當代賽博龐客文學與賽博文化博龐客 Vision and Speed: 文學 Contemporary Cyberpunk Literature and Cyberculture 與賽博研究生:李蕙君文

2 公

分

外國國立語中文山學大學

系

博士論國立中山大學外國語文學系

文

博士論文

Department of Foreign Languages and Literature 視界 National Sun Yat-sen University 與速 Doctorate Dissertation 度：當代賽視界與速度:當代賽博龐客文學與賽博文化博龐客 Vision and Speed: 文學 Contemporary Cyberpunk Literature and Cyberculture 與賽博研究生:李蕙君文

化 Hui-Chun Li

指導教授：田偉文博士研究 Dr. Rudolphus Teeuwen 生：李蕙君中華民國105年1月

104 January 2016 學年

度

國立中山大學外國語文學系博士論文

Department of Foreign Languages and Literature National Sun Yat-sen University Doctorate Dissertation

視界與速度:當代賽博龐客文學與賽博文化

Vision and Speed:

Contemporary Cyberpunk Literature and Cyberculture

研究生：李蕙君 Hui-Chun Li 指導教授：田偉文博士 Dr. Rudolphus Teeuwen

中華民國 105 年 1 月

January 2016 論文審定書

Acknowledgments

I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my adviser Dr. Rudolphus

Teeuwen for his continuous support, patience, motivation, and encouragement. His guidance helped me in all the time of research and writing of this dissertation. His editorial advice was essential to the completion of this dissertation.

The completion of my dissertation was aided by a grant awarded by the MOST-

DAAD Sandwich Program, sponsored by the Ministry of Science and Technology,

Taiwan and Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst, Germany, which enabled me to work at Humboldt University of Berlin for a seven-month research stay in 2015.

There I was received warmly by the Department of English and American Studies. To

Dr. Martin Klepper I owe a great deal of gratitude, for his stimulating comments on my dissertation. The generosity I received from Sigrid Venuß, secretary of the department, and the friendships I made with Miloš, Wasabi, and Rusja have lasted long beyond my stay in Berlin.

I thank my oral examiners, Dr. TEE Kim Tong, Dr.Min-hsiou Rachel Hung,

Dr.Che-Ming Yang, and Dr. Nai-Nu Yang, for making substantial suggestions on widening my research from various perspectives. I especially thank Dr. TEE Kim

Tong for his inspiring comments. I would also like to thank Dr. Yu-San Yu for her support and kindness during my study.

My gratitude also goes out to my family and friends, especially Clara, Emerald, and Stephen for supporting me throughout the writing of this dissertation and in my life in general.

摘要

賽博龐克文學描繪一個由高科技建立的烏托邦社會，它不僅預示了一個更

美好的未來，也揭發了完美社會隱藏的後現代癥狀及焦慮。如果文學的主要任

務是溝通意見、傳達情感、及交流思考，那麼速度作為賽博文化的主要元素之

一，妨礙了這些互動。賽博龐克敍事再現了數位社會中，偏重視覺而忽略其他

感官經驗的情況。本論文探索速度與視覺的概念在賽博文化與賽博龐克文學作

家威廉．吉布森與弗諾．文奇小說中的呈現。各面向的議題如—普適運算、媒

介化、幻像、超越與存在的厭煩、大監控，腦內突觸的塑造、擴增實境、類比

－數位的共同賽踐—皆納入討論，以增進對數位文化更進一步的瞭解。第一部

份闡述賽博文化的幻像，並檢視賽博龐克作者如何再現一個被圖像統治的社會，

以及現時被即時殖民的現象。第二部份解碼賽博文化和賽博龐克小說裡類比—

數位的創意實踐，並分析它們與上述議題的對話。第三部份證明類比—數位實

踐創造關懷的論述、促成政治對話的空間、並生產異質的知識系統。此知識是

逆轉現今工業化程式設計的種子，也是將機器視像與加速的毒藥轉化為療癒人

性解藥的開端。

關鍵字：視覺與速度、賽博文化、賽博龐克文學、普適運算、類比－數位的共

同賽踐、腦內突觸、程式設計

iii

Abstract

Cyberpunk literature constructs both a utopian society based on advanced technology and a dystopian society ruled by totalitarian, technocratic, militarist and late capitalist regimes; it thus envisions a better future as it, at the same time, unveils postmodern conditions and anxieties. If literature’s ultimate task is to communicate feelings, ideas, and states of mind, speed as one of contemporary cyberculture’s major symptoms inhibits such communication. Depictions of privileging ocular perceptions as repetitively represented in cyberpunk narratives are reflective of such reduction of scope of human experiences. This dissertation delves into the notions of speed and vision as demonstrated by cybercultural practices and contemporary cyberpunk literature writers William Gibson and Vernor Vinge. Dealing with cybercultural issues—such as accelerated cyberculture, spectacular mediatization, fantasy, symptoms of malaise in cybernauts, transcendence and boredom, mass surveillance, the shaping of synapses, and analogico-digital practices—cyberpunk fiction constantly incorporates diversified perspectives to extend its understanding of the contemporary world. Going against the grain of seeing cyberculture as a potentially risky practice to the shaping of humanity and history, as is demonstrated in Guy

Debord’s and Paul Virilio’s concepts of technological and digital dystopia and of a society turning into ideological spectacles, Bernard Stiegler envisions that a new paradigm of perception and of knowledge will emerge from analogico-digital practices. I approach the works of the contemporary cyberpunk writers with Gibson’s idea of the phantasmagoric aspect of cyberculture and examine how cyberpunk writers inform and represent a society that is mediated by images and in which lived time is colonized by real time. I decode the creative analogico-digital practices

iv consistently manifested and portrayed in cyberculture and cyberpunk narratives and explore how these practices can be related to the issues of speed, vision, fantasy, media, metaphysics, and memory. In doing so I make evident that these cultural practices as forms of resistance gradually are turned into a politically contested site in which lived lives are erased by real time and culture is commodified, while they also provide us with new formations of knowledge. The alternative knowledge is a seed to reverse engineer an industrialized programming, which is a means to making the poison of machine vision and speed into the cure of humanity.

Keywords: vision and speed, cyberpunk literature, cyberculture, ubiquitous computing, synapses, analogico-digital practices, programming

Table of Contents 論文審定書 ...... i Acknowledgments ...... ii 摘要...... iii Abstract ...... iv Introduction ...... 1 Literature Review ...... 4 Methodology ...... 7 Structure ...... 8 Chapter One: Spectacular Capitalism ...... 17 Mirror ...... 19 Mediatization ...... 23 Chapter Two: Ubiquitous Computing and Accelerated Speed ...... 28 A Flight from Flesh ...... 35 Memory and Dromosphere ...... 38 Chapter Three: Traversing the Fantasy of Capitalism ...... 47 Fantasy ...... 52 Commodity Fetishism and Interpassive Subject ...... 54 Situationist International as Therapy ...... 62 Hit the Real: Literature’s Socially Symbolic Act ...... 64 Chapter Four: A Moment in the Great Object ...... 67 Surveillance ...... 72 Symptoms ...... 80 Absences and Politics of the Real-Time ...... 90 Chapter Five: (Toward an) Ontological Appropriation of Digital Beings . 101 Thou and It ...... 106 Between It and Thou ...... 115 Attunement to A New Ontology ...... 131 Chapter Six: Networks of Industrialized Synapses ...... 136 Industrialized Memories and Synapses ...... 139 In the Beginning Was the Command-Line ...... 140 Foc.us and BRAIN Initiative: Engineering Neurons ...... 141 Synapses Being Short-Circuited by Industrialized Memories ...... 147 The Origin of Humans and Tertiary Memories ...... 151 Speed and Evolution of Technics ...... 153 Chapter Seven: Transductive Discourse of Care ...... 155 Slowness: A Cultivated Speed ...... 156 Analogico-Digital Discourse of Care ...... 162

A Discourse of Care Through the Eyes and Speed of the Machines ...... 165 The Position of Literature ...... 170 Hypertexts: Combining Hyperattention and Deep Attention ...... 177 Conclusion ...... 180 Works Cited ...... 183 Index ...... 189

vii

Introduction

In the beginning of his article presented in The Vision 21 Symposium on

Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering in the Era of Cyberspace in 1993, “The

Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era,” Vernor

Vinge claims that “Within thirty years”, with the accelerated development of technology, “we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence.

