make the Joker’s face both horrifying and sexy, thanks to the celebrated make-up artist, John Caglione Jr.. But Barack Obama’s metaphorical dip in the river of chemical waste creates an e/affect quite different from Ledger’s. Uncannily wandering large painted lips on the face of the President impart a different monstrosity that punctures the comic book surface and exposes a temporal dimension of violence beneath. Here, the Joker falls through a wormhole or river of filth carrying stubbornly unerased traces of minstrelsy, white face, black face, racial drag, tap-dancing and the arts of feigning stupidity, signifying slavery and subordinated status to the propertied white man. Here, on the necropolitan vaudeville stage, they are doing the genomic cakewalk.

Some images are like slivers crafted for the sole purpose of lodging under the thin skin of white bleeding heart liberals. Rush Limbaugh, king of right wing talk radio, gave the members of the white working class a voice, a perspective and a mission to rise up against liberal humanist multicultural tolerance. Other radio and cable television personalities such as Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly and Ann Coulter heightened the rhetoric and coarsened the language, so that by shock value alone, they became mainstream. This is what Thomas Frank, in his book What’s the Matter with Kansas? called conservative populism: the shift from traditional politics based on class struggle to polarization around cultural issues such as abortion, gay marriage and Affirmative Action. The object of conservative ire moved from “fat cats” to “liberal elites,” creating a dilemma for organized labor. [8] Progressive labor leaders have struggled to woo the white working class, the unionized blue-collar workforce in the northern states in particular, into a coalition of organized Latina/o workers and politicized young people. [9] But race in the United States remains a potent wedge issue, one that Republican strategists and conservative voices have exploited for votes since the culturally volatile late 1960′s.

Journalist David A. Love traces the Obama-Joker image to President Obama’s September 9th, 2009 healthcare address to Congress, during which a Republican House Member shot out of his seat with a shout of “You lie!” Love situates the congressman’s outburst within a growing secessionist movement in the United States:

some people say they want their country back. The issue for them is whether the states have a right to be free from Black rule in the form of Barack Obama. This includes states’ rejection of healthcare reform . . . and calls for investigations into the President’s citizenship. [10]

On Blackcommentator.com, Love warns of the formation of a coalition of Republican lawmakers, corporate lobbyists, right wing militias, “birthers” (people who believe Obama was not born in the United States, therefore unqualified to be President), anti-immigration Minutemen (citizen militias who “guard” the U.S.-Mexican border), White nationalists, “tea baggers” (wealthy conservative tax protesters); and right-wing talk radio hosts. Mainstream cable news networks — most noticeably FOX News, but CNN also — collude in the creation of the illusion of “objective” news, activating a cycle of center-to-(right wing) fringe ideology that serves to empower relations among and between (sometimes) odd bedfellows. It is not enough for one group to despise Obama; the hate must wear many masks and must thrive between veils of consciousness, where a kind of undead “Masque of Blackness” incessantly plays on. [11] As Zizek wrote, “the ‘real’ evil of late-capitalist social disintegration has to be transposed into the archaic magic-mythic evil of ‘monsters’.”‘ [12]

In the magic-mythosphere, the gentle folklorists of the future may possibly discover that Carl Jung had a point: the concept of synchronicity as “an acausal connecting principle” — of ideas, affects, events, images and stories traveling at the speed of light in virtual systems — is more relevant than the old “real.” [13] If the space-time fabric has truly been ruffled, then has not the classic Newtonian principle of causality surpassed itself, leaving an excess of fields of possibility with permeable boundaries and fluctuating content? In response to God’s touch, to know is to be co-emergent with groupings of psycho-physical phenomena that make fleeting sense, through sense-making, acausal, analogical chains or semi-transparent planes of signification: an open system.

A different category of images sets out to blur the semiotic distance between the President and a primate. The catalog of visual artifacts representing people of African descent as half-human, half-primate is too weighty and torn to do adequate justice in the space of this essay. One example of an artifact of this kind would be the anatomical sketches of the 16th century Dutch physician, Petrus Camper (1722-1789), who created scientific charts portraying the evolution of man. As art historian Michael Harris pointed out, the most developed humans on the chart were modeled after Greek sculptures, while Africans were associated with primates in an earlier stage of evolution. [14] Camper’s charts circulated widely throughout Europe and the Americas, remaining in pedagogical use in medical schools into the late nineteenth century. This racializing iconography is the subject of Joseph Pugliese’s essay, ‘Demonstrative Evidence’: A Genealogy of the Racial Iconography of Forensic Art and Illustration, which examines visual conventions “that constitute the contemporary production of caucacentric forensic body charts” and their ideological effects. [15] Forensic charts served as a kind of visual discourse to support theories and practices of scientific racism, social Darwinism and eugenics, which set out to prove the existence of white racial superiority.

The Obama-Space Alien category of images has a decidedly more playful morphology. The idea of what aliens look like has changed over time, according to a 1997 study of media representations and drawings by alien abductees under hypnosis in clinical settings. [16] Of particular interest here of is the 1961 abduction of Betty and Barney Hill, a married couple living in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Barney Hill, who was of Ethiopian descent, sat on the local board of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission. Betty Hill, who was Caucasian, was employed as a social worker. Theirs was the first widely publicized case of alien abduction in the United States. The couple told the press of driving home from a vacation late one summer night. An enormous flying saucer landed in the road directly in front of their vehicle, forcing them to a halt. Barney Hill stepped out of the car to investigate. According to Barney’s testimony, aliens telepathically summoned him, Betty and their small dachshund, Delsey, to board the spacecraft. As for what happened next, the Hills could not recall except through fragmented memories, recurrent nightmares, and strange bodily sensations. They claimed to have “missed time” due to the episode. [17] A fascinating visual artifact of the Hill case is a photograph of Barney Hill at home in his study (see Figure 1). In the photo, Barney Hill rests his hands on the family television set. Prominently placed on top of the television is what appears to be a model 16th century Dutch or Portuguese slave ship. A large map of the stars spans the wall behind the clustered figures. Viewed through Jung’s acausal connecting principle, the figures in the photograph could be said to resonate webs of pasts and futures, myths and histories, bodies and technologies. The webs overlap in the invisible, though patently there, space-time that the Hills claimed to had lost.

Figure 1: Barney Hill, (circa 1966). Photograph in the University of New Hampshire Library, Milne Special Collection.

The categories discussed so far have borrowed from the cultural stockpile of iconic murderers, idiots and madmen, and transposed them onto the figure of Barack Obama. Clumsy or sleek, absurd or revolting, all are politicized, racialized images freighted with contested histories and silences. Into this niche step the Devil and his friends, the devouring monster and the clever antichrist. They have one trait in common: a penchant for promiscuous mixing. Mary Shelley’s monster mixed the human with the machine, creating a lonely beast. The Golem of Jewish folklore mixes animate and inanimate matter; in Psalms 139:16 of the Bible, the word golem is used to refer to a raw, embryonic or incomplete substance. [18] In the classic narrative, the Golem is formed and brought to life by a rabbi through the performance of rituals and Hebrew incantations. As the Golem grows, it becomes more violent, turning on gentiles and in some versions of the story, killing its own creator.

In visual art, the mother of the most monstrous of all media is collage. Its children — montage, sampling, morphing — all inherited the traits of promiscuous mixing and matching of texts and images from disparate sources to form a new thing. Therefore it is fitting that makers of racist imagery choose this medium; ironic that they cannot broadcast their products outside of biotechnological systems of digitally coded communication. Do the picture-makers feel themselves becoming-monstrous too?

The pictorial fiction chosen for close analysis in this study is Obama-antichrist. The star of popular novels and movies, antichrist is monstrous, alien, sub-human, insane and violent — traits found in all of the other categories. The antichrist narrative is embedded in Christian religiosity, and has enjoyed a resurrection, so to speak, with the rise of popular Evangelical Christianity in the mid-twentieth century. As the Joker is to Batman, so the antichrist is to Jesus. As the imaginary embodiment of evil, he is the causeless cause of all things wrong in the world. The appropriate response to social problems such as injustice and inequity is not to organize and strategize for action, but to prepare oneself and ones loved ones for the coming Rapture — the return of Jesus Christ. During the Rapture, followers of Jesus who have thoroughly given themselves to Him will be taken up to heaven. Unbelievers and inadequately prepared Christians will be left behind to fend for themselves in a world ruled by antichrist, who metes out gruesome punishments such as crushing people like grapes in a winepress. [19]

The personification of evil is a load-bearing principle, structurally essential to the mental architecture of western ethics. One has to have an embodiment of evil to have an embodiment of good in Jesus Christ. The existence of one demands the existence of the other, perpetually engaged in an epic struggle for dominance. To provide a contrast, the concept of evil in Buddhism — if there is one — is the result of greed, anger and the delusion of a separate self. Suffering gives rise to samsara, the transmigration of souls through earthly lives. Nature gives and takes life. Even on the cellular level, the evil of decay and death exists side by side with the good of growth and health. [20] This difference, which underscores the structural necessity of evil in western thinking, is why the politicized, racialized depiction of antichrist is considered a matter of importance in this study. It is, in effect, a way to peer inside the modern Anglo-American Christian mind.

Prophecy Literature

The Late Great Planet Earth by Hal Lindsey and C. C. Carlson was the first Christian prophecy book to break through to mainstream audiences. [21] Known for its hair-raising vision of the future, Lindsay wove biblical prophecy with contemporary events to create a believable scenario of World War III erupting in the Middle East. The book rode a wave of interest in mystical writings until Bantam, the first major press to publish a work of Christian prophecy, picked it up from a small Christian publishing house for release in a mass market edition.

