The Mutation of Subjectivity in a Post-Print Culture Johnnie a Wilcox
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Recombinant Media: The Mutation of Subjectivity in a Post-Print Culture Johnnie A Wilcox Marina, California B. A, University of Southern California, 1990 M. A, Humboldt State University, 1993 A Dissertation presented to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Virginia in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English University of Virginia January 2005 © Copyright by Johnnie A. Wilcox All Rights Reserved January 2005 i ABSTRACT “Recombinant Media: The Mutation of Subjectivity in a Post-Print Culture” Johnnie A. Wilcox “Recombinant Media: The Mutation of Subjectivity in a Post-Print Culture” argues that subjectivity in American literary postmodernism is a transformation of the subject produced by print technology. This transformation comes about as a result of cultural shifts in media priority and the changes media themselves undergo as they incorporate techniques of other media. This study examines how the representation and production of subjectivity in several print objects is affected by the incorporation of techniques more characteristic of non-print media such as film, electronics, and music. The introduction traces the rise of non-print media such as film, electricity, and radio and argues that these media both augment and deform is such a way that print media then produces “recombinant media” which dramatically alter the subject normally produced by print. The first chapter considers how Gravity’s Rainbow hybridizes its own media body to create from its reader a retribalized, cybernetic subject. The second chapter traces the origins of this mutated, postmodern subject back to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, arguing that the pressures of electricity and speech mutate Invisible Man into the prototype of the hacker. The third chapter considers Dwayne McDuffie’s and Gregory Wright’s comic series Deathlok as a print object that remediates electronics and cinema in order to interpret cyborg consciousness in terms of race, especially insofar as both can be described by W. E. B. DuBois’s concept of double-consciousness. The fourth chapter revisits Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, arguing that the novel’s critique of capitalism is conducted by the remediation of film, electricity, comics, textiles, and music. The conclusion suggests that Ellison’s Invisible Man, Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, and McDuffie’s and Wright’s Deathlok forecast the end of print by mutating the subject of print culture into a species of networked cybernetic subject. ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Being part of an extended cyborg body with parts stubbornly situated within diverse geographical locations, chronological periods, and ontological orders, there simply are too many of you, of us, to imagine these acknowledgements could ever be complete. The first whom I must acknowledge is my mother, Yung Sun Wilcox. To her I owe everything. I wish I had the language to tell her how much. I am extremely grateful to Michael Levenson who read many versions of this manuscript (even before it was this manuscript) and who trusted me to know what I was doing long before I did. Jennifer Wicke catalyzed my thinking on the subjects of cyborgs, blackness. Her incisive and provocative comments continue to shape my thinking on this subject. I would also like to express my gratitude to Eleanor Kaufman who challenged me to think harder about bodies and organs. Of all my respondents, Johanna Drucker posed questions which made me consider how I relate to the subject of my writing and I hope some day to be able to answer her more directly. I also would like to thank in no particular order, John Thomas Higgins, Amanda Eileen Owen, Benita Blessing, Sarah Ortner, George Hartley, Carey Snyder, Paul Jones, Jeremy Webster, Nicole Reynolds, Ken Daley, Jason Nathaniel Goldsmith, Jayme Schwartzberg, Paul Gaffney, Chris Ruotolo, Linda Hunt, Candace Caraco, and Mendy Gladden. I also want to acknowledge those of you who belong to this body but have happened to go unnamed: thank you for being here. 1 TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract i Acknowledgements ii Table of Contents 1 Introduction 2 Recombinant Media and You Chapter One 26 The Beginning of the End of the Book: Gravity’s Rainbow and the Decline of Print Culture Chapter Two 87 Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man: Prototype for a Black Cyborg Subject Chapter Three 121 Recombinant Media Technique in Late Twentieth-Century Popular Culture Chapter Four 159 Turning Print Against Capital Gravity’s Rainbow’s Monstrous Recursive Media Body Conclusion 198 Notes 202 Works Cited 220 2 INTRODUCTION Recombinant Media and You HOW PRINT BECAME A POST-PRINT MEDIUM Recombinant media recombine other media forms and by so doing multiply the kinds of subjectivity which can and, ultimately, do exist. The idea is not a new one. Marshall McLuhan’s The Gutenberg Galaxy created a framework by which to understand how something so