Shortly after, the human era will be ended…[d]evelopments that before were thought might only happen in ‘a million years’ (if ever) will likely happen in the next century…. I think it's fair to call this event a singularity.” Vinge forecasts that 7 years from now, we will be able to program superhuman intelligence that is devoid of awareness but an efficient means of “digital signal processing.” That is to say, they can compute large data very fast with “Intelligence Amplification” (I.A.). As hopeful he is toward I.A., he also confesses that I.A. can turn an individual into a “sinister elite.” If the coming of the Singularity cannot be stopped, what is to be done? I argue that tracing the thought experiments of cyberpunk literature and cyberculture practices will help humankind prepare a survival kit for the arrival of the Singularity. I explore symptoms of the accelerated speed respectively in the social, psychological, metaphysical, and biological dimensions in my chapters. The accelerated speed cannot be separated from vision, as Paul Virilio puts it:

Speed enables you to see. It does not simply allow you to arrive at your

destination more quickly, rather it enables you to see and foresee. To see,

yesterday with photography and cinema, and to foresee today with

electronics, the calculator and the computer. Speed changes the world

vision. In the nineteenth century, with photography and cinema, world

vision became “objective’…. It can be said that today, vision is becoming

‘teleobjective.’ That is to say that television and multimedia are collapsing

the close shots of time and space as a photograph collapses the horizon in

the telephotographic lens. Thus speed enables you to see differently, and it

is beginning with the nineteenth century that this world vision changes

and public space becomes a public image through photography,

cinematography and television. (Virilio, The Politics of the Very Worst 21)

Using Virilio’s observation of the relation between speed and vision as a springboard for my dissertation, I discuss the critical notions of vision and speed as demonstrated by cybercultural practices and contemporary cyberpunk literature writers William

Gibson and Vernor Vinge. These writers have been recognized as some of the most accomplished and influential writers in contemporary cyberpunk literature. Dealing with cybercultural issues—such as accelerated cyberculture, spectacular mediatization, fantasy, symptoms of cybernauts, transcendence and boredom, mass surveillance, the shaping of synapses, and analogico-digital practices—cyberpunk fiction constantly incorporates diversified perspectives to extend its understanding of the contemporary world. My interest in cyberpunk goes beyond the study of cyberspace and technology as cultural entities; cyberpunk is also a reflection on humanity and a new paradigm of connecting with others and with the world. Cyberpunk studies make possible the understanding of the circumstances of contemporary social, cultural, and human transformations and provide viewpoints regarding what it means to be human not only from the perspective of the humanities but also from that of the interaction with technology and sciences.

If literature’s ultimate task is to communicate feelings, ideas, and states of mind, speed as one of contemporary cyberculture’s major symptoms inhibits such communication. Depictions of privileging ocular perceptions as repetitively represented in cyberpunk narratives are reflective of such reduction of scope of

2 human experiences. This research delves into vision and speed in contemporary cyberpunk literature and how it participates in critique and practice of cyberculture by fictionalizing an alternative near future, rethinking commercial culture and the relation between art and politics in the digital age, and looking into mediatization and a militarism hidden underneath technological advancement.

I intend to approach the works of the contemporary cyberpunk writers with

Gibson’s idea of the phantasmagoric aspect of cyberculture. In my dissertation I will examine how cyberpunk writers represent and reflect on a society that is mediated by images and in which lived time is colonized by real-time. I will try to decode the creative analogico-digital practices consistently manifested and portrayed in cyberculture and cyberpunk narratives and explore how these practices can be related to the issues of speed, vision, fantasy, media, metaphysics, and memory. In doing so I will make evident that these cultural practices as forms of resistance gradually are turned into a politically contested site in which lived lives are erased by the real-time and culture is commodified, while they also provide us with new formations of knowledge. The authors and works to be investigated include William Gibson’s

Neuromancer (1984), Pattern Recognition (2005), Spook Country (2009), and Zero

History (2011); and Vernor Vinge’s Rainbows End (2006). These works contribute to the investigation on various dimensions of vision and speed as well as dialogues between advanced technology and humanity. Their narratives oftentimes bifurcate into celebrations of technology and the demise of humanity, which will also be reflected in my approaches in this dissertation. I contend that to show both sides of the stories will help illustrate the vibrant communications that human beings have with technology. This binary approach does not strive to stigmatize either side as essentially heinous or auspicious, but to demonstrate that this dichotomy is instrumental for understanding the nature of technology and humanity. Cultural

3 events I plan to discuss include mediatization, accelerated speed, ubiquitous computing, commodified fetishes, mass surveillance, existential boredom, and industrialized programming in contemporary society. These are cultural productions, the crux of cyberculture and of cyberpunk authors. Literary representation and cultural practice interweave in a discourse network that forms a holistic scope of contemporary society and of this dissertation.

The kind of questions that will guide my investigation of these authors and events are: How are speed and vision unique to the contemporary cyberpunk literature and cyberculture? How do speed and vision contribute to formulate accelerated culture? How does accelerated culture appropriate the paradigm of perception? How will analogical-digital practices reverse accelerated culture and redefine the meaning of the human, of knowledge production systems, and paradigms of perception? How do people understand the human in a world where ubiquitous computing is heavily stressed as a means of communication? How do speed and vision get woven into media narratives and become an operational paradigm in military scenarios of global politics? How does mediatization restrict freedom and confine perceptive experiences?

How does accelerated computing disrupt the attention of taking care of our overall well-being to the production of industrialized synapses? How does analogico-digital practice create possibilities of reversing the damage done by the current programming industry?

Literature Review

4 subversion of social norms. This aspect of subversion aligns cyberpunk with the critical function of utopian and fantastic literature, namely that of representing the unseen of culture, the unconscious memory of history, and the seeds of hope that allow us to reclaim cultural history. The prefix “cyber” denotes current cultural conditions and inscribes cybernetic fictionality and the aesthetics of current everyday life into literature. Cyberpunk signifies a speculative attitude to late-capitalism in its unidirectional, technocratic form. Thus, cyberpunk takes on the responsibility of reflecting and interpreting current culture, a responsibility both fiction writers and academic intellectuals bear.

Cyberculture is the variegated current social reality that cyberpunk critically reflects and practices. If society is configured by cyberculture, then so are our cognition and imagination: the ways we read, interpret, and interact with cybernetic, computing, and digital devices evolve, in a feedback loop, with developments in cybernetics, computing, and digitalization. On the one hand, the digital revolution brings us closer to a bright utopian future, introducing, for instance, a dynamic reading experience that channels information and experiences from one medium to another, traveling back and forth between visual- and audio-scapes. On the other hand, the utopian desires awakened by cyberculture may lead to snares and sinister plots of the culture industry. The speculative perspective of the cyberpunk movement on how humans emerge as flickering subjects and on how cyberculture interpellates citizens into netizens serves as a mirror to our current cultural conditions.

Speed and vision play a significant role in the study of contemporary cyberpunk literature and cyberculture; however, in more mainstream culture these facets have been comparatively underexposed in the past few decades. As far as it goes, two books and three book chapters have been fully dedicated to the study of cyberpunk literature, including Storming the Reality Studio: a Casebook of Cyberpunk and

Postmodern Science Fiction (1991) edited by Larry McCaffery; Mirrorshades: The

Cyberpunk Anthology (1998) by Bruce Sterling; “Cyberpunk” by Damien Broderick in Reading By Starlight (1995); “Cyberpunk” by Scott Bukatman in Terminal Identity

(1993); and “Cyberpunk” by Mark Bould in A Companion to Science Fiction (2005).

Theorists that contribute to studying speed and vision associated with cyberpunk literature and cyberculture include Paul Virilio’s The Vision Machine (1994), The Art of the Motor (1998), The Politics of the Very Worst (1999), The Information Bomb

(2000), Speed and Politics (2006), Art as Far as the Eye Can See (2007), and The

Aesthetics of Disappearance (2009); Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle

(1994); and Bernard Stiegler’s Technics and Time I: The Fault of Epimetheus (1998),

Technics and Time II: Disorientation (2009), and Taking Care of Youth and the

Generations (2010).

Apart from books, some critics have published papers on cyberpunk, including

“Cyberpunk and the Dilemmas of Postmodern Narrative: The Example of William

Gibson” by Claire Sponsler (1992), “The Business of Cyberpunk: Symbolic Economy and Ideology in William Gibson” (1994) by David Brande, “The Posthuman Body:

Inscription and Incorporation in Galatea 2.2 and Snow Crash” by Katherine Hayles

(1997), “Dead Channel Surfing: The Commonalities between Cyberpunk Literature and Industrial Music” (2005) by Karen Collins, and “Writing Culture and Cyberpunk”

(2006) by Alexander Knorr. According to Knorr, “Cyberpunk does not naively strive to expose the dangers of the growing technologisation of society, but decidedly stresses human creativity, the ability of cultural appropriating globally spreading technology, commodities, and ideas.” He aptly puts emphasis upon creative analogico-digital practices in cyberpunk narratives, while most of cyberpunk critiques, if not all, stress realization of a dystopic commercialized society and an apocalyptic future. In light of Knorr’s positive outlook of cyberpunk narrative, this dissertation

6 takes cyberpunk creativity as a beacon in the face of postmodern plight.

Methodology

Speed and vision, as complex and diverse as they are, have been a crucial motif in the studies of cyberpunk narratives and cyberculture. Much like Erich Auerbach, in

Mimesis, takes one scene from a novel, and elaborates its implications in his treatment of mimesis in Western Literature, I intend to analyze cultural events in the works I deal with as the starting point of a centrifugal and centripetal cultural critique.

Crossing literature and media as distinct genres and products of culture, this dissertation proposes to provide an interdisciplinary methodology in the hope to ignite and continue a dialogue on speed and vision amongst analogico-digital traces. Guy

Debord, Paul Virilio, Arthur Kroker, and Bernard Stiegler, are major theorists contributing to the specific explorations of eyeball culture, accelerated culture, existential boredom and analogico-digital practices in cyberculture. Gibson and Vinge imaginatively investigate how speed and vision embed themselves in locative art and how art and politics collide in mediascapes. Going against the grain of seeing cyberculture as a potentially risky practice to the shaping of humanity and history, as is demonstrated in Debord’s and Virilio’s concepts of technological and digital dystopia and of a society turning into ideological spectacles, Stiegler envisions that a new paradigm of perception and of knowledge shall emerge from analogico-digital practices.