Lindsey’s book paved the way for the 16-book Left Behind series by Pastor Tim LaHaye and ghostwriter Jerry Jenkins. [22] The phenomenal success of the series (65 million copies sold) led to feature articles in The Atlantic, The Nation, Time, Newsweek, Rolling Stone and others. [23] Three of the books — Left Behind, Left Behind II: Tribulation Force, and Left Behind: World at War – became feature films released by Cloud Nine Pictures. In addition, the novels were adapted for children in a forty-book series that has sold over 11 million copies to date. [24]

Secular scholars have probed the political and economic implications of Left Behind and the flourishing prophecy movement in the United States. Monahan and Strombeck argue that the books further a narrow conservative agenda while simultaneously reinforcing themes of markets and privatization. [25] Marks of the Beast by Glenn Shuck evaluates the role of apocalypse in contemporary evangelical America and beyond. Shuck views Left Behind as a series of “adjustment narratives” helping modern prophecy believers make sense of the complexities of network culture and political issues while preserving their collective evangelical identity. [26]

Marina Warner’s Engines & Angels: The Culture of Apocalypse examines apocalyptic imagery in film and digital media, contending that technology’s realism captures viewers in webs of seductive illusion where themes of intolerance, vengeance and excessive violence are incessantly played out. [27] Born Again Ideology: Religion, Technology, and Terrorism by political scientist Arthur Kroker, and works by Stephen Pfohl elaborate technological aspects of the movement from a posthuman perspective and are key to the analysis presented in this article. [28]

This article examines a specific set of visual angles and cultural relations that are implied but not directly addressed in Shuck, Pfohl and Kroker’s philosophical investigations of technology in evangelical communities. It interrogates the visual-social aspects of images made by some socially conservative white evangelicals during the 2008 presidential campaign season. More broadly, the article sets out to develop the visual cultural aspects of current scholarly discussions of prophecy belief and apocalypse. This is considered necessary because of the predominance of images in digital communication technologies. As McLuhan predicted, Gutenberg Man is in decline, communication has freed itself from the linearity of print technology; the eyeball has become the coveted object of marketing techniques designed to grab the attention of distracted consumers. [29] Images have become the locus of competitive sales and advertising because of their ability to pack a high density of information into a small area and elicit emotion from viewers. Researchers of visual persuasion maintain that the “implicit nature of visual argumentation and the relative lack of social accountability which images enjoy in comparison with words,” means that pictures can be used to make claims that would be unacceptable if spelled out verbally. [30] The audacity of some of the Obama images would appear to bear this out.

These developments led the popular forecaster, John Naisbitt, to announce the arrival of “The Postliterate Future” in an article for The Futurist. [31] As evidence, he cited the decline of newspaper sales, the rise of graphic novels and the U.S. government’s release of its 9/11 Report in comic book form. [32] If book retail sales are an indicator of the ascendency of the visual, Naisbitt may be correct: in 2003 the graphic novel genre had outsold every other book category for four years running, according to Micha Hershman of Borders. [33] Part of the popularity of the genre must surely be its adaptability to movie and video game formats. A 2008 article in Publishers Weekly reported a 12% rise in sales in graphic novels from 2006, figures that were boosted exponentially by crossover hits such as Stephen King’s bestseller, The Dark Tower. [34]

Scholarly work has kept apace of the trends, giving rise to the overlapping sub-disciplines of visual culture, visual semiotics, and visual rhetoric. Scholarship in these areas has created what Moriarty and Barbatsis called, “a plane of creativity constituted by lines of flight,” or new perspectives on the study of visual communication. Contributing to these perspectives are scholars from professionally oriented fields such as art education and mass communication, and offshoots of more settled disciplines such as cultural studies and information systems. As Moriarty and Barbatsis explained, the emerging field of visual signification tends to mix and match pieces that have disciplinary roots in different areas but have no unifying theory or methodologies of their own. Furthermore, the multi-centric field “does not operate in a traditional linear or language-centered reality. Rather it displays . . . an approach that is both organic and dynamic.” (35) It is in this spirit of organic multidisciplinarity that I present my research on images that conflate Barack Obama and the figure of antichrist.

Images conflating Barack Obama and Antichrist

Late in the 2008 presidential campaign, digital images depicting Barack Obama as a false messiah, a space alien, a terrorist, a beast, a fascist dictator and antichrist began to surface on the Internet. “Satan’s Son” by Grim Reaper (see Figure 2) was one of many such images. Grim Reaper’s digital prints appeared on the artist’s Flickr photostream, grimreaper131349 (http://www.flickr.com/photos/9665916@N08/3293462424/) alongside other works, some expressing political views and some not. According to the profile, Grim Reaper is a male who lives in the city of The Colony, Texas. According to publicly available data on The Colony, 77.5% of its residents self-identify as Non-Hispanic Whites (compared to the 63% national average according to the US Census Bureau, 2008) and estimate their median household income at $78,272 — substantially above that of Texas as a whole ($47, 548). [36] The significance of this data will become more apparent in the next section, where White evangelical racial perceptions and attitudes are seen to correlate with self-segregation. [37]

Figure 2: Grim Reaper, “Satan’s Son,” digital print (2008): http://www.flickr.com/photos/9665916@N08/3293462424/ (accessed 21 July 2009).

Another type of image is The Passion of Obama, (Figure 3) posted to Perspectives of a Coffee Conservative (coffeeconservative.com) on April 24, 2009, by Richly Chheuy. It is representative of a genre that emerged when Barack Obama became a serious contender for the U.S. Presidency. The iconography draws from stock (traditional or popular) Christian imagery while supplanting Obama for the Jesus figure, presumably to mock Obama (but not Jesus). The visual rhetoric and juxtaposition of symbols suggest a belief that Obama is a false messiah or antichrist.

Figure 3: “The Passion of Obama,” digital image posted by Richly Chheuy (26 April 2009): http://coffeeconservative.wordpress.com (accessed on 15 August 2009).

The theme of apocalypse, and its coded anxiety, was fully exploited by the McCain campaign with its ad, The One (see Figure 4). Released online in early August 2008, the ad depicts McCain’s democratic rival as a self-appointed messiah. A rapid sequence of images merges the figure of Obama with Charlton Heston in the role of Moses in the 1956 Cecil B. DeMille technicolor extravaganza, The Ten Commandments. A musical crescendo matches the iconic image of Heston’s arms flung wide for the Red Sea to part in obeisance to God’s covenant with the children of Israel. The sequence glows in a magical incantation of images, sounds, meanings and code: the very conditions for the strange, spectral visage of an Obama-golem to appear, eerily similar to the egomaniacal antichrist figure of Nicolai Carpathia in the Left Behind novels. As the glow quickly fades, the heroic figure of Charlton Heston as Moses dissipates into Heston the hair-brained right wing zealot and celebrity chairman of the National Rifle Association, ground zero of America’s fixation with guns and post-9/11 “panic insecurity.” [38]

According to a Time magazine article by Amy Sullivan, the creator of The One ad was Fred Davis, a top media consultant for McCain with close ties to the Christian Coalition. [39] Visually, the ad evokes the cover art of the Left Behind books and DVDs (see Figure 5). At several points in the ad, an ominous orange glow surrounded by dark clouds fills the screen. In one frame, the image of an otherworldly staircase appears in a golden mist. Similar meteorological signs and Hollywood-inspired visual devices appeared in digitized images contemporaneously with The One ad.

Figure 4: “The One” McCain political campaign ad, digital video (2008).

Figure 5: Cover art for the film, Left Behind DVD package (United States: Cloud Nine Pictures, 2000).

Warner and other historians of religion have written about the propagandic use of apocalypse narratives by authoritative regimes of the past. [40] In 2008, political marketers and their media conglomerate partners manipulated apocalypse symbols and codes of the Left Behind brand to mobilize grassroots evangelicals to vote for the secularist McCain in the November election. [41] With data showing that 63% of self-identified Christians in the U.S. believe in the rapture of the church, “that is, that before the world comes to an end, the religiously faithful will be saved and taken up to heaven,” and that about one-quarter of the U.S. population believes that the book of Revelation, with its fantastic descriptions of the Whore of Babylon, Armageddon and The Last Judgment, is the absolute Word of God, it is a wonder that political marketers and strategists did not exploit the “irrational core of the apocalypse narrative” any more than they did. [42]

White Evangelicals on Race in America

Scholars believe that the figure of antichrist in Revelation was a reference to its author’s (known as “John the Divine” or “John the Revelator,” c. 100 C.E.) contemporary, Roman Emperor Nero. This never stopped inquiring minds from searching for antichrist elsewhere. In the court of public opinion, Frederick II, Peter the Great, Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin, members of the British royal family, a whole series of Popes, the United Nations, John F. Kennedy, Bill Gates and many others have stood accused. [43] So it should not come as a surprise that Barack Obama became a suspect.

Most people have heard Barack Obama’s story and are aware of what made him a unique choice for president of the United States. As Dee Dee Myers wrote in a 27 January 2009 blog for Vanity Fair:

His black African father, white American mother, Muslim middle name, and childhood spent partially in Asia make him more than the 21st-century embodiment of the classic American melting pot; his story makes him accessible to people the world over who might see in his life a few scenes from their own. [44]

These same biographical details are what make some white evangelicals uneasy about Obama. [45] As Jonathon Alter wrote in Newsweek, four decades of political strategizing designed to exploit racial fears among rural, southern and working class Whites (Nixon’s “Southern Strategy”) had primed voters to react negatively to racial cues (such as the darkened face of Willie Horton). [46]

Michael Emerson and Christian Smith’s book, Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America, studied the racial attitudes of white evangelical Protestants through a national telephone survey of 2,500 self-identified White evangelicals and 200 face-to-face interviews. [47] Applying the sociological concept of “cultural tools” to interpret their findings, Emerson and Smith concluded that individuals using theologically rooted evangelical cultural tools tended to: “(1) individualize and minimize the race problem, (2) assign blame to Blacks themselves for racial inequality, (3) obscure inequality as part of racial division, and (4) suggest unidimensional solutions to racial division.” [48] Furthermore, focus on the primacy of personal relationships prevented individuals from recognizing the structural and institutional dimensions of race in economic, political, educational, social and religious systems. Political opposition was more likely to be expressed in personal attacks on a candidate than in organized activity. Emerson and Smith found that anti-structural views and racial isolation were self-reinforcing. Thus the most racially isolated white evangelicals, “think and act as if [racial] problems do not exist.” [49]

African American and Native American evangelicals in Emerson and Smith’s study took a very different view of racism. To these respondents, the “monster of racialization is Satan, who delights in division and oppression,” the researchers reported (see Figure 6). [50] One Native American participant spoke of racism as an evil spirit or poison passed on through generations. This monstrous Other of the white Christian imaginary is vividly encoded in Fra Angelico’s (1425-30) image of Satan in The Last Judgment and other works of western art.