ubiquitous as print has shaped subjectivity, our perceptions, and the very modes by which we perceive in the first place. McLuhan’s insight is that certain physical characteristics of print—linearity, visuality, and uniformity—affect how we interpret non-print media. Among other things, McLuhan has prompted us to consider how human consciousness is altered through its interactions with different types of media. The central argument of this text—that the rise of cinematic, electric, and electronic media produced a new kind of subject, the cybernetic subject in particular—seems obvious to the extent it follows McLuhan’s insight that media alter the sense ratios of human perception. Indeed, the proliferation of studies of the Internet, video games, television, and film, and the assertions of such studies that in the twentieth century these “new” media have displaced print as the dominant media form all but obviate the need for a study regarding the kinds of cybernetic subjectivity made possible by the advent of “new” media. What makes this study notable is its argument that print has been transformed by these new media, becoming both the agent of its own superannuation and an agent of its own radical mutation. “Recombinant Media” takes as its subject print objects, arguing after Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin that by means of remediation print has itself become a post-print medium capable of producing one strand of cybernetic subjectivity. In Remediation: Understanding New Media, Bolter and Grusin assert that all mediation is the remediation of prior media. Bolter and Grusin refer to the necessity that all media redeploy other media (and can in their turn be redeployed) as “the double logic of remediation.” They formulate this double logic in three ways: 1) “Remediation as the mediation of mediation,” which refers to the 3 fact that all mediation is always the remediation of another mediation, there is no such thing as a first-order mediation 2) “Remediation as the inseparability of mediation and reality,” which can be recast as the fact that media are real even at the same time they mediate the Real, and 3) “Remediation as reform,” that media have the ability to reshape reality (55-56). With regard to the present study, the most important aspect of Bolter’s and Grusin’s assertions regarding the mediation of media and the Real is the idea that media are themselves real and that they have the capacity to reshape reality (formulations 2 and 3). Both points signal that media and the Real are recursively structured. This recursive aspect of media is important because it gives structure to the cybernetic subject I consider in the chapters which follow. The general outline of the cyborg ontology I describe resembles the rhizomatic structure of what Deleuze and Guattari identify as the body without organs. More specifically, I consider the print subject as it is reconstituted in print media that have incorporated into themselves non-print media such as film, electricity, electronics, and video games. These recombinant media, I assert, are the birthing ground of a species of a networked cybernetic subject. The specific objects that comprise my primary subject texts are Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, and Dwayne McDuffie’s and Gregory Wright’s Deathlok. These print objects, like the subjects to whom they give rise—Tyrone Slothrop, Invisible Man, and Deathlok—are themselves cybernetic networks, products of the meshing of humans, machines, organisms, and mechanisms. Like Bolter and Grusin, I believe “technology [. ] is articulated through a network of formal, material, and social practices” (67). I further believe that media and subjectivity are socially and materially constituted hybrids, but with regard to cybernetic subjectivity, these hybrids are not integrated wholes as much as they are ensembles of discrete elements which stubbornly occupy disparate ontological orders. My thinking is highly influenced by the work Adrian Mackenzie has done regarding the technical ensembles which populate and shape human culture, work which brings to light the philosophical writings of Gilbert Simondon (Transductions). More generally, media, as we traditionally understand it, is the mediation of consciousness, the representation of perception. Media are comprised of artifacts designed to produce (or reproduce) 4 distinct states of consciousness and perception. In this sense, the body itself is a mediating organ, so it is perhaps not surprising that media objects can be understood as organs of a body comprised of many disparate parts. The historical relationship between cybernetic subjects and the ontological dimensions of the media in which these subjects have taken shape begins after human culture can be said properly to have harvested electricity. My primary argument is that the shift from print media to non-print media such as film and electronics mutates the subject produced by print. Though primarily concerned about the decline of literature in print, Leslie Fiedler also believed that the subject (of liberal humanism) was being mutated out of existence.