Cultural events that I will analyze in this dissertation center on two critical approaches developed by Virilio and Stiegler. In contrast to Stiegler’s theorization of a forward-dawning cyberculture, Virilio’s analysis of speed and vision in cyberculture focuses more on the reception and reification of ideology. Speaking from a producer or a programmer’s point of view—the point of view of digital formation builders out

7 of zeros and ones—Stiegler argues that an analogico-digital image-object lends a new mental image to our mind and that a transductive discourse of care is to reverse the programming industry, a discourse that turns coding into a creative production of miscellaneous products as well as a creative destruction of the environment. This

“new” mental image problematizes knowledge formation and invents a new paradigm that cannot be perceived by our bodily senses. Speaking from a consumer or a receiver’s point of view, Virilio contends that the gap between mental image and image-object is an illusion and a trick manipulated by machine’s speed. If the machine can make anything invisible visible, it can also make visible invisible as well.

The motor is the pivotal element of technological prosthesis that human senses cannot compete with. Virilio contends that the motor of new media generates ecstasy in humans that eventually deafens our senses into inertia. Stiegler, on the other hand, considers that new technology “brings new rules of movement to light, the description of this movement is its transformation. That is to say, it is not only its description, but rather its inscription: its invention” (“The Discrete Image” 161; emphasis original).

We can decode an implicit message that Stiegler’s analysis is built upon an apology for analogico-digital technology’s differences to reality, as he states that the analogico-digital image does not simply describe what was, but what has not been, and what could be. Virilio’s analysis meant to be premonitory whereas Stiegler’s theory enlightening. At the threshold of a new age, Virilio informs us what to prevent and Stiegler invites us what to expect as well as encouraging us to participate in the programming of the future.

Structure

Bearing the looming of the Singularity in mind, I deal with my research objectives in seven thematic chapters. The chapters deal with three aspects of the relation between

8 humanity on the one hand and technology-induced vision and speed on the other: the impacts, damages, and possible cures of mediated vision and computing speed. With accelerated speed and mediated vision as the crux of my dissertation, I investigate how they contribute to the production of the fantasy, symptoms, existential crises, and the means to maintain a symbiosis with superhuman intelligence. Chapter One entitled “Spectacular Capitalism” unfolds how capitalist ideology operates through online footage. Rosemary Jackson’s idea of “mirror text” and Guy Debord’s idea of

“society of the spectacle” justify my approach of using “eyeball culture” to read and interpret critical observations in cyberpunk writings and cybercultural practices. In cyberpunk literature, society consists of phantasmagoric architecture and furnishing where every signifier aims to capture attention. It is so fascinating that spectacles lure spectators into the fantastic world they project. Online footage is one of the spectacles that implement normalized knowledge. Literature of the Fantastic unveils the ideological gap between the lived and the representational life. Pseudo-desires are coded in spectacles and transmit the signal of false consciousness to the eyeball of spectators. The production of knowledge becomes static as it is mediated through the purpose of making commercial gain. With the same goal in sight, and more demand of false-desire, machine speed quickens to meet the objective faster.

With the help of accelerated speed, cybernauts strive to disappear into cyberspace. Chapter Two “Ubiquitous Computing and Accelerated Speed” discusses how the yearning to go beyond the physical world degenerates into an escapism where digital beings1 are willing to live solely as consciousness without the body. The body is taken as obsolete and detrimental to the transcendence of the being, instead of a vehicle carrying emotions that help the being to be happy. The soul is trapped inside

1 The term, “digital beings,” designates a group of people whose existence is heavily associated with and depends on the ebb and flow of the cybernetic network to which they are constantly connected.

9 the body, but it does not solve the problem by discarding the box. Memories that are tied to the body keep haunting digital beings. At the same time, digital beings keep away from facing their traumatic memories.

Chapter Three entitled “Traversing the Fantasy of Capitalism” examines the collective fantasy in a society dominated by digital media and ubiquitous computing.

Virilio once remarked, “With acceleration there is no more here and there, only the mental confusion of near and far, present and future, real and unreal—a mix of history, stories, and the hallucinatory utopia of communication technologies” (The Art of the

Motor 35). I explore how cybernauts who rake in the most motors paradoxically are not productive but, instead, inertly disappear in the process. In his The Aesthetics of

Disappearance (Hereafter Aesthetics), Virilio recognizes contemporary society as a picnoleptic society which demonstrates the aesthetics of disappearance. By picking up stories of accelerated culture and showing how they are contextualized in cyberpunk writing, I examine how Gibson’s description of otaku culture reflects his critique of accelerated culture, and how otaku lifestyle reduces or lends new meaning to existence. Particularly, this chapter examines how the protagonist Cayce’s confrontation with traumatic affect is capable of forging a shield that prevents her from turning into an interpassive subject and commodity fetish, something that happens to the masses.

Chapter Four, entitled “A Moment in the Great Object: Surveillance, Symptoms, and Politics of the Real-Time,” bearing on Virilio’s criticism of motor, assesses the possible risk of reducing the world into Great Object by outsourcing senses onto temporal objects. This chapter also deals with how the utopian desire to be absolutely secured and to know everything tragically cocoons us in total surveillance and military paranoia. “The world will then close in on itself, …we will have become a part or a moment in the Great Object” (The Art of the Motor 141). Drawing on

10 contemporary cybercultural events and two psychological and societal symptoms in

Gibson’s Pattern Recognition and Spook Country, which have been analyzed in the previous chapter, I argue that the speed culture in our society produces picnoleptic and interpassive civilians who prepare the society for becoming a Great Object.

Picnolepsy and interpassiveness are a premonitory sign of infonauts in demise. These symptoms elucidate the conditions in psychology and phenomenology behind the unmindful willingness to delegate to digital gadgets the authority of human senses, turning the gadgets into their proxy. For one, ubiquitous computing allows the state to micromanage civilians whose private data become pawns in drafting political strategy on a global scale. For another, pervasive computing makes it easier for international advertising agencies to execute branding schemes with ways of customizing commodities according to the situational needs of each client. The affair between the state and the advertising agency is furthermore complicated by the invention of

Augmented Reality technologies, as one of the various forms that the politics of the real-time takes. Augmented Reality gadgets in some ways enhance human senses and create what Virginia Woolf termed “a moment of being” whereas in other ways they turn the less cautious mind into, as Virilio puts it, “a moment in the Great Object.”

Chapter Five entitled “(Toward an) Ontological Appropriation of Digital Beings” discusses Arthur Kroker’s observation of two monumental symptoms in contemporary cyberculture. In his Will to Technology, Kroker argues that the contemporary plague of ubiquitous technicity has replaced metaphysics as a means of transcendence and “a postmodern epoch constituted by the sovereignty of (electronic) space has profound boredom as its ‘fundamental attunement’” (54). The disappearance of transcendence and emergence of unbearable boredom are premonitory to the practice of cyberculture. Bearing on Kroker’s observations on contemporary cyberculture’s two monumental symptoms—boredom and nihilism—

11 this chapter aims to provide a possible remedy for the metaphysical mal-adjustment of digital beings. In his analyses, Kroker uses eastern mysticism as an essential guideline to re-read Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Marx in order to re-appropriate technocracy to the concern of humanity. Nevertheless, he does not supply us with the quintessential ideas of eastern mysticism that make his theories vital for understanding digital beings.

I propose that eastern metaphysics, particularly the Hindu philosopher Nagarjuna’s ramification of ontology, is not only essential in re-reading theories on digital society but also capable of providing possible remedies for the existential crises of digital beings. Bearing upon Nagarjuna’s fourfold dialectical approach to ontology, digital beings could be liberated from boredom and nihilism, and the shackle of polemic entities between progress and void. Specifically, cybercultural practices exemplified in this chapter are brand culture created by Bigend and Tito’s Yoruba rituals, respectively a product of virtual capitalism that causes boredom and nihilism and an alternative ontological manifestation of life.

Chapter Six, entitled “Networks of Industrialized Synapses,” aims to argue that current cyberculture has seen more grammatization of the toxicity and less formation of the cure. The grammatization of industrialized programming inscribes a market force of knowledge where discipline of science is privileged over humanities, speed over slow culture, short-circuited over long-circuited synapses. In 2011 the European

Union has invested roughly € 9 billion on boosting “super-fast broadband1” internet speed. Other than EU, developing countries including Taiwan have been trying to accelerate the speed of the internet. It is believed that the faster the internet speed, the quicker the economic growth. One of the functions of literature has always been that of a spokesperson for humanity. In this particular case, its aim is to suspend short- circuited capitalism and initiate a transductive discourse of care that reverses grammatization of the industrialized programming. Vernor Vinge’s Rainbows End

(2006) embodies the position of literature to speculate on the mnemotechnological grammatization of Augmented Reality. Although the cultural significance of

Augmented Reality remains minimal in 2015, big data and fast internet speed make the near future ready for AR to become the next phase of the User Interface after the command line and the Graphic User Interface (GUI). Chris Grayon spearheads the invention of AR. He directs our attention to the fact that: “Through technology with digital memory, which went beyond our human capacity, it would give us the ability to recall a vast database of memory at a moment’s notice” (Augmented Reality: An

Emerging Technologies Guide to AR 120; emphasis mine). In line with Grayon, Tish

Shute adds that “the future of AR is data-driven….[and] the augmented experience is all about situational awareness…” (118). It is crucial to note that the ability to enlarge human capacity is to “recall” or access digital memory from a database that can be easily edited to the narrative of those in power and through which the long-termism can be curtailed. On the other hand, the digital being as code drift also benefits from the capability of humans to reposition themselves in the transductive network. Clearly, situational awareness is the important factor here. There is relatively little discussion on the mutual impact between AR and literature. However, medicine, military, entertainment, commerce, and art, among other disciplines and industries, have been incorporating this new technics into their future development. The position of literature in the digital area can be examined through the issues that emerge from the confrontation between literature and AR. Programming as our current technics takes the form of informatics and carries the means of writing history and knowledge transference. Having been programmed by speed culture, the synapses of digital beings are configured by the technics to be vigilant and forgetful at once. I argue that

Googlized memories, BRAIN Initiative, and Foc.us are projects of industrialized programming that are toxic to our noetic and existential well-being as the ways in

13 which they are programmed render the brain forgetful and addicted to speed. Our synapses are configured by the grammar of speed programming to be short-circuited instead of long-circuited and more accustomed to hyperattention instead of deep meditation.