Figure 6: Fra Angelico, The Last Judgment (detail), tempera on panel (1425-30). Museum of San Marco, Florence.

The Ghost of Leviticus

The end of the world in John the Revelator’s vision is a world of Levitican law turned upside-down. The Old Testament book of Leviticus, which describes the duties of the priests in the tribe of Levi, legislated laws of cleanliness that are grossly transgressed in Revelation. [51] In Leviticus 26: 1-2, the authors command:

You shall not make idols for yourselves; you shall not erect a carved image or a sacred pillar; you shall not put a figured stone on your land to prostrate yourselves upon, because I am the LORD your God.

In Revelation 13: 14-15:

…[the beast] deluded the inhabitants of the earth, and made them erect an image in honour of the beast that had been wounded by the sword and yet lived. It was allowed to give breath to the image of the beast, so that it could speak, and could cause all who would not worship the image to be put to death.

Levitican laws governing sexual conduct forbid intercourse with animals “as to make yourself unclean with it;” no woman should “submit herself to intercourse with a beast: that is a violation of nature.” [52] In Revelation, the polymorphous beast in 13: 1-2 “was like a leopard, but its feet were like a bear’s and its mouth like a lion’s,” implying unholy parentage. The Whore of Babylon in Revelation 18: 2-3 is described as “a dwelling for demons, a haunt for every unclean spirit, for every vile and loathsome bird. For all nations have drunk deep of the fierce wine of her fornication.” These rules matter to the Tribe of Levi because in their mattering, in their material construction of the bodies of women and the blood traits of children of Levi, lies the boundary between who is of the Tribe and who is Other. The matter is one of identity and patriarchal control.

The text of Leviticus explains the need for strict holy laws in terms of transgressions:

The people who were there before you did these abominable things and the land became unclean. So the land will not spew you out for making it unclean as it spewed them out. For anyone who does any of these abominable things shall be cut off from his people. [53]

In her classic analysis of the abominations of Leviticus, anthropologist Mary Douglas questioned why certain objects, acts and relations should be categorized as clean and others as unclean: “Why should the camel, the hare and the rock badger be unclean? Why should locusts, but not all, be unclean? What have chameleons, moles and crocodiles got in common that they should be listed together?” [54] To Douglas, the general principal of cleanness in animals was that they conform fully to their class. Species that were imperfect members of their class, “or whose class itself confounds the general scheme of the world,” were judged unclean. [55]

Douglas’ insights help make sense of the racial fear felt in some white evangelical communities at the time of the 2008 presidential election. As Douglas noted: “Holiness requires that individuals shall conform to the class to which they belong. And holiness requires that different classes of things shall not be confused.” [56] A man of European American and African descent with a Muslim-sounding name whose intelligence defies demeaning stereotypes might be perceived as “of a class [that] confounds the general scheme of the world” by some racially isolated whites. [57]

Postings to the Barack Hussein Obama is the Antichrist Facebook group support this hypothesis. According to group’s moderator, Gino Borri: “Proof: It says in the bible, he will come as a man mounted on a white horse. Translation: His mother is a white woman with 6 african (sic) husbands. White horse? Or white whore?” [58] Later in the posting, Borri echoes a lapel button sold at the 2008 Republican state convention in Texas — “If Obama is president…will we still call it the White House?” — (see Figure 7) — but refashions the question into a statement of proof that Obama is antichrist: “Obama would be a ‘black’ president in the ‘white’ house (satan is described as black in attribute and who seeks to take over the white mansion known as heaven).” [59] On a similar note, the moderator of the web group, First Light Forum, called Obama a “Satanic Son of a Socialist Slut.” [60]

Figure 7: Button sold at the Republican state convention in Texas (2008): http://thedailyvoice.com/voice/2008/06/tx-gop-convention-button-if-ob-000774.php (accessed on 21 July 2009).

Obama’s parentage clearly triggered a racist reaction deeply rooted in American society. In an article on genetics and race in horror films of the 1950s, Gonder noted that throughout the 1950s and 1960s, magazines such as Parents and Better Homes and Gardens published articles about the influence of harmful genes, specifically called “black genes.” [61] In 2008, anti-miscegenation fantasies returned to the public eye. During the presidential election, a pipe-fitter from Mobile, Alabama told a New York Times reporter, “He’s (Obama’s) neither-nor. He’s other. It’s in the Bible. Come as one. Don’t create other breeds.” [62] A retired textile worker told the same reporter: “God taught the children of Israel not to intermarry. You should be proud of what you are, and not intermarry.” [63] These and other comments reflect the “one drop” rule of the old racialized order: a single drop of “black” blood in a person of otherwise “white” racial identity rendered the person legally black. [64]

Douglas’ analysis of Leviticus also helps us to read The Revelator’s end-times horror as an implosion of the strict holiness laws, a traumatic cultural memory bursting through the linguistic surface. Trauma, as Katherine Hayles discussed in relation to digital code, overwhelms the human ability to process it. “The characteristic symptoms of trauma — dissociation, flashbacks, re-enactments, frighteningly vivid nightmares…” are, as Hayles sees them, a “powerful resource through which new communication channels can be opened between conscious, unconscious, and non-conscious human cognition.” [65] In 2008, some prophecy believers analogically linked the momentum of the Revelation narrative to the juggernaut of Barack Obama’s candidacy, as an image used in a CNN segment on Obama clearly and purposefully suggested. For one flickering second, the face of a dark-skinned man with his mouth open like the maw of a beast fills the television screen in a flow of images prepared for the segment (see Figure 8).

Figure 8: “Obama the Antichrist?” Segment aired on CNN (15 August 2008): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQoV_Ngl-G8 (accessed on 21 July 2009).

In a sense, Leviticus could be said to haunt the unconscious regions of digital code and (human) interfaces. As a ghost, its authoritative demands for precise forms of social behavior re-enact the traumas of boundary transgression inherent in the human-cyber interface. Haraway’s statement that technologies are not mediations between bodies but are rather organs, “full partners,” genes in the sense of computer code in the sense of techno-morphogenetic interflow, expands virally by analogy. Terror of the “unclean,” miscegenated body and the stain of “black genes” in white blood may be the repressed of the white evangelical mind, multiply encoded in the distributed networks of digital ecologies. [66]

As Strozier noted in his study of fundamentalism and violence, religious paranoia is inherently apocalyptic. [67] Fueled by rigid dualistic thinking, the believer’s tendency to construct the other in apocalyptic terms can culminate in violent fantasies and actions. According to Strozier, the actual psychological illness of paranoia is rooted in trauma that is beyond the sufferer’s reach to understand. Projective fantasies of pure evil embodied by some racial or ethnic group can escalate into a drive to destroy it by any means necessary, including assassination and genocide, as seen in 20th century genocidal projects in Germany and Yugoslavia. At a symbolic level, the deployment of “beastly” apocalypse imagery in response to the perceived racial threat posed by Barack Obama seems to parallel the trauma of persecution informing the author of Revelation‘s monstrous visions during the bloody reign of Roman Emperor Nero. The same trauma reverberates in the LaRouche Youth Movement, whose pictorial fictions of Obama as Hitler fling the viewer into a reaction-formation of perpetual crisis and flight, an uncanny return of the ancient Jews fleeing captivity, persecution, and the unbearable oppression of the monstrous Self/Other (see Figure 9). [68] This is the flashpoint where meaning implodes: an illuminated dust cloud of affect envelops its sudden, absolute disappearance. Thus the 2008 presidential election brought forth images, “embedded in the collective self, capable of assuming virulent form in moments of historical and social crisis.” [69] And as we have seen, digital images expressing this virulence were in no short supply.

Figure 9: Anti-Obama poster displayed by LaRouche Youth activists at the Arlington Heights post office on August 19, 2009. Published in the Arlington Heights, Illinois online newspaper: http://www.arlingtoncardinal.com/category/politics/protests/ (accessed on 05 December 2009).

In “The strange language, ‘genish’”

The first scene of the 1999 end-times thriller, The Omega Code, takes place in the study of an aged Rabbi. [70] The eye of the camera closes in on the desktop, showing the viewer a Hebrew manuscript and a DNA strand drawn on parchment. In the same frame is a scroll, crumpled and yellowed with age (see Figure 10).

Figure 10: Robert Marcarelli, director, The Omega Code motion picture (United States: Providence Entertainment, 1999).

The camera angles up to a computer screen displaying Hebraic text — presumably the bible — in a revolving double helix (see Figure 11). As the plot of the film thickens, the audience is told: “Bible is a holographic program to be read in three dimensions.” In this program, prophetic bible code merges with DNA to produce, “The genetic code of the universe.” Here it is useful to know The Omega Code was co-written by Hal Lindsey, co-author of The Late Great Planet Earth. Lindsey was an outspoken voice in the “Obama is Antichrist” crusade during the 2008 presidential campaign, revising and nuancing his position only after Obama became President. [71]

It is no coincidence that best-sellers with titles like The Bible Code by Michael Drosnin (also author of The Bible Code II: The Countdown), Cracking the Bible Code, Bible Code Bombshell, The Apocalypse Code — the list goes on — flooded the market during the decade and a half when the Human Genome Project (HGP) determined “the complete sequence of the 3 billion DNA subunits (bases), identified all human genes, and made them accessible for further biological study.” [72] A contagion of affect took hold of the notion of controlling of the mechanisms of life by “cracking” a code. Everyone became an armchair code breaker, and out of the confused excitement came the image of the Bible-encoded DNA spiral (see Figure 12). [73]

Figure 11: Robert Marcarelli (Director), The Omega Code motion picture, Bible-infused double helix screen shot (United States: Providence Entertainment, 1999).