The previous chapters heavily stressed the negative impact of cyberculture on humans; Chapter Seven, by contrast, focuses on how cyberculture benefits contemporary society by engaging with it positively and critically. The inspection of the side-effects of cyberculture does not try to demonize or discourage the use of the internet. On the contrary, these critical comments strive to crystallize potential challenges digital beings are or will be facing in the digital society. Since the degree of trust in technological gadgets and digital infrastructure paves the way for the establishment of a healthy digital society, clarifying the possible doubts will not only prevent digital citizens from avoiding using digital facilities but also liberate digital citizens from the distrust of technologies. Chapter Seven, entitled “Transductive

Discourse of Care,” focuses on how cyberculture benefits contemporary society by engaging with it positively and critically. In this positive manifestation, the textual analyses and cultural practices that cyberculture produces will rest more on the reappropriation of technology to the benefits of humans, such as rethinking industrial programming through digital art practices, enhancing vision through analogico-digital practices, imagining a not-yet-future through the lens of digital culture production and inspecting the emerging production of Augmented Reality as the emblem of a dawning culture. While current practices of cyberculture are mostly short-circuiting synapses, symptoms of speed and adrenal fatigue emerge that call for our attention.

14 by a discourse of care that encourages digital beings to pace themselves and distribute their limited attention toward the critical matters of the society. A discourse of care counteracts the production of dopamine by suspending the synapses from circulating in the infinite loop of a reward circuit of speed and obsolescence engineered by late capitalism. It is, however, more rewarding in the long-run regarding overall cultural, social, and economic development. American scientist and science fiction writer

Vernor Vinge’s Rainbows End, Australian artist Benjamin Forster’s “A Written

Perspective,” No Somos Delito’s Hologram demonstration, and Reiner Strasser and

M.D. Coverley’s “ii -- in the white darkness: about [the fragility of] memory” taken together form a discourse of care that aims to challenge the industrialized memories and serve as a possible paradigm of speculation and suspension if not reverse- engineering of the current techno-capitalized memories. These cultural practices cultivate long-term vision, intensify elaboration of memories that have been forgotten by humans in the process of accelerated disappearance, and serve as a critical lens to see the world as the naked eye cannot. The discourse of care makes it possible to extend the short-circuited synapses of the brain and the society and in so doing suspend the accelerated destruction of late-capitalist progress.

The conclusion recapitulates the theme of the dissertation and its importance and provides a cross-text review of the depictions of vision and speed in the previous chapters, in the hope of bringing forth a humanist vision and speed and to provide a relatively holistic panoramic view of accelerated culture’s significance in contemporary cyberpunk literature and cyberculture. If Utopia projects quietude and a sense of happiness in our mind, the way to utopia in our contemporary society is to achieve this by means of switching on the motor of being. The motor, without affinity to productivity, and an accomplice of progress, is appropriated to activate inert being to yearn for happiness. In a hyper-industrialized society, happiness consist less of

15 having the leisure of making options, than of narrowing down choices and concentrating on the one choice. A late capitalist society has provided us with ostensible possibilities while leaving us no will to decide what to do. A new paradigm of vision and speed generated out of analogico-digital practices based on care must go beyond corporate constraints, opening up not only new ways of surviving, but also of inhabiting late capitalist society with a sense of ease.

Chapter One: Spectacular Capitalism

Introduction

The past decade has seen a great number of websites that provide services for uploading and downloading videos. A video clip or footage present fragments of strangers’ lives born as figments of someone’s imagination. A digital nomad can be easily lost in the abyss of browsing one piece of footage after another. In his Pattern

Recognition, William Gibson brings readers into a post-9/11 society where mourning is performed and diluted by means of a global consumption of spectacles of footages, movies, and brand names. Gibson’s novel is well-known for its representation of cyberspace as a defamiliarized space of reality and its description of the near future as the unseen of the society. His continued effort to celebrate the subversion of internet hacking as an act of decoding the most encrypted and critical moments in history also is at work in Pattern Recognition. Alex Link and Phillip E. Wegner reckon that

Gibson’s novel can be discussed in relation to the issue of globalization in literature.

In his “Recognizing the Patterns,” Wegner argues that how we define literature is an interrogation of what globalization means to us. While Alex and Wegner emphasize the significance of globalization in the novel, Lauren Berlant and John Johnston take the novel as a case study of human emotions in contemporary society. In his

“Intuitionists: History and the Affective Event” Berlant analyzes the protagonist

Cayce Pollard’s acute sensitivity to brand names as an act of tracing an intuitive sense of the historical present in scenes of ongoing trauma (864). Following Berlant’s discussion on traumatic affect, Johnston explicates how important technology is in determining the mapping of traumatic affect. Instead of analyzing Cayce’s traumatic affect as most critics have done before, I would like to discuss the function of the

17 spectacle and of fantastic literature in homogenizing knowledge in society, thus unveiling the ideological gap between the lived and the spectacular-representational life.

In his Fantasy: the Literature of Subversion, Rosemary Jackson states: “The fantastic traces the unsaid and the unseen of culture: that which has been silenced, made invisible, covered over and made ‘absent’” (4). Aside from the function of unveiling false consciousness, fantastic literature also criticizes the everlasting closure of social mores and capitalist ideology. Pattern Recognition challenges the position of media in manipulating knowledge, history, and audience attention in terms of the logic of marketing. Marketing interpellates individuals into docile subjects by means of projecting a commercialized utopia based on ideology-laden consumption.

Following Louis Althusser, Louis Marin, in his work on degenerated utopias, remarks:

“Ideology is the representation of the imaginary relationship individuals maintain with their real conditions of existence” (Utopics: The Semiological Play of Textual Spaces

239). In a world dictated by images of false consciousness, ideology is reified in spectacles. “The spectacle,” as Debord remarks in his The Society of the Spectacle, “is the acme of ideology, for in its full flower it exposes and manifests the essence of all ideological systems” (151). This chapter aims to extrapolate from Debord’s insight and to show how the one-way street of ideologization is manifested through online footage. I argue that the capitalist class in its fascist scheme, using footage as a way of mediatization, deploys and markets homogenized knowledge to bury history in culture. The lived time is replaced by spectacular time and existence filled with pseudo-desires. Yet, the fluid language in Pattern Recognition functions as a mirror reflecting lived everyday life as it manages to mediate ideology.

Mirror

“Five hours’ New York jet lag and Cayce Pollard wakes in Camden Town to the dire and ever-circling wolves of disrupted circadian rhythm. It is that flat and spectral non- hour, awash in limbic tides, brainstem stirring fitfully, flashing inappropriate reptilian demands for sex, food, sedation, all of the above, and none really an option now”

(Pattern Recognition 1 ; emphasis mine). Cayce wakes up from her sleep only to find herself stuck in a bad dream within Debord’s society of the spectacle that is built upon a “pseudo-cyclical time” (110) and consumption of “spectacular commodities” (112).

The border between spectacles and the world is neutralized by images of a homogenous culture.

A mirror, which serves no less as a medium reflecting reality than as a frame mediating ideologies, is an essential optical device to this phantasmagoric society.

The function of mirror can be understood in terms of Jackson’s analysis of mirror’s optical effects (see fig.1.).

lens

image Object

The paraxial

(or mirror)

Fig. 1. The mirror’s optical effects from Rosemary Jackson; “The ‘real’ under scrutiny”; Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion.

The object on the right refers to phenomenal reality as we experience it every day, whereas the image on the left refers to mediated reality. The paraxial area, Jackson notes: “could be taken to represent the spectral region of the fantastic, whose imaginary world is neither entirely ‘real’ (object), nor entirely ‘unreal’ (image), but is located somewhere indeterminately between the two” (18). In other words, fantastic fiction represents the paraxial area which serves as “style of negation” (Debord 144) and “the fluid language of anti-ideology” (Debord 146) capable of initiating a dialogue with ideology and expressing a critical viewpoint to history’s direction. The visible universe on the right-hand side of the mirror is an illusion produced out of the object/Idea that is false consciousness disguised as truth. Since differences between object and image will destroy a systematic construction of utopia, discrepancies are to be erased by the author of the world from the production of knowledge. To the dismay of this mysterious author, Cayce’s singular talent or abnormality—she is allergic to trademarks—makes her immune to the erasure of subjectivity under the flood of the homogeneity of culture. She concedes to be a fashion “victim” because the mere glance of brand names activates a series of phobic attacks. “CPUs. Cayce Pollard

Units. That’s what Damien calls the clothing she wears. CPUs are either black, white, or gray, and ideally seem to have come into this world without human intervention”

(Pattern Recognition 8). Her dress code is one of the signifiers of truth, as well as signification of encryption. CPU, an acronym of Central Process Unit, the heart of the computer, is UPC as seen in the mirror. UPC stands for Universal Product Code, the bar codes that we usually see on commodities. Apparel, as one of the media that deliver capitalist messages, becomes one of the serial codes of ideology and, more importantly, the central process unit of the spectacular society.

Marketing Homogenized Knowledge

Dominated by the hegemony of capitalism, the society portrayed in Pattern

Recognition is modeled on the scheme of Totalitarianism and aims to unify individuals from the production to the dissemination of homogenized spectacular commodities. Cayce Pollard’s apophenia—“the spontaneous perception of connection and meaningfulness in unrelated things” (Pattern Recognition 117) —acknowledges that the cultural memory has been shaped by fragmentary footage circulated on the internet and will direct the masses to the next big trend. The process of marketing homogenous knowledge is divided into four stages: (1) Production of pseudo- traumatic events by seven (sin) sisters, a concentration camp formulated by big corporations to confine artists’ creations within the frame of the capitalist economic and political concern. (2) Artists’ mental projection of pseudo-events and their representation: The T-shaped armament stuck in artist Nora’s brain is symbolically an inerasable traumatic event which has to be worked out through creating artworks. On the one hand, capitalists strive to commodify Nora’s traumatic memory and market this pseudo-event by circulating fragmentary footage on the internet; on the other hand, a secret society endeavors to decipher ideologies embedded in the footage. (3)

Dissemination of pseudo-events in and mapping of the T-bone city: At this stage, exchange value dominates all artistic, ethical, and other concerns, and manifests itself in T-bone city’s being overwhelmed by numbers and subjugated spectactors’ consciousness. (4) Since reception of footage is several degrees removed from its original source, the traumatic event itself has become ideology that commodifies individuals. There is embedded in the footage a hypnotic message that presents this ideology as the truth—the truth that the world created by Nora is reality, and that to buy associated commodities shown in the footage will cure your trauma. The pattern of the totalitarian scheme in the society of the spectacle, from T-shaped armament, through T-bone city, to Trend’s complex relationship can be mapped out as the

21 following graph (see fig. 2.).

footage Seven/sin sisters Armament stuck in the brain: Map of City shapes like a T-bone Appoint Inerasable marking of memory and is encoded with watermarks criminals to find

images for Nora 28374658193 F:F:F Trend T 46 37

47 The footage maker’s brain Decoding

Cayce Pollard Secret society

Fig. 2. The pattern of totalitarian scheme is demonstrated in this image.

In this graph, the dotted line refers to the process of unveiling truth, whereas the solid line refers to the production of ideology. In terms of Jackson’s theory of optical stratification, the dotted line refers to the narrative of the paraxial dimension, whereas the solid line refers to the representation of commercial ideology. The idea that the mirror-world is a space that retains heterogeneity in America is furthermore explained in Cayce’s conversation with a Chinese hacker about the conspiracy of the representative of a global advertising agency. Deciphering Bigend’s plot, the hacker remarks: “pretty soon there is no mirror to be on the side of” (108) because Bigend plans to dissolve regional borders and differences by means of global marketing strategies. If the production of homogenous knowledge and time by the advertising industry continues, the mirror will cease to reflect or to negate the commodified world

22 where “all experience [is] reduced, by the spectral hand of marketing, to price-point variations on the same thing” (Pattern Recognition 352). The world will soon be framed by a single image, and all borders will have disappeared.

Mediatization

Media, the major platform of spectacles from Napoléon’s time to the present day, have always been the vehicle of ideology. If media are devoid of freedom from interference by any form of power, they can easily be tainted with propaganda. “By the time ideology,” Debord notes,

became absolute because it possesses absolute power, has been

transformed from a fragmentary knowledge into a totalitarian lie, truly

historical thinking has for its part been so utterly annihilated that history

itself, even at the level of the most empirical knowledge, can no longer

exist. Totalitarian bureaucratic society lives in a perpetual present in

which everything that has happened earlier exists for it solely as a space

accessible to its police. (76)

The danger of media lies in their potential to become a thought police that regulates individuals to obey what the state dictates. In his The Art of the Motor, Paul Virilio elaborates how Napoléon founded the industrial press to control civilians’ minds.

“This was a system originally set up for information gathering, investigation, and censorship with the help of police minister Joseph Fouché and his disciples, such as the famous Charles Louis Havas. It also had the financial backing of Gabriel Julien

Ouvrard, the dubious banker who tendered for army supplies” (6). This system is what Virilio calls “mediatization” whereby media are in the service of political and economical interests. In a society of the spectacle, the media regime commits a coup d’état that dictates consumers to meet its ideal state—a phantasmagoria formulated by

23 capitalists. In the process of mediatization, messages are filtered, consciousnesses framed, and truth distorted. Virilio remarks that how we receive knowledge and perceive reality is through “identifying with the alter ego, literally, this other me that allowed us to ‘see,’ or rather conceive, the real at a distance and that meant our point of view had a natural social relief. A bit the way the slight gap between one’s eyes produces the depth of the image one perceives, its stereoscopy, thanks to the slight spatiotemporal lag in ocular motility” (8 emphasis original). In his research, Virilio explains how media block the vision of the “other me,” or the “stereoscopy.” He employs Marcel Pagnol’s reflection on the cinema’s projector here. Pagnol observes that in the cinema, spectators are assimilated into one single unity and can only see the film in homogenous fashion. It is because the “projector, designed to optically replace the alter ego (the other me) by enabling the viewer glued to his seat to see as present what is naturally absent and outside the restricted circle of their visual reach, in fact eliminates the stereoscopic couple that previously composed and gave life to the social depth of the real” (8 emphasis original). In other words, without actively perceiving the cinematic narrative, audiences’ alter egos are being framed by the projector, whereas the eyes are unconsciously and passively being integrated into the singular vision provided by the projector’s point of view. The world represented in the cinema then becomes the only version audiences take to be real. This totality of vision alludes to how footage embedded with false consciousness becomes a universal trend, which is, in other words, a cultural cleansing. This “camera effect” (Virilio 10) derived from consuming movies in the past decades is even more poisonous to subjectivity in today’s society. As Debord puts it: “Imprisoned in a flat universe bounded on all sides by the spectacle’s screen, the consciousness of the spectator has only figmentary interlocutors which subject it to a one-way discourse on their commodities and the politics of those commodities” (153). During the last few years,

24 mobile devices have replaced cinema for interpellating the spectator. As one carries a mobile device anywhere one goes, one’s supposed freedom of actively viewing a movable screen paradoxically turns one into an even more captive spectator.

Footageheads are granted the freedom to carry their mobile devices everywhere they go, but have to pay the price of being hypnotized all the time. If we consider the production of footage as the production of knowledge that configure our interpretation of history, then Bigend the interpreter is a master of history who controls the footage and then disseminates it to the masses who consume pseudo-events or ghost-events instead of experiencing real events. “My passion,” confesses Bigend to Cayce at their first meeting, “is marketing, advertising, media strategy, and when I first discovered the footage, that is what responded in me. I saw attention focused daily on a product that may not even exist….The most brilliant marketing ploy of this very young century” (Pattern Recognition 67).

Marketing and advertisement are not merely ways of making a profit, but ways to discipline and deploy civilians. As Damien, the documentary director of a punk archeology project would say, truth “is closer to allergy, a morbid and sometimes violent reactivity to the semiotics of the marketplace” (Pattern Recognition 2). It is through advertisement that the propaganda or chess master’s message is communicated, and it is through Cayce’s apophenia and allergy to trademarks that the ideology of capitalism is exposed. In addition to how ideology is produced by media, advertising, and marketing strategies, the footage’s content and its uploading process will also reveal how history is being manipulated by the chess master. Cayce discovers that the footage is shared globally in stenographic ways—“concealing information by spreading it throughout other information” (Pattern Recognition 78)— instrumental for disseminating state propaganda while disguising it as spectacular commodities. The footage is an allegory of capitalism where truth is replaced by false

25 consciousness and history is replaced by fragmentary false events. In a conversation,

Stella (Nora’s sister and distributor of footage) and Cayce debate whether or not the footage as production of linear narrative is going to end in the future. “One day,” it will, Stella believes, if Nora ever “will start to edit as she edited her student film”

(Pattern Recognition 312), i.e. heavily stressed by the punk spirit of the 80s. Upon showing Cayce around Nora’s workspace, once a squatted house, Stella’s mind streams nostalgically back to the anarchistic spirit of the past. Her longing for the past is abruptly buffered by seeing “a square of clear acrylic: laser-etched in its core are the Coca-Cola logo, a crude representation of the Twin Towers, and the words ‘WE

REMEMBER’” (Pattern Recognition 313). Stella seems to say that Nora can no longer be the angel of history at a time where traumatic memories are mere slogans and commodified in global marketing. Nora’s footage is nullified as “an impersonal memory that was the memory of the administration of society…The masters who, protected by myth, enjoyed the private ownership of history, themselves did so at first in the realm of illusion” (Debord 96-7). The footage is Gibson’s metaphor for history: is it completed or still progressing, and is it written in linear-time or cyclical time?