Figure 12: Michael Drosnin, “DNA Spiral / In adam the model, template,” Bible Code II: The Countdown. (New York: Viking–Penguin, 2002): http://www.prophecy.worthyofpraise.org/Biblecode/codekey20.jpg (accessed on 21 July 2009).

The Bible-encoded DNA image brings to mind Marcia Ian’s analysis of Christian commodity culture and objects invested with transcendent affect by their users. As Ian sees it, such objects blur the boundary between sacred and secular, reiterating, “the original ‘blurring’ putatively achieved by the Incarnation” — of God in the flesh body of Christ. [74] Like a paradoxical surface that has only one side and one boundary: “Christ is…the nonexistent point where one side of the möbius strip becomes continuous with the other; he is the immanent transcendence of material nature become the signifier of culture-American culture.” [75] Similar to the möbius strip and the three-dimensional double möbius, the DNA double-helix is composed of two intertwining spirals, symbolic of natural and spiritual understandings of environment and cosmos. [76]

The double-helix in the work of vernacular artist and lay minister Dean Thomas Coombes is, as Brian Massumi might put it, a topological figure in continuous transformation in and out of visual manifestations. [77] These manifestations do not stop at the picture’s edges: they extend, loop and envelop Coombes himself in mutual reciprocity. Life escapes and returns through the symbology of code. In “DNA: The ‘Book of Life,’” Coombes describes DNA as: “a large instruction book, approximately 800 Bibles long, written in the strange language ‘genish,’ which consists of only four letters (A, C, T, G).” [78] In “The Serpent Overlapping Bel, that Stretches from his Crown to his Foot,” the spiral enveloping the human is at once scroll, serpent, lamp, lightning and double-helix (see Figure 13). Another image in the “Bel” series shows an erratic red spiral breaking free of the figure, like a bolt of de-pressurized intensity bursting out of Coombes’ serial renderings of Bel (see Figure 14). [79]

Figure 13: Dean Thomas Coombes, “The Serpent Overlapping Bel, that Stretches from his Crown to his Foot,” crayon on graph paper, Baal Bible Code (2008): http://www.bible-codes.org/Cherub-balance-bible-code.htm (accessed on 21 July 2009).

Figure 14 Dean Thomas Coombes, “The Lightening (variation),” crayon on paper, Baal Bible Code (n.d.): http://www.bible-codes.org/Cherub-balance-bible-code.htm (accessed on 22 July 2009).

Bel or Baal is an Old Testament figure who appears most dramatically in The Book of Isaiah, which corresponds historically with the Jew’s post-exilic period. As one of the titles of Marduk, the main Babylonian deity, Bel represents chaos or, as the translators of the The New English Bible put it, the “empty void.” [80] Bel refers to the archaic gods and foreign cultural influences that threatened Israel’s solidarity and unique monotheistic covenant with God during the period of exile in Egypt. In Isaiah 46:1, the author promises the downfall of the Babylonian gods:

Bel has crouched down, Nebo has stooped low:
their images, once carried in your processions,
have been loaded on to beasts and cattle,
a burden for the weary creatures;
they stoop and they crouch;
not for them to bring the burden to safety;
The gods themselves go into captivity.

The “processions” referred to in this passage were the liturgies of Babylonian cultic festivities, among them the New Year’s celebration, which included “processions of their images.” [81]

In the United States, the two dominant, seemingly incompatible myths of creation are Christian creationism and naturalistic explanations of the Big Bang and Darwinian evolution. In recent years, evangelical Christianity’s creationism has been repackaged as “intelligent design,” ostensibly to make the idea more palatable to school boards and curriculum publishers. To philosophers of science, Christianity’s anthropomorphic account is non-credible, despite the syntheses sought by progressive theologians such as David Ray Griffin and Joseph Bracken. [82] Tellingly, the cover art of Griffin’s influential book, Two Great Truths: A New Synthesis of Scientific Naturalism and Christian Faith, depicts a spiral. Yet scientific theory and philosophy of science have moved closer to conceptualizations of cosmic self-organization, emergence philosophy and biocomplexity theory, which view matter and creative force as inherently fused. [83]

It is pleasant to imagine the shattered world becoming whole again, returning to the primordial motherland, where proteins, like the basic elements of signification, link and de-link in statistically impossible ways. Freud wrote in The Uncanny of unrequited love and the homesick longing for return to the womb.

As soon as something actually happens in our lives which seems to confirm the old, discarded beliefs we get a feeling of the uncanny; it is as though we were making a judgment something like this: ‘So, after all, it is true that one can kill a person by the mere wish!’ or, ‘So the dead do live on and appear on the scene of their former activities!’ and so on. [84]

The desire to become “genish,” and then, like the mark of red crayon in Coombe’s drawing of Bel, to escape containment by way of lightning bolt or other supernatural force may also be the desire to embrace and release the uncanny familiar.

Popular theories may consider or even welcome God’s return to the world, assuming this God will resemble Bel more than Yahweh. They do not anticipate the arrival of the full mass of a wrathful, selfish or jealous God, a God whose very presence precludes the possibility of making images or anything that cuts up the wholeness of consciousness. Yet the closed posthumanist universe of Kroker’s vision may be in the process of already becoming iconoclastic; in other words, intolerant of things that stand still, it may trap spirits and crush them in small spaces as prisoners of inexorable entropy. The posthuman universe may yet be that space of spirit recovery. The terms of God’s return may demand nothing less than the unconditional release of time and space from representation: the scattering of dead cells in which evil itself reproduced.

Notes
——————-

[1] Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States: 1492 — Present (New York: HarperCollins, 2003).

[2] I am indebted to my doctoral student, Trey Shirley, for allowing me to use his term, “pictorial fiction.”

[3] Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extension of Man (London: Routledge, 1964).

[4] For purposes that will be explained in this essay, the “genomic body” and “race” are closely knit concepts. A 2005 research article in Science magazine explains that the genetic marker, SLC24A5, effects variation of pigmentation in humans. “The evolutionarily conserved ancestral allele of a human coding polymorphism predominates in African and East Asian populations. In contrast, the variant allele is nearly fixed in European populations . . . and correlates with lighter skin pigmentation in admixed populations, suggesting a key role for the SLC24A5 gene in human pigmentation.” Rebecca L. Lamason, et. al., “SLC24A5, A Putative Cation Exchanger, Affects Pigmentation in Zebrafish and Humans,” Science 310, no. 5755 (2005), DOI: 10.1126/science.1116238

[5] Arthur Kroker, “Digital Cosmologies,” in Critical Digital Studies: A Reader, ed. Arthur and Marilouise Kroker. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 344.

[6] Jeff Dwyer, A Ghost Hunter’s Guide to California’s Wine Country (New York: Pelican, 2008), 18. “Hauntings may be environmental imprints or recordings of something that happened at a location as a result of repetition of intense emotion. As such, they tend to be associated with a specific place or object, not a particular person.”

[7] Alan Moore and Brian Bolland, “The Killing Joke,” Comic Vine, http://www.comicvine.com/the-killing-joke/39-40503/ (Accessed on 14 November 2009)

[8] Thomas Frank, What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (New York: Henry Holt, 2004).

[9] Robert Borosage, “Bringing the White Working Class into the Progressive Majority,” Campaign for America’s Future (10 April 2008), http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/bringng-white-working-class-progressive-majority (accessed on 15 November 2009). This article is an excerpt of remarks delivered on April 9, 2008 at the Conference on a New New Deal in Washington, D.C., sponsored by the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute. Progressive labor organizations such as ASFCME (public employees) led by president Gerald McEntee, and the AFL-CIO, led by political director Michael Podhorzer, are among those who have tried to win over white working class labor. See also: George Packer, “The Hardest Vote,” The New Yorker 84, no. 32 (2008): 60. And: David Moberg, “Wooing Unions for Obama,” The Nation 287, no. 11 (13 October 2008): 20, 22-23.

[10] David A. Love, “Secesh 3.0: Fear of a Black President,” The Black Commentator (17 September 2009), http://www.blackcommentator.com/342/342_cover_col_fear_black_president.html (accessed on 14 November 2009).

[11] Virginia Mason Vaughan, Performing Blackness on English Stages, 1500-1800 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 65-67. Ben Jonson wrote the Masque of Blackness in 1603 for the Queen of England, who personally requested the court masque so that she and her ladies could pretend to be black Moors. Vaughan writes, “What is radical in Queen Anne’s request is her desire to use black pigment. Why, one wonders, would a Queen of England, six months pregnant, wish to appear in public, her face and arms coated with black grease? The answer may lie in the song that opens the Masque of Blackness, which was performed in the Banqueting House at Whitehall on 6 January 1605….” Jonson’s song has the lyric:

[N]ow honored, thus,
With all his beauteous race:
Who, though but blacke in face,
Yet are they bright,
And full of life, and light.
To prove that beauty best,
Which, not the colour, but the feature
Assures unto the creature.

In her analysis, Vaughan defers to the insights of one of the Queen’s biographers (Leeds Borroll), who noted that by using black make-up, Anne and her ladies “devised a structure in which she and her court became a spectacular presence in a glittering and politically symbolic social season.” The biographer added that courtiers in the audience struggled to discover who the ladies were under the blackface, although “with some effort they were knowable as ‘aristocratic ladies who are part of the golden world of the court’.”