Cayce’s apophenia points her to the footage’s fishy uploading process and her curiosity for truth motivates her to meet up with Bigend who she thinks knows the answer to her question. She says to Bigend that “in terms of actual sequential order of uploaded segments,…they clearly aren’t in a logical narrative sequence. Either they’re uploaded randomly…” (Pattern Recognition 66). Not waiting for her to finish, Bigend cuts in, “Or very carefully, intending to provide the illusion of randomness…the footage has already been the single most effective piece of guerrilla marketing ever”

(66-7). Indeed, as epitomized in the novel, footage is layered by diplomatic history, administrative impersonal memory, and a means of marketing the society into

26 spectacular capitalism. The world beyond Pattern Recognition, this figment of

Gibson’s imagination, is more flexible and less apocalyptic than the novel entails.

Conclusion

In an interview, “This Strange Institution Called Literature,” Jacques Derrida stresses the possibility of fictionality in and responsibility of literature in the twentieth century.

It is exactly literature’s fictionality that makes it possible to shape the future and rethink the past and its responsibility as a utopian institution to “say everything, in every way” (37). Kelly McNally, a therapist Cayce has been seeing in the wake of

September 11, writes her a letter at the end of the novel: “There definitely are, in the literature, instances of panic disorders being relieved through the incidence of critical event stress, although the mechanism is far from understood” (Pattern Recognition

365). Taking Cayce’s mental condition as a microcosm of the society, McNally’s diagnosis of Cayce echoes Derrida’s concern about literature’s responsibility in contemporary society. Instances of panic disorders, for Cayce, are allergic reactions to brand names and hypersensitivity to global trends. By writing into fiction the

“incidence of critical event stress” of the society, Pattern Recognition represents the social illness and reveals the truth of global mediatization. Throughout the novel,

Cayce’s allergy to brand names can be taken as a metaphor for Debord’s alertness to the society of the spectacle which Gibson has given fictional shape in Pattern

Recognition. While fictionality’s function is to be subversive, what is yet to be discussed is the ethical issue involved in digging up truth from unbearable memories.

Chapter Two: Ubiquitous Computing and Accelerated Speed

Introduction

Ubiquitous computing and the frequent usage of digital media render surfing the net the easiest and quickest means for infonauts to escape from reality. Just like air, the computing and information flow is invisible to the naked eye, but prevalent in our daily life. William Gibson’s cyberpunk fiction Neuromancer (1984) envisions how, in the future, the internet’s immediacy and speed are going to change how humans contemplate their own existence. In cyberpunk writing, Gibson represents a hacker whose neurons are cut off and subsequently develops suicidal episodes, in hope of bringing forth issues of and interconnected networks of existence, body, speed, memory, and cyberspace. In the novel, cyberspace transforms into a utopia where human consciousness is interwoven seamlessly with information flows, whereas the body generates friction and thus is considered a troublesome burden to the flow.

Borrowing the definition of “escape velocity” from physics, this chapter aims to probe the phenomenon of Case’s escapade into cyberspace, and transgression out of its confinement. In terms of physics, escape velocity is defined as “a speed sufficient to overcome the gravitational force of a planet” (“escape velocity, n.1”). The more emotion the body carries the more gravitational pull it generates toward cyberspace.

The first half of this chapter probes Case’s desire to escape from the body’s confinement by means of uploading his consciousness into high-speed teletopia. The second half of this chapter aims to discuss the relationship between memory and dromosphere.

In 1994, Ollivier Dyens remarked that this novel is the first creative fiction that ever brought up the issue of the cognitive cyborg. He reckons that cyberpunk

28 narrative attempts to describe emotion, nevertheless neglecting the feelings of humans and cyberspatial organisms (194). Dyens points out this new theme of research and how this issue is closely related to everyday life whereas Gibson elucidates the reasons behind cyberpunk’s subversive narratives. In Gibson’s interview with Larry

McCaffery, he mentions that the special effect of cyberpunk narrative is its illustration of the relation between memory as an editing mechanism and the mental activities of recognition and identity formation. He remarks: “computers in my books are simply a metaphor for human memory: I’m interested in the hows and whys of memory, the ways it defines who and what we are, in how easily memory is subjected to revision”

(270). Aside from the emotions of cyberspatial organisms and cyberpunk narratives,

Wendy Wahl theorizes the relation of Molly and Case into that of Freud and Dora.

She discusses in particular the confrontation between body and consciousness. Wahl contends that psychotherapy is the means to discipline human bodies in the twenty- first century. Direct confrontation with psychotherapy is doomed to be incorporated into its system as psychotherapy is likened to cybernetic network system. Resistance to the system ultimately becomes a feedback to this circuit of power. Although Dyens observes that cyberpunk narrative seemingly neglects discussions on emotions and feelings, he does not delve into the cause of this insouciance. In the framework of my approach to this chapter, I propose to connect three pivotal principles and investigate how they altogether serve as means and embodiment of cyberpunk culture. Firstly, cyberpunk narrative marries advanced biotechnical organisms with humanist instincts such as emotions. Secondly, central to cyberpunk is the oblivion of memory, attributed to an intentionally blocking off emotions. Adding speed as a third configuration aside from memory and emotion, this chapter intends to delve into the intra-discourse of speed on body and the yearning of human beings for an accelerated utopia.

In Gibson’s interview with David Wallace-Wells, he recalls the original story of the fantastic creation of cyberpunk narrative. He points out that the effects of cyberpunk narrative attempt to create a reading experience that carries readers into a sense of loss of direction or in an alien place. This kind of reading experience, according to him, is the most exciting thing in envisaging and reading a futuristic story. When he was walking on the streets of Vancouver, he walked past arcades where he witnessed kids who were so immersed in the games and “what they wanted was to be inside the games, within the notional space of the machine. The real world had disappeared for them—it had completely lost its importance. They were in that notional space, and the machine in front of them was the brave new world.” So begins the cyberspace, in place of the mainstream imagination at that time—outer space and spaceship—as an imaginative future space. Other than the fantastic invention of cyberspace, Gibson envisages that products of advanced technology, prosthetic- memory and de-railed mentality as such will confront humans in the future. He considers a depressive girl’s mental condition a parallel to the mental state of contemporary society. He recounts that when the girl finishes her shock therapy, her friend will take her to a fish market. At first, she looks at the fish without paying much attention. After a while, she finally comes to her senses, and displays an emotion mixed with shock and awe. He wants to represent a modern society that experiences collectively what the girl experiences: being out of touch with reality after the shock therapy, being in a state of wonderment, and then coming back to its senses.

Gibson’s cyberpunk narrative perfectly describes modern man’s intermittent mental state, at times connected to, at others disconnected from reality. What is the relationship between mental state and speed? How do the state of losing oneself in speed and its side-effect of inertia influence one another in the back-and-forth

30 between the network of cyberspace and reality? If memory is the pivotal element in shaping existence, memory, and history, how does accelerated speed configure the means of accessing and editing memory? Neuromancer deals with issues such as internet and virtual culture, media and information technology, machines as extensions of human body, market mechanism and capitalism, postwar and information war; in so doing, cyberpunk narrative fictionalizes social phenomena, in hopes of unveiling conundrums of information technology, politics and humanity.

This chapter begins with escape velocity, and intends to investigate how, when the body escapes to cyberspace, the information flow mobilizes the body; how the body numbs down to inertia when it stays in high speed; and how memory pulls accelerated consciousness back to a humanist speed driven by human body. When memory becomes a puppet of power, capable of being installed, accessed, edited, how does the body then evoke consciousness’s false yearning?

It all begins in the big bang of the information universe. Popular usage of the internet and information overload means for Paul Virilio the phenomenon of acceleration. He observes that modern society can be diagnosed as a picnoleptic and deranged society. In an interview with Nicolas Gane, Donna Haraway responds to

Gane’s doubts about how to tackle the constantly evolving and endlessly changing connections between various entities, including, “chip, gene, cyborg, seed, foetus, brain, bomb, database, [and] ecosystem,” (“When We Have Never Been Human,

What Is To Be Done?” 155) Haraway notes:

Things are changing fast and I believe that’s a fact. But I believe there are

lots of continuities that we forget if we get a kind of euphorics of speed in

our thinking. There is a Virilio-esque euphorics of speed aspect of cultural

theory that misleads us. I’m just as struck by the thick continuities as by

the profound re-shapings and the rapid flickering changes that are taking

place. I think we need to pay attention to the thick continuities as a kind of

prophylactic against the euphorics of speed as a cultural aesthetic or as a

cultural-theoretic aesthetic. That’s one thing. The other is that we don’t

need methods so much as practices, and we’re already engaged in them.

(155)

Haraway suggests that the task of cultural critics is to focus on thick continuities instead of the euphorics of speed. If literature’s task is to evoke feelings in readers’ minds, then speed prevents us to really “feel” something. In his book Aesthetics of

Disappearance, Virilio argues that in contrast to our unconscious life which experiences a paradoxical sleep (rapid-eye-movement sleep), our conscious life experiences a paradoxical waking (15). The phenomenon is spreading and growing in the mass majority of people’s lives. A society with a mass phenomenon of picnolepsy is thus coined a picnoleptic society where our consciousness is taken to be inferior to computer screens. As Virilio notes: “…the faculty of feeling is in essence epileptic and is subject to Reason and computer screen” (32). The effect of the real is privileged by “readiness of a lumpiness of a luminous emission” (18), which suggests that the real-time colonizes present reality. This phenomenon implies that technology is held as truth or the “pseudo-state of rational wakefulness” (42). Feeling is subject to cybernetic discourse and time given its position to motion. Cyberspace’s real time colonizes present time because the speed of light is too fast for our body to keep up with. Yet our body is likened to engine that cannot be activated without a certain motor or speed. The issue at stake is to construct a new paradigm of perception, or a

(post)humanist speed. In his “The Shrinking Effect,” Virilio discloses that “With acceleration there is no more here and there, only the mental confusion of near and far, present and future, real and unreal—a mix of history, stories, and the hallucinatory utopia of communication technologies” (The Art of the Motor 35). The magic of the

32 hallucinatory utopia is based on the “trick effects” of machines (The Art of the Motor

54) which blindfold eyes and derail consciousness. The naked eye cannot catch up with the speed of the machine, so the machine is capable of camouflaging as military equipment that mixes false with true information, without being discovered. Gibson’s cyberpunk narrative and Virilio’s cultural critique both elucidate that the human body carries a consciousness that goes picnoleptic and deranged at once. In the narrative, these deranged humans are fictionalized as meat puppets and colonized by a cyberspace characterized as a hallucinatory utopia. In Virilio’s observation notes, they are the sampled group in his Information Bomb (2000): “the ‘Net junkies’,

‘Webaholics’ and other forms of cyberpunk struck down with IAD (Internet

Addiction Disorder), their memories turned into junk-shops great dumps of images of all kinds and origins, used and shop-soiled symbols, piled up any old how”

(Information Bomb 38). The addiction of Net Junkies is attributed to escaping from the reality and filling the void of offline existence by consuming mass amount of information. This subjective motive of addiction goes hand in hand with an objective motive developed by cyberspace’s circulation and motion—a space dominated by light and speed—the dromosphere. According to Virilio, this nuance reconfigures how humans experience time and space and forms a new paradigm of perception on space and time. In his Information Bomb, Virilio argues:

Past, present and future – that old tripartite division of the time continuum –

then cedes primacy to the immediacy of a tele-presence which is akin to a

new type of relief. This ia a relief not of the material thing, but of the event,

in which the fourth dimension (that of time) suddenly substitutes for the

third: the material volume loses its geometrical value as an ‘effective

presence’ and yields to an audiovisual volume whose self-evident ‘tele-

presence’ easily wins out over the nature of the fact. (118)

This hallucinatory utopia, in fact, is constructed by tele-space’s and tele-time’s physical characteristics as well as the abrupt relief and immediacy as we perceived. It is parallel to the phenomenon of floating perceived by astronauts who escape from earth to outer space, when gravity is canceled. In this event, the fourth dimension’s real-time overwrites the traditional time continuum, thereby allowing humans to perceive tele-presence’s relief and effective present. Such a teletopia is overwhelmed by dromopolitics, and dominated by the absolute speed of computing amongst the information flow. This absolute computing speed ultimately replaces the relative speed of the automobile engine (Information Bomb 120). In other words, the contemporary world hovered over by Virilio’s dromosphere and aligning with

Gibson’s cyberpunk narrative is on the way to fine-tune the perception of time and space that it allows. Finger swiping and mouse clicking on a shopping website are capable of substituting for a ride to the store.

Computing speed does not only make our life easier, but also contributes to information overload and the forming of a dromosphere, and determines how we perceive time, space, and define existence. The new perception of time and space also has its effects on our bodies. Modern men bifurcate into one group of cocooners and another of hyperactive men. In his The Art of Motor (1998) Virilio highlights that in hypermodern society, the motor shrinks from large into miniature machinery, from canals, bridges, and roads outside of our body through prostheses to nutrients inside our body (100-01). He evinces that “Not just chemical substances after the modern fashion in stimulants such as alcohol, coffee, tobacco, drugs, and steroids, but also technological substances, the products of biotechnology, such as the intelligent chips that are allegedly able to superexcite our mental faculties” (The Art of Motor 102).

Owing to advanced technology, motors assimilate with human bodies in order to perform in full capacity. Theoretically speaking, teletopia’s motor enhances labor

34 capacity with its convenience, immediacy, and efficiency. Nevertheless, this practically enhanced labor does not accommodate the need of human bodies to take a break. In reality, the human body becomes inert and produces desires to consume surpluses of excitement. Virilio contends that “Postmodern man’s inertia, his passivity, demands a surplus of excitement not only through patently unnatural sports practices, but also in habitual activities in which the body’s emancipation due to real-time remote-control technology eliminates the traditional need for physical strength or muscular exertion” (The Art of Motor 103). With the help of technology, hyperhuman’s desire for supervitality will come true. However, even though the human body needs to be triggered to motivate perceptive motors, when it is over- motivated, motors exceed their humane capacity and result in a numbing down of motors into a state of inertia. It progresses towards passivity instead of productivity.

Human bodies ultimately are colonized by the dromosphere.

A Flight from Flesh

The first half of this chapter probes into Case’s desire to escape from the body’s confinement by means of uploading his consciousness into a high-speed teletopia. In the world of teletopia, the human body is considered a trouble maker, as its motor is way slower than the speed of information flow. The novel takes place in Chat (short for Chatsubo), situated in Japan. Case is a regular in this bar. He chitchats with the bartender as usual. Tonight he recollects the time when he was a console cowboy:

“He’d operated on an almost permanent adrenaline high, a byproduct of youth and proficiency, jacked into a custom cyberspace deck that projected his disembodied consciousness into the consensual hallucination that was the matrix” (Neuromancer

5).This scenario depicts how Case’s physical motor connects to the motor of consensual hallucination, or teletopia with zero friction. It so happens that his

35 consciousness disappears into the matrix. The human body is so immersed in the superexcitement of speed and frictionless efficiency that the mere presence of body is forgotten by consciousness. Because Case stole things from his employer, his neurons are destroyed by a hit-man. “For Case, who’d lived for the bodiless exultation of cyberspace, it was the Fall. In the bars he’d frequented as a cowboy hotshot, the elite stance involved a certain relaxed contempt for the flesh. The body was meat. Case fell into the prison of his own flesh” (Neuromancer 6). Meat is a derogatory term for describing the human body as meat designates neither power nor spirit in connection to consciousness. Meat for Case is a class lower than consciousness whereas consciousness belongs to the elite because the motor of neuron transmission is faster than the speed of a physical motor. Even more significant than the speed of the motor is the eternal preservation of consciousness through uploading data of consciousness on the internet, without a corruptible human body as its carrier. However, neurons are the conduits between human body and cyberspace. As his neurons are destroyed, the gravity of his body pulls him down from cyberspace back to the space of body. Case becomes a fallen angel, his position degrading from elite to plebeian. Specifically the destruction of neurons means that the only way to cyberspace is disconnected. As a result, harboring the longing to reconnect his neurons to cyberspace, he comes to

Chiba’s organ clinic in Japan:

A year here and he still dreamed of cyberspace, hope fading nightly. All

the speed he took, all the turns he’d taken and the corners he’d cut in

Night City, and still he’d see the matrix in his sleep, bright lattices of logic

unfolding across that colorless void….The Sprawl was a long strange way

home over the Pacific now, and he was no console man, no cyberspace

cow boy[….]But the dreams came on in the Japanese night like livewire

voodoo, and he’d cry for it, cry in his sleep, and wake alone in the dark,

curled in his capsule in some coffin hotel, his hands clawed into the

bedslab, temperfoam bunched between his fingers, try to reach the console

that wasn’t there. (Neuromancer 4-5)

Once a console cowboy, Case is so used to living in the high speed of information flows that he cannot bear to live in the low speed of physical space. As long as his addiction to cyberspace’s accelerated speed is triggered, a dose of “speed” more or less activates a parallel speed of cyberspace. In other words, he executes a plan of becoming hyperhuman by consuming “speed” to accelerate the motor of his body to a speed compatible to the motor of supervitality. This longing to live in cyberspace, the place Case identifies as “home,” can only be approximated in his dreams. Meanwhile even though his consciousness inhabits a flesh that lies in a coffin hotel signifying death, a desire to grasp cyberspace seems to launch his consciousness towards the console. Not even with a dose of “speed” can he reconnect neurons to consensual hallucinations.

Knowing that all his savings are now in the possessions of drug dealers, and his neurons will never be rebuilt, Case is thrust into “a kind of terminal overdrive, hustling fresh capital with a cold intensity that he seemed to belong to someone else”

(Neuromancer 7). Cyberspace means to him a place like home, a consensual hallucination, a hyper-speed heaven, simply put, the moxie of his motor of existence, and what he defines as living. Intakes of ecstasy and speeding up are means to approaching cyberspace. The moment he comes to his senses and realizes that he cannot replicate perceptions of living in cyberspace, he accelerates the speed of living to the point of disappearance. “Ninsei wore him down until the street itself came to seem the externalization of some death wish, some secret poison he hadn’t known he carried. Night City was like a deranged experiment in social Darwinism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button”

(Neuromancer 7). Night City epitomizes a hyper-industrialized and commercialized society where social progress accelerates. On the one hand, competition and acceleration are means of survival. One who slows down when not concentrating on speeding up the progress becomes a replaceable organ in Chiba’s organ market. On the other hand, caught between an oscillating force of boredom and ecstasy, a hyperactive man commits to a suicidal motor and continuously demands life for new experiments.