[12] Slavoj Zizek, Violence (New York: Picador, 2008), 26-27.

[13] Carl G. Jung, Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle, trans. R. F. C. Hull (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973).

[14] Molly Davis, “Professor Explores Visual Imagery,” The Emory Wheel (29 October 2009), http://www.emorywheel.com/detail-pf.php?n=27581 (accessed on 02 November 2009).

[15] Joseph Pugliese, “‘Demonstrative Evidence’: A Genealogy of the Racial Iconography of Forensic Art and Illustration,” Law and Critique 15 (2004): 287-320.

[16] Joseph Nickell, “Extraterrestrial Iconography,” Skeptical Inquirer no. 21 (1997): 18-19.

[17] “Books: Testament for Believers,” (Review of The Interrupted Journey by John Fuller) Time, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,828455,00.html (accessed on 12 November 2009).

[18] For a scholarly interpretation of the Golem legend in Jewish folklore, see: Moshe Idel, Golem: Jewish Magical and Mystical Traditions on the Artificial Anthropoid (Albany, NY: State University of New York at Albany, 1990).

[19] Michael O. Emerson and Christian Smith, Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).

[20] For a comparative religion analysis, see: Peter Koslowski, ed, The Origin and the Overcoming of Evil and Suffering in the World Religions (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001).

[21] Hal Lindsey and C. C. Carlson, The Late Great Planet Earth (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1970). Also see: David Matthews, “Hal Lindsey’s Prophecies: A Study of The Late Great Planet Earth,” (1997), http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Agora/3958/hal1.htm (accessed on 20 June 2009).

[22] Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, Left Behind: A Novel of the Earth’s Last Days (Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 1995). See also: Jerry Jenkins, “From ‘Left Behind’ back to Jesus,” The Washington Post (05 February 2009), http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/guestvoices/2009/02/ from_left_behind_back_to_jesus.html (accessed on 10 July 2009).

[23] The series’ sales volume caused an extensive media buzz — and some serious journalism. See: Michael Gross, “The Trials of the Tribulation: In the ‘Left Behind’ Novels Things Get Very Bad — The Planet is Invaded by ’200 Million Demonic Horsemen,’ for Example, and That’s Before Armageddon and the Last Judgment,” The Atlantic Monthly 285 (2000): 122-128; Melanie McAllister, “An Empire of the Own,” The Nation 277, no. 8 (2003): 33-6; David Van Biema, “The End: How It Got That Way,” Time (01 July 2002): 46-7; David Gates, “The Pop Prophets,” Newsweek (24 May 2004): 44-50; Robert Dreyfuss, “Tim LaHaye — He’s the Best-Selling Author of Novels About the End of the World, but his Real Mark on the World May be Pushing George W. Bush Even Further Toward the Christian Far Right,” Rolling Stone (19 February 2004): 46-53.

[24] Leftbehind.com, “The Kids Series,” http://www.leftbehind.com/01_products/browse.asp?section=Kids (accessed on 24 June 2009).

[25] Torin Monahan, “Marketing the Beast: ‘Left Behind’ the Apocalypse Industry,” Media, Culture & Society 30, no. 6 (2008): 813-830. “In ‘Left Behind,’ the world economy may serve the interests of evil, but the apocalypse industry is thoroughly integrated with the capitalist economy and is amazingly lucrative. Media and networking technologies may be the tools of antichrist, but they are also the tools of the authors and the novels’ heroes.” Also see: Andrew Strombeck, “Invest in Jesus: Neoliberalism and the ‘Left Behind’ Novels,” Cultural Critique 64 (2006): 161-195. Strombeck argues that market capitalism and Christian Far Right ideology merge in the Left Behind narrative: “Neoliberalism emerges as humanity’s only protection against apocalypse; security and economic freedom work in flue coexistence with premillennialist theology.”

[26] Glen Shuck, Marks of the Beast (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 195.

[27] Marina Warner, “Angels & Engines: The Culture of Apocalypse,” Raritan 25, no. 2 (2005): 12-41.

[28] Arthur Kroker, Born Again Ideology: Religion, Technology, and Terrorism (CTheory Books, 2006), bai07: http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=546 (accessed on 02 October 2009). Also see: Steven Pfohl, Left Behind: Religion, Technology, and Flight from the Flesh (CTheory Books, 2006), lbh12: www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=553 (accessed on 1 October 2009).

[29] Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962). For information on “eyeball marketing,” visit www.eyeballmarketing.com. “We find your audience through our guerilla marketing tactics and target them through keyword coding, search engine registration, creative placement, banner swaps, text links, press releases, email, chatroom participation, newsgroup posts, and other permission marketing tactics.”

The view from academia, as articulated by visual culture theorist W.J.T Mitchell, is: “To live in any culture whatsoever is to live in a visual culture … As for the questions of hegemony, what could be more archaic and traditional than the prejudice in favor of sight? Visual has played the role of the sovereign sense since God looked at his own creation and saw that it was good, or perhaps even earlier when he began the act of creation with the divisions of the light from the darkness.” W.J.T. Mitchell, “Showing Seeing,” Journal of Visual Culture 1, no. 2 (2002): 165-181.

[30] Paul Messaris, Visual Persuasion: The Role of Images in Advertising (Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications, 1996), xix.

[31] John Naisbitt, “The Postliterate Future,” The Futurist 41, no. 2 (2007): 24-26.

[32] Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colon, The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006).

[33] Andrew D. Arnold, “The Graphic Novel Silver Anniversary,” Time (14 November 2003), http://www.time.com/time/columnist/arnold/article/0,9565,542579,00.html (accessed on 13 November 2009).

[34] Heidi MacDonald, “ICv2 Confab Reports 2007 Graphic Novel Sales Rise 12%,” Publishers Weekly (18 April 2008), http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6552534.html (accessed on 13 November 2009). This points out the circuitry between literature, comics, the movie industry, The Dark Knight, Heath Ledger’s portrayal of the Joker, white face, minstrelsy, racism, President Obama and those who accuse him of practicing socialism. Not so surprisingly, most of the circuit is controlled by Time Warner Media Group, which owns DC comics and graphic novels, the Batman franchise, Warner Bros. film studios (which released The Dark Knight), Warner Bros. video games, CNN, AOL, as well as marketing tie-ins and licensing agreements.

[35] Sandra Moriarty and Gretchen Barbatsis, introduction to Handbook of Visual Communication: Theory, Methods, and Media, eds, Ken Smith, Sandra Moriarty, Gretchen Barbatsis, and Keith Kenney (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2004), xxi

[36] Data on the cost of living, weather, median household income, house values and “Races in The Colony,” can be found at: http://www.city-data.com/city/The-Colony-Texas.html

[37] Emerson and Smith, 20.

[38] Kroker, 10. “Like Hegel’s vision of the owl of Minerva which takes flight at dusk, the God of the New Testament may have died in European consciousness in the age of progress precisely because a new incarnation of God, the God of the Old Testament, fusing a crusading politics of redemptive violence and a domestic tutelary of panic insecurity, was being born by way of the American political covenant.”

[39] Amy Sullivan, “An Antichrist Obama in McCain Ad?” Time (8 August 2008), http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1830590,00.html (accessed on 25 June 2009). “The ad was the creation of Fred Davis, one of McCain’s top media gurus as well as a close friend of former Christian Coalition head Ralph Reed and the nephew of conservative Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe.”

[40] Warner, 24. Also see: Leonard L. Thompson, The Book of Revelation: Apocalypse and Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), for an examination of the social conditions of the Roman Empire under which Revelation was written. Michael Standaert, Skipping toward Armageddon: The Politics and Propaganda of the Left Behind Novels and the LaHaye Empire (New York: Soft Skull Press, 2006) focuses on the political meanings of the Left Behind books in the context of Bush-era American empire. For a critical reading of the Book of Revelation and other parts of the New Testament through the postcolonial theoretical lens developed by Homi Bhabha, see: Steven D. Moore, “Empire and Apocalypse: Postcolonialism and the New Testament,” Biblical Interpretation: A Journal of Contemporary Approaches 16, no. 5 (2008): 516-518.

[41] John King, “Evangelicals Reluctantly Embrace McCain,” CNN (24 October 2008), http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/10/24/mccain.evangelical/index.html (accessed on 10 June 2009).

[42] A Pew study found: “…63% of self-identified Christians in the U.S. believe in the rapture of the church, ‘that is, that before the world comes to an end, the religiously faithful will be saved and taken up to heaven’”: Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life Ten Nation Survey of Renewalists (September — October 1996), http://www.ropercenter.uconn.edu/cgi-bin/hsrun.exe/Roperweb/pom/StateId/DyHUQIA7aj_0OZmkbM7ttwjqZZvAy-VTOX/HAHTpage/Summary_Link?qstn_id=1668397 (accessed on 27 June 2009).

Basing their information on the same Pew study, newspapers reported, “about one-quarter of the U.S. population believes that the book of Revelation, with its fantastic descriptions of the Whore of Babylon, Armageddon and The Last Judgment, is the absolute word of God.”

NBC News and The Wall Street Journal, “U.S. Public Opinion on Religion — Self-Described Born Again or Evangelical Christians,” (2009), http://www.ropercenter.uconn.edu/cgi-bin/hsrun.exe/Roperweb/pom/StateId/DyHFVAA7ua10O-VFbM7hRh3MZZvT_-3yN2/HAHTpage/Summary_Link?qstn_id=1737328 (accessed on 27 June 2009).

[43] Bernard McGinn, Antichrist: Two Thousand Years of the Human Fascination with Evil (New York: Harper Collins, 1994). Steven Pearson, The End of the World: From Revelation to Eco-Disaster (London: Robinson, 2006). Arthur Pink, The Antichrist, (Blacksburg, VA: Wilder Publications, 2008). Some churches have issued an official statement regarding their position on the antichrist. For example, see: Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod, “WELS Doctrinal Statement on the Antichrist,” (1959), http://www.wels.net/cgi-bin/site.pl?2617&collectionID=795&contentID=4441&shortcutID=5297 (accessed on 15 June 2009): “This teaching that the papacy is the Antichrist is not a fundamental article of faith . . . It is not an article on which saving faith rests, with which Christianity stands or falls. We cannot and do not deny the Christianity of a person who cannot see the truth that the Pope is the Antichrist.”

[44] Dee Dee Myers, “Is Obama the Most Famous Living Person Ever?” Vanity Fair (27 January 2009), http://www.vanityfair.com/online/politics/2009/01/is-obama-the-most-famous-living-person-ever.html (accessed on 15 June 2009).

[45] Naomi Shaefer Riley, “Loyal to the End: Evangelicals Stay the Course,” Wall Street Journal (07 November 2008), http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122601904162807153.html (accessed on November 14 2009); and: Theodore Roelofs, “Will Evangelicals Respond to Obama’s Overtures?” The Christian Century 125, no. 16 (2008): 12-13.

[46] Jonathon Alter, “Hope vs. Fear,” Newsweek 152, no. 18 (2008): 36-7.

[47] Emerson and Smith, 86. In U.S. politics, the “Southern Strategy” refers to a Republican Party method of winning southern states in the latter decades of the 20th century and early 21st century by exploiting opposition between “Negrophobe whites” (who had traditionally voted Democrat) and members of the New Left, Civil Rights, desegregationist, and anti-Vietnam War movements. See: James Boyd, “Nixon’s Southern Strategy: ‘It’s All in the Charts,’” New York Times (17 May, 1970): 215.

[48] Ibid, 75-76, 170.

[49] Ibid, 170.

[50] Ibid, 74.

[51] King James Bible, Leviticus 1-15.

[52] Ibid, 18: 23.

[53] Ibid, 1: 27- 1: 30.

[54] Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966), 41. Also see: Mary Douglas, Leviticus as Literature (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 1999).

[55] Douglas, 55.

[56] Ibid, 53.

[57] Ibid, 55.

[58] Gino Borri, “Why He’s the Antichrist,” Barack Hussein Obama is the Antichrist Facebook Group (2008), http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=38222960469 (accessed on 05 July 2009).

[59] James Joyner, “Obama ‘White House’ Buttons,” Outside the Beltway (17 June 2008), http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/archives/obama_white_house_buttons (accessed on 06 July 2009); and Borri, Ibid.

[60] JR, “Obama — Satanic Son of a Socialist Slut in More Ways Than One,” First Light Forum (2009), http://jewsribsinbearjaw.wordpress.com/2009/04/11/obama-satanic-son-of-a-socialist-slut-in-more-ways-than-one (accessed on 08 July 2009). “For lets face it, Obama’s Kansas born white mother got off sexually by deliberately rejecting white men in favour of fornicating with dozens of foreigners (especially of Negro or Asian or ethnicity); and she no doubt did that to show her commitment to communism that the Jews use to break down the morals and racial purity of a Gentile nation so that the Jews can reign supreme over the moneyless cattle of the common people (the “proletariat”) by their money in brave new age.”

[61] Patrick Gonder, “Like a Monstrous Jigsaw Puzzle: Genetics and Race in Horror Films of the 1950s,” The Velvet Light Trap 52 (2003): 33-44. “Common in the articles discussing heredity during the 1950s are descriptions of the influence of harmful genes ‘significantly called black genes,’ as contrasted to ‘more benevolent genes.’”

[62] Adam Nossiter, “For Some, Uncertainty Starts at Racial Identity,” New York Times (14 October 2008), http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/15/us/politics/15biracial.html (accessed on 10 July 2009). See also: Stephen Ducat, “Why They Hate Obama: Miscegenation and Other Nightmares of the Racist Political Imagination,” Huffington Post (26 October 2008), http://www.huffingtonpost.com/stephen-ducat/why-they-hate-obama-misce_b_137935.html (accessed on 05 July 2009).

[63] Nossiter, 1.

[64] F. James Davis, Who is Black?: One Nation’s Definition (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001).

[65] Katherine Hayles, “Traumas of Code,” in Critical Digital Studies: A Reader, ed. Arthur and Marilouise Kroker. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 28.

[66] Donna Haraway, “Crittercam: Compounding Eyes in Naturecultures,” in When Species Meet, ed. Donna Haraway. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 249. Also see Gonder, 35.

[67] Charles B. Strozier, “The Apocalyptic Other: On Fundamentalism and Violence. Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions 11, no. 1 (2007): 84-96. Also see: Stanley Schneider, “Fundamentalism and Paranoia in Groups and Society,” Group 26, no. 1 (2002).

[68] The LaRouche movement’s imagery ironically recreates Obama as the author of “the final solution.”

[69] Strozier, 81.

[70] Robert Marcarelli (Director), The Omega Code (Motion picture) (United States: Providence Entertainment, 1999).

[71] Lindsey, 1970, Ibid. Examples of Lindsey’s views on Obama can be found in: Hal Lindsey, “How Obama Prepped World for the Antichrist,” WorldNetDaily (01 August 2008), http://www.wnd.com/index.php?pageId=71144 (accessed on 19 June 2009). Lindsey reports his views on current events via podcast. See: Hal Lindsey, “Watchman Warning: Is Obama the Antichrist?” The Hal Lindsey Report: Watchman Warning (15 June 2009), http://www.hallindsey.com/ (accessed on 15 June 2009).

[72] Michael Drosnin, The Bible Code (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997). Drosnin is also author of The Bible Code II: The Countdown. Other Christian genre books on the “Bible code” theme are: Jeffrey Satinover, Cracking the Bible Code (New York: Harper Paperbacks,1998); R. Edwin Sherman, Bible Code Bombshell (Green Forest, AZ: New Leaf Press, 2005), Hank Hanegraaf, The Apocalypse Code (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2007) — to list a few.

[73] Completed in 2003, the Human Genome Project was a 13-year project coordinated by the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Institutes of Health. According to the HGP website, the project goals were to: “identify all 20,000-25,000 genes in human DNA; to determine the sequences of the 3 billion chemical base pairs that make up human DNA; to store this information in databases; to improve tools for data analysis; to transfer related technologies to the private sector; and to address the ethical, legal, and social issues that may arise from the project.” Human Genome Project official website, http://www.ornl.gov/sci/techresources/Human_Genome/home.shtml (accessed 13 November 2009).

[74] Marcia Ian, “‘Invisible Religion’: The Extimate Secular in American Society,” Religion Between Culture and Philosophy 3, no. 1-2 (2009): 6, http://english.chass.ncsu.edu/jouvert/v3i12/ian.htm (accessed on 05 July 2009).

[75] Ibid, 6.

[76] Dawn Whitehand, “Patterns That Connect,” Leonardo 42, no. 1 (2009): 10-15.

[77] Dean Thomas Coombes, Bible Code Pictograms: Bible Codes that Form Images and Predict the Future (05 November 2009), http://www.bible-codes.org/index.htm (accessed on 13 November 2009). “As Brian Massumi might put it…” Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002).

[78] Dean Thomas Coombes, DNA: “The Book of Life” Bible Prophecy Code, http://www.bible-codes.org/dna-code.htm (accessed on 13 November 2009). The chemical structure of DNA is made from repeating units of nucleotides Adenine (A), Cytosine (C), Thymine (T) and Guanine (G). This is why “the strange language, ‘genish,’” consists of only the letters A, C, T and G. See: Saenger Wolfram, Principles of Nucleic Acid Structure (New York: Springer Verlag, 1984).

[79] Dean Thomas Coombes, “The Image of Baal,” from The Baal Bible Code, http://www.bible-codes.org/Cherub-balance-bible-code.htm (accessed on 13 November 2009).

[80] Gene M. Tucker, trans., The Book of Isaiah in The New English Bible with Apocrypha, Oxford Study Edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 780.

[81] Ibid, 780.

[82] David Griffin, Two Great Faiths: A New Synthesis of Scientific Naturalism and Christian Faith (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006). See also: Joseph Bracken, The One and The Many: A Contemporary Reconstruction of the God-World Relationship (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdsman, 2006).

[83] On cosmic self-organization and natural genesis: Jan Ambjorn, Jerzy Jerkiewicz and Renate Loll, “The Self-Organising Quantum Universe,” Scientific American 299, (2008): 42-49. Skirting around the soft spots of New Age pop philosophy: Stuart Kauffman, Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason and Religion (New York: Basic, 2008) and Michael Shermer, “Sacred Science,” Scientific American 299, no. 1 (July 2008): 38-38.

[84] Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, trans. David McLintock (New York: Penguin Classics, 2003), 154.

—————-

Carolyn Erler is an Assistant Professor of Visual Studies at Texas Tech University. She collaborates with the Beehive Collective, a grassroots arts group whose members travel the Americas using their political posters to teach and promote social justice. She has written on Dow Chemical’s “Human Element” branding campaign and the visual counter-campaign of the International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal, whose central agents are the female survivors of the Bhopal chemical disaster. She runs the Little Green Hut Shelter Home for Abandoned Animals on the western high plains.

rtainty Starts at Racial Identity,” New York Times (14 October 2008), http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/15/us/politics/15biracial.html (accessed on 10 July 2009). See also: Stephen Ducat, “Why They Hate Obama: Miscegenation and Other Nightmares of the Racist Political Imagination,” Huffington Post (26 October 2008), http://www.huffingtonpost.com/stephen-ducat/why-they-hate-obama-misce_b_137935.html (accessed on 05 July 2009).

[63] Nossiter, 1.

[64] F. James Davis, Who is Black?: One Nation’s Definition (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001).

[65] Katherine Hayles, “Traumas of Code,” in Critical Digital Studies: A Reader, ed. Arthur and Marilouise Kroker. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 28.

[66] Donna Haraway, “Crittercam: Compounding Eyes in Naturecultures,” in When Species Meet, ed. Donna Haraway. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 249. Also see Gonder, 35.

[67] Charles B. Strozier, “The Apocalyptic Other: On Fundamentalism and Violence. Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions 11, no. 1 (2007): 84-96. Also see: Stanley Schneider, “Fundamentalism and Paranoia in Groups and Society,” Group 26, no. 1 (2002).

[68] The LaRouche movement’s imagery ironically recreates Obama as the author of “the final solution.”

[69] Strozier, 81.

[70] Robert Marcarelli (Director), The Omega Code (Motion picture) (United States: Providence Entertainment, 1999).

[71] Lindsey, 1970, Ibid. Examples of Lindsey’s views on Obama can be found in: Hal Lindsey, “How Obama Prepped World for the Antichrist,” WorldNetDaily (01 August 2008), http://www.wnd.com/index.php?pageId=71144 (accessed on 19 June 2009). Lindsey reports his views on current events via podcast. See: Hal Lindsey, “Watchman Warning: Is Obama the Antichrist?” The Hal Lindsey Report: Watchman Warning (15 June 2009), http://www.hallindsey.com/ (accessed on 15 June 2009).

[72] Michael Drosnin, The Bible Code (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997). Drosnin is also author of The Bible Code II: The Countdown. Other Christian genre books on the “Bible code” theme are: Jeffrey Satinover, Cracking the Bible Code (New York: Harper Paperbacks,1998); R. Edwin Sherman, Bible Code Bombshell (Green Forest, AZ: New Leaf Press, 2005), Hank Hanegraaf, The Apocalypse Code (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2007) — to list a few.

[73] Completed in 2003, the Human Genome Project was a 13-year project coordinated by the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Institutes of Health. According to the HGP website, the project goals were to: “identify all 20,000-25,000 genes in human DNA; to determine the sequences of the 3 billion chemical base pairs that make up human DNA; to store this information in databases; to improve tools for data analysis; to transfer related technologies to the private sector; and to address the ethical, legal, and social issues that may arise from the project.” Human Genome Project official website, http://www.ornl.gov/sci/techresources/Human_Genome/home.shtml (accessed 13 November 2009).

[74] Marcia Ian, “‘Invisible Religion’: The Extimate Secular in American Society,” Religion Between Culture and Philosophy 3, no. 1-2 (2009): 6, http://english.chass.ncsu.edu/jouvert/v3i12/ian.htm (accessed on 05 July 2009).

[75] Ibid, 6.

[76] Dawn Whitehand, “Patterns That Connect,” Leonardo 42, no. 1 (2009): 10-15.

[77] Dean Thomas Coombes, Bible Code Pictograms: Bible Codes that Form Images and Predict the Future (05 November 2009), http://www.bible-codes.org/index.htm (accessed on 13 November 2009). “As Brian Massumi might put it…” Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002).

[78] Dean Thomas Coombes, DNA: “The Book of Life” Bible Prophecy Code, http://www.bible-codes.org/dna-code.htm (accessed on 13 November 2009). The chemical structure of DNA is made from repeating units of nucleotides Adenine (A), Cytosine (C), Thymine (T) and Guanine (G). This is why “the strange language, ‘genish,’” consists of only the letters A, C, T and G. See: Saenger Wolfram, Principles of Nucleic Acid Structure (New York: Springer Verlag, 1984).

[79] Dean Thomas Coombes, “The Image of Baal,” from The Baal Bible Code, http://www.bible-codes.org/Cherub-balance-bible-code.htm (accessed on 13 November 2009).

[80] Gene M. Tucker, trans., The Book of Isaiah in The New English Bible with Apocrypha, Oxford Study Edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 780.

[81] Ibid, 780.

[82] David Griffin, Two Great Faiths: A New Synthesis of Scientific Naturalism and Christian Faith (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006). See also: Joseph Bracken, The One and The Many: A Contemporary Reconstruction of the God-World Relationship (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdsman, 2006).

[83] On cosmic self-organization and natural genesis: Jan Ambjorn, Jerzy Jerkiewicz and Renate Loll, “The Self-Organising Quantum Universe,” Scientific American 299, (2008): 42-49. Skirting around the soft spots of New Age pop philosophy: Stuart Kauffman, Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason and Religion (New York: Basic, 2008) and Michael Shermer, “Sacred Science,” Scientific American 299, no. 1 (July 2008): 38-38.

[84] Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, trans. David McLintock (New York: Penguin Classics, 2003), 154.

—————-

Carolyn Erler is an Assistant Professor of Visual Studies at Texas Tech University. She collaborates with the Beehive Collective, a grassroots arts group whose members travel the Americas using their political posters to teach and promote social justice. She has written on Dow Chemical’s “Human Element” branding campaign and the visual counter-campaign of the International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal, whose central agents are the female survivors of the Bhopal chemical disaster. She runs the Little Green Hut Shelter Home for Abandoned Animals on the western high plains.

N. Katherine Hayles

An interview/dialogue

with Albert Borgmann

and N. Katherine Hayles
on humans and machines

Question: This email message, like most of the email found in the inbox of your computer’s email program, was written and sent by a person, and not by some disembodied intelligent machine. However, these days, it’s possible to imagine that this message was machine-generated. In your books, Holding On to Reality and How We Became Posthuman you both discuss how we got to this point. Could you summarize briefly, as a place to begin?

Albert Borgmann: Your scenario shows that today we are dealing with a new kind of information we may call technological information. It was preceded first by natural information—tracks, smoke, fire rings. Such information (it still is all about us) can leave us uncertain as to who the person was that left tracks or built a fire in the distance. Natural information was followed by cultural information, best represented by writing—a story, for instance. Such a story may give us the picture of a fictional person. But here we are actively engaged in bringing the person to life and hardly confused about whether or not there is an actual person.

Technological information is so much more massive than natural and unlike cultural information takes on a life of its own so that we may be deceived or uncertain about whether a real person has addressed us from within cyberspace. It would take artificial intelligence and much more advanced virtual reality to give that uncertainty real oomph. Neither is feasible as far as I am concerned. But interestingly, people, when entering cyberspace, sometimes reduce themselves to the shallow, disjointed, and cliché-ridden persona that can be mimicked by information technology and so become co-conspirators of their confusions about who is who. If we keep our mooring in reality and conduct ourselves thoughtfully in cyberspace, we will not fall prey to deception.

N. Katherine Hayles: In How We Became Posthuman, I tell three interrelated stories: how information lost its body, that is, how it was conceptualized as an entity that can flow between substrates but is not identical with its material bases; how the cyborg emerged as a technological and cultural construction in the post-World War II period; and the transformation from the human to the posthuman. All three stories are relevant to seeing an email message and not knowing if it was human or machine-generated.

For now, however, let me concentrate on the transformation from the human to the posthuman. Recent research programs in computer science, cognitive sciences, artificial life and artificial intelligence have argued for a view of the human so different from that which emerged from the Enlightenment that it can appropriately be called “posthuman.” Whereas the human has traditionally been associated with consciousness, rationality, free will, autonomous agency, and the right of the subject to possess himself, the posthuman sees human behavior as the result of a number of autonomous agents running their programs more or less independently of one another. Complex behavior in this view is an emergent property that arises when these programs, each fairly simple in itself, begin reacting with one another. Consciousness, long regarded as the seat of identity, in this model is relegated to an “epiphenomenon.” Agency still exists, but it is distributed and largely unconscious, or at least a-conscious.

The effect of these changed views is to envision the human in terms that make it much more like an intelligent machine, which allows the human to be more easily spliced into distributed cognitive systems where part of the intelligence resides in the human, part in a variety of intelligent machines, and part in the interfaces through which they interact. At the same time, intelligent agent programs are being developed using “emotional computing” techniques that allow these artificial systems to respond to unexpected situations in ways that more closely resemble human responses.

The upshot, then, is that both artificial and human intelligences are being reconceptualized in ways that facilitate their interactions with one another. Although I have written this summary, it could easily have been produced by such a system as the “Amalthaea” intelligent agent system being developed at the MIT Media Lab by Patti Maes and Alexandros Moukos. Are you sure I did write this message?

Q: It sounds like you two disagree about the extent to which artificial intelligence could mimic human intelligence. But you both seem to be saying that’s not the central issue anyway. The real issue is not whether a machine will be built that can replicate human behavior, but whether humans will begin (or continue) to think of themselves as machines. Is that right?

Borgmann: One thing Katherine and I agree on is that humans are essentially embodied and therefore cannot escape their bodies no matter how or what they think of themselves. Of course being mistaken about one’s bodily existence can have strong cultural and moral consequences. But the crucial error these days is not to think of oneself as a machine but to shift one’s moral center of gravity into a machine of sorts—cyberspace.

By cyberspace I mean the realm of electronically and digitally mediated information (soon to include television). Some regions of cyberspace are indisputably sober and beneficial and require highly skilled engagement, viz., the areas where computers are used for research and design. In the realm of leisure and consumption, however, cyberspace will very much resemble television, except that cyberspace is much more diverse and allows for (increasingly easy) interaction. The temptation to entrust one’s curiosity and desires primarily to cyberspace will be even greater than it is now. To do so is not to commit a cognitive error but to become an accomplice in the diminishment of one’s person and one’s world. Just as you cannot escape your body, you cannot really and finally escape reality. But you can degrade to utilities what should be celebrated as the splendor of tangible presence.

Hayles: Humans thinking of themselves as machines has a long history, dating back to the classical era. Since World War II and the development of intelligent machines, this tendency has greatly increased, as the work of Sherry Turkle, among others, has shown. Think of all the everyday expressions that now equate human thought with computers: “That doesn’t compute for me”; “my memory is overloaded”; and my favorite, drawn from Turkle’s account of the world of hackers: “Reality is not my best window.”

There are important limitations to the human-computer equation. It is by no means clear that human thought does operate in the same way as computer calculation, and computers can never experience emotions in anything like the same way that humans do. In my view, the easy equation between humans and computers needs to be challenged, especially when it leads to important social and cultural consequences. My vision of how computers and humans can enter into productive partnerships, however, is rather different than Albert’s. I don’t think the idea that humans will “live” in cyberspace will last very long. It’s clear to most people, I think, that they have real lives in the real world, and that the illusion one can live in virtual reality is mostly a fantasy of technofreaks and science fiction writers.

What will happen, and is already happening, is the development of distributed cognitive environments in which humans and computers interact in hundreds of ways daily, often unobtrusively. Think of how often you use computers now, often without knowing it. When you heat your coffee in the microwave, the settings are controlled by a computer chip. When you glance at your watch to see if you have time to drink the coffee, you are probably relying on the computer chip that makes your watch intelligent. When you go out and start your car to drive off to work, the ignition system and probably many other systems as well rely on computer chips. More computers control the recognition system that makes the electronic doors swing open as you approach. As you run for the elevator, sensors connected with yet more chips make the door spring back as you touch them. And on and on.

Computers aren’t just in boxes anymore; they are moved out into the world to become distributed throughout the environment. “Eversion,” my colleague Marcus Novak has called this phenomenon, in contrast to the “immersion” of the much more limited and localized virtual reality environments. The effect of moving in these distributed cognitive environments is often to enhance human functioning, as the ordinary examples above illustrate. Of course, there is also a downside. As cognition becomes distributed, humans no longer control all the parameters, and in some situations, they don’t control the crucial ones, for example in automated weapon systems.

Should we therefore hit the panic button and start building big bonfires into which we will toss all the computers? One way to avoid looking at this situation apocalyptically (which may be titillating but in my view always risks serious distortions) is to think about distributed cognition in historical terms, as something that began happening as soon as the earliest humans began developing technology. External memory storage, for example, isn’t limited to computers. It happens as early as humans drawing animals and figures on cave walls to convey information about hunting and ritual activities. Putting contemporary developments in these kinds of contexts will help us, in my view, get away from scare scenarios and begin to think in more sophisticated ways about how human-computer interactions can be fruitful and richly articulated.

Q: You can’t escape your body and no one really can live in cyberspace. But can’t the possibilities for disembodied communication and exploration presented by cyberspace actually be liberating, for instance, to those terrified of face to face contact or negatively objectified by a “real” culture that idealizes the young, the thin, etc.? Being in the tangible presence of reality is not always so splendid. Those who speak positively of cyberspace say the existence of that network empowers individuals. Is that illusory, misguided?

On the other hand, as Katherine points out, there might be some very real dangers lurking in the fantastically convenient world of computer “eversion.” Consider 2001′s HAL 2000, for instance, a computer programmed perhaps a bit too closely on the human cognitive model. Assuming you don’t want to end up there, where do you draw the line? HMO’s are considering programming their computers to make medical diagnoses and recommend treatments based on probability distributions. That’s a timesaver, to be sure, but has it crossed the line between calculation and moral judgement? Can even the finest “emotional computing” techniques ever transform a computer into an independent moral actor?

Borgmann: The claim that cyberspace liberates people from the accidents of gender, race, class, and bodily appearance is often made by advocates of electronically distributed education. But to conceal a problem is not to solve it. We have to learn to respect and encourage people as they actually exist. The “liberated” students or citizens of cyberspace, moreover, have to bleach out their presence to that of a person who is without gender, social background, and racial heritage. Otherwise they betray what is supposed to remain hidden. And it turns out that there are loudmouths and bullies in cyberspace as often as in reality. The fuzzed identities of cyberspace, moreover, lend themselves to their own kind of mischief.

The insertion of microchips in the appliances and gadgets of everyday life is for the most part the continuation of another kind of liberation, from the claims of things rather than persons. It is a disburdenment that is at the center of the technological culture. We are concerned, as we should be, that some of the disburdening devices are not going to work correctly or safely, and we are particularly worried about automated systems and, again, properly so. Information technology is much more fallible and fragile than most people realize.

But there is an issue that should concern us precisely when automated devices work well. The instances Katherine mentions present relatively trivial benefits and marginal improvements over their less sophisticated predecessors. But when such sophistication reaches a critical mass as it does in a so-called smart house where every last and least domestic chore and burden is anticipated and taken over by an automatic device, inhabitants become the passive content of their sophisticated container. The vision of such an environment often carries the implied promise that people will use their disburdened condition creatively and inventively. But assuming that in the smart house the blandishments of cyberspace will present themselves with even greater diversity and glamour, most people will likely do what they now do in their relatively engaging homes with its relatively primitive access to cyberspace, viz., television—they will immerse themselves in the warm bath of electronic entertainment.

There are, thank God, indications of a hunger for reality and of a growing desire to seek the engagement of real people and real things. Whether one supports this resolution of the ambiguities of cyberspace or not, one should certainly agree with Katherine that widening and deepening the context of the notions that keep us enthralled (something she does so well in her book) will give us the leeway to consider our predicament more resourcefully.

Hayles: Almost two decades ago, Joseph Weizenbaum in “Computer Power and Human Reason” made the argument that judgment should be a uniquely human capacity—that computers can only calculate, not engage in moral reasoning. However, new programming techniques based on recursive feedback, parallel processing, and neural nets are making it possible for computers to engage in more sophisticated decision-making than in Weizenbaum’s day. It isn’t so clear now that computers can’t engage in “moral reasoning.” The line, it seems to me, can’t be drawn in an a priori way, which is what Weizenbaum was proposing. Instead, it seems to me more a pragmatic or practical question: what can computers do, and how reliably can they do it? Bear in mind that humans are not perfect decision-makers, either, so the comparison ought not to be between perfection and computers, but between computers and normal human judgment, with all of its fallibility.

There are already many instances in which humans depend for their lives on computer decisions. Consider the X-29 fighter jet, which has forward-swept wings and is aerodynamically unstable—so unstable, in fact, it cannot be successfully flown by a human alone. There are three computers on board all running the same software, and they “vote” on what actions to take. If two of the three agree, the plane is flown according to that decision. (The triple redundancy is to minimize the possibility of fatal computer malfunction). This is an example of how agency and decision-making has become a distributed function involving both human and non-human actors. I think we will see more and more situations like this in the decades to come. Whatever line one draws, it will necessarily change as computers continue to develop and evolve.

Should we regard this with alarm? More properly, I think, with caution. I can imagine a similar argument made when cavemen tamed fire—some arguing that fire is a dangerous force that can easily get out of control and destroy those who would make use of it. Well, yes, this does happen occasionally, but who would now think of life without “domesticated” fire? Technology always implies interdependence, and in many cases, interdependence so woven into the fabric of society that it cannot be renounced without catastrophic loss. So now with computers.

Q: Albert speaks of “a hunger for reality and of a growing desire to seek the engagement of real people and real things.” What are some examples of that hunger and desire? Does this represent a step beyond the posthuman—to be conscious both of the interdependence of human life with machines and the differences between humans and machines? Perhaps, to be engaged with machines but not enthralled?

Borgmann: Getting a reading of contemporary culture is a fine and difficult art. You have to begin with observations and hunches. You see a park being recovered from neglect and danger, a theater being restored to its former glory, old apartment buildings being rehabilitated. You see people returning to the streets, entertained by street musicians at the corner or an opera singer on a stage in the park. You see people working for the preservation of a mountain range or a stand of trees for no other reason than that these things should be celebrated rather than turned into something that is useful and has a market price.

It is the luminous and consoling reality, of course, that people try to retrieve. Spending sleepless nights at the bedside of children mortally sick with diphtheria or scarlet fever was very real once, but it is not a reality we want to have back. (How to define reality more precisely is a complex issue to which Katherine has made notable contributions.) On occasion your intuitions about the growing thirst for reality are unexpectedly confirmed by asides of perceptive authors who in writing about something else entirely cannot help noticing how insubstantial and unreal our world has become. I am thinking of writers like Joe Klein and Sven Birkerts.

At length, however, social and cultural theorists have to test and temper their observations against the findings of social scientists. The splendor of reality and people’s response to it arenot exactly social science categories. The Census Bureau in fact often aggregates categories in a way that makes a distinction between engagement in reality and indulgence in consumption impossible. But the the Census does provide evidence that people want out of their technological and mediated cocoons. So do the writings of Juliet B. Schor, Robert Wuthnow, John P. Robinson and Geoffrey Godbey, among others. The revival of urbanism and the vigor of environmentalism are the best indications that people are seeking the engagement of real persons and the commanding presence of reality.

Hayles: In my view, machines are “real things,” so I don’t see an engagement with machines as in any way antithetical to contemporary reality. I do think it is important not to elide the very real differences that exist between humans and machines, especially the different embodiments that humans and machines have. Certainly I think that Albert is correct in insisting that virtual reality will never displace the three-dimensional world in which our perceptual systems evolved; the richness, diversity, and spontaneity of this immensely complex environment makes even the most sophisticated computer simulation look like a stick world by comparison. Where I differ, perhaps, is in seeing the situation not as a dichotomy between the real and virtual but rather as space in which the natural and the artificial are increasing entwined. I foresee a proliferation of what Bruno Latour calls “quasi-objects,” hybrid objects produced by a collaboration between nature and culture—genetically engineered plants and animals, humans who have had gene thereapy, humans with cybernetic implants and explants, intelligent agent systems with evolutionary programs who have evolved to the point where they can converse in a convincing fashion with humans, and so forth. But then, this is nothing so very new, except for the techniques involved, for humans have been producing hybridized environments for a very long time. Our challenge now, it seems to me, is to think carefully about how these technologies can be used to enhance human well-being and the fullness and richness of human-being-in-the-world, which can never be reduced merely to information processing or information machines.