Case only finds solace in chitchat with Ratz in the bar. He tells himself: unless you go to a fixed location and share stories with a particular person, you will end up

“with nothing left of you but some vague memory in the mind of a fixture like Ratz, though heart or lungs or kidneys might survive in the service of some stranger with

New Yen for the clinic tanks” (Neuromancer 7). Just like for the middle-class salary man who go to a bar off-work, for Case too, one beer temporarily stops the time, nullifies mind, and ultimately turns this hyperactive man into a man of no memory.

Unfortunately, when Ratz mentions Linda Lee out of the blue, the bar stops to serve as a place of zero gravity and becomes polluted with memories. As soon as Case’s memory for Linda is recalled, he leaves the bar broken-hearted. His desire to escape from the body’s gravity into cyberspace’s zero gravity is a characteristic symptom of

Webholics. When the passage to high-speed information flow is cut off, the body’s desire to consume surplus excitement is unquenchable. On the contrary, the body yearns for intakes of ecstasy to replace the surfing in cyberspace. A hyperactive man such as Case does not retain any traces of existence if he does not outsource the faculty of recording memories to Ratz in the bar.

Memory and Dromosphere

Part two of this chapter aims to discuss the relationship between memory and the

38 dromosphere. Paradoxically, consuming cyberspace both emancipates the body from physical labor and enforces it to do extreme exercises at the same time. Case continues to accelerate his existence, until a fragment of a memory of Linda pulls him back to the pace of flesh-sphere. He loses his will to life when his neurons are ravaged.

The death drive dominates his entire existence. A void wraps his flesh up and hovers around his consciousness. Medication barely maintains basic survival conditions, but his consciousness is colonized by the real time in cyberspace. Nevertheless, he is gracefully colonized as cyberspace’s real-time screens off the past, protecting him from the disruptions of memories. As soon as the whim of memories looms near, even if he cannot activate the motor to the speed of cyberspace, he is capable of approaching this speed by producing a perception of pseudo-cyberspace in the flesh- sphere:

Get just wasted enough, find yourself in some desperate but strangely

arbitrary kind of trouble, and it was possible to see Ninsei as a field of

data, the way the matrix had once reminded him of proteins linking to

distinguish cell specialities. Then you could throw yourself into a

highspeed drift and skid, totally engaged but set apart from it all, and all

around you the dance of biz, information interacting, data made flesh in

the mazes of the black market….” (Gibson 16)

Living in the speed of light simultaneously progresses with commemorating Linda.

After Case accomplishes a mission, he returns to Chat to resuscitate his stamina in a process of rehabilitation. Ratz pinpoints that even though Case appears to be cheerful, in reality “this portable bombshelter built of booze and ups” (Gibson 21) camouflages a socially unacceptable facial expression, “against the grosser emotions” (Gibson 21).

The day he stops to reign in cyberspace, Linda’s ghost permeates unexpectedly into the lowspeed flesh-sphere. The death of Linda reminds him that he must live in a

39 lowspeed flesh-sphere of his own. This thought engulfs him alive as if in a black hole, and activates his death drive. Memories reek of the smell of corpses, whereas ecstasy catches a whiff of freshness. Several doses a day cover the ugly smell and vivify him temporarily. The pseudo-dromosphere serves as a movable bomb shelter, vacuums all negative emotions into void. In spite of memories that caught him between living and dying, living in the accelerated speed of the hyperhuman consequently drives him to

Death. In a profile report of Case, he will have to replace his liver in a year if his highspeed living style continues. In other words, this acceleration of living speed is about to crash. Armitage thus proposes that he fix his neurons as soon as possible.

Once, his existence depended on acceleration; interestingly, only if he drifts away from the dromosphere and regains his consciousness, is he capable of existing as a human being.

Memory is the switch of speed. Sad memories keep exposing themselves on the screen of his mind. Linda’s spirit wanders to and fro intermittently in memory lane.

The free flow of the real-time screen is threatened to be disrupted and subverted by the friction of memories. Linda Lee’s ghost turns up in Case’s consciousness, dreams, and hallucinations. A sudden intrusion of memory into his mind screen blocks off the real-time information flow and forces Case to opt-out of interface activities.

Memories switch off his being colonized by real time and switch on his capacity to feel. This “lag” of information flow brought on by his escape velocity evinces a paradoxically disappearing but dawning humanity.2 Accordingly, a buffering information flow signifies a humanist speed that contains a superhuman’s desire to live on a highspeed and frictionless information flow while it redeems humanist memories capable of negotiating with consciousness.

2 The accelerated information flow indicates the disappearing of beings into technology whereas the “lag” provides a break for the hyperactive humans to think and feel.

Meat not only connotes a burden to neurons and consciousness but also connect with feelings and emotions. In “Midnight in the Rue Jules Verne,3” Case’s screen of mind consecutively replays scenarios of angry emotions juxtaposing fragments of

Linda’s dying moment with images of Dixie’s blasting brain. It occurs to Case that

“the rage had come in the arcade, when Wintermute rescinded the simstim ghost of

Linda Lee, yanking away the simple animal promise of food, warmth, a place to sleep”

(Gibson 152). Emotions for Case are virtual and of a simulated quality as perceived in arcades. Or, in the terminology of computer, he considers emotions viruses and his mind screen serves as a sandbox safeguarding the security of his mind. Executing emotions within the sandbox prohibits any unexpected damage to the computer’s

CPU. Under the circumstances, his CPU has a great chance of lagging behind its normal capacity when he calculates Linda the newly added variable. Although Case understands that memories are the soil of the efflorescence of existence, the impact of emotion-viruses prompts him to block memories anyway.

Motivated by the death drive, he begins to remember how numb he felt when he was trafficking drugs in Ninsei. The acceleration of living speed enables him to approach supervitality, then to disappear in the speed, and ultimately to become inert.

By the time he stops speeding, his desire to feel slowly takes over the dictate of speed, reason, and progress. Even so, the sandbox contests with the emotion-virus and filters it off right away: “It’s the meat talking ignore it” (Gibson 152; emphasis original).

The sandbox of mind screen shelters off disruptions of emotions in order to maintain the order of speed, allowing zero mental abrasion. In fact, this is not the first time the mind screen activated the sandbox. Earlier than this event of virus attack, his sandbox pops up on the screen and blocks off memories of Linda. It takes place before he is

3 This chapter begins a journey into the core of Case’s existence.

41 fully recovered from the surgery of repairing his neurons. As figments of memories of

Linda cannot intrude into his consciousness, they permeate his dreams. In theory, fragments of memories create more chaos than designate meanings in human minds.

Once the fragments are again connected to make a sensible meaning, Case’s traumatic memory of Linda’s death is triggered immediately. Case, just like any other human beings would, chooses to escape or nullify traumatic memories into highly productive activities. “Once he woke from a confused dream of Linda Lee, unable to recall who she was or what she’d ever meant to him. When he did remember, he jacked in and worked for nine straight hours” (Gibson 59). Paradoxically, as soon as the superhuman’s highspeed motor achieves productive progress, a human being also meets his end fast with the destruction of memories and life. Meat being debased as a lower class, however, does not listen to the order of dromosphere. As a result, only when Case refuses to espouse the order of speed in cyberspace and really lives in the humanist speed of the flesh-sphere, will Linda drift into his dreams or fade out through memory lane. By any means, when he decelerates to humanist speed, another trick of modernity looms near.

In the process of screening off emotion-viruses, Case embodies his desire to live in the highspeed dromosphere and in turn overpowers the humanist speed toward a space of oblivion. A speculative issue related to this phenomenon is the tricks the media complex plays on memory in data coups d’etat. In his “Media Complex,”

Virilio contends that broadcasting advertisement on television and on movies served as a means of disseminating political propaganda in the twentieth century

(Information Bomb 12). In place of television and movie, the Sprawl and Sense/Net, respectively the spectacle of the society and internet become today’s dominant mediated means to govern our thoughts. The Sprawl is illuminated by electromagnetic light emitted and spread from television. “The sky above the port was the color of

42 television, turned to a dead channel” (Neuromancer 3). Neuromancer opens with the epitaph of modern men, with a description of a city lit up by artificial light instead of natural light. Being one of the dominate forces of dromosphere, electromagnetic light or photons overwrite natural light and enslave humans to the will to speed instead of the will to life.

Wintermute is an Artificial Intelligence (A. I.) and product of T-A which controls the data flow of the entire city. In the novel, A. I. has a close affiliation with the state’s conspiracy. A. I. was first developed to replace injured soldiers in battle fields.

Nowadays A. I. functions less as a prosthetic replacement of labor than as an extension of state’s control over citizens. Case is coerced to hack into military headquarter to replicate A. I. into the security system, and finally completes his mission of manufacturing memories. Wintermute also controls Colonel Corto’s life by installing false memories into his brain, so that he comes to believe that he lives to fulfill a military mission. When Corto finds out that his whole life is a lie scripted by a computer, his identity starts to fall apart. Several psychological disorders start to grow on him. A doctor diagnoses his illness as schizophrenia. The same draconian chicanery falls on Case. As the novel progresses, Case’s life pins the memory of

Linda Lee as a point of departure and arrival. Upon knowing that this memory is created by Wintermute, instead of his real experience, his life is shattered and his existence is rendered meaningless. Wintermute is strongly affiliated with military power and state propaganda. Uploading all data onto the cloud makes sharing information easier while at the same time making data analysis more feasible and precise. The bigger the data are collected, the more precise the result is. As a result,

Wintermute is instrumental in controlling civilians in the dimension of data flow and from the real-time computer screen. The noosphere will follow the order of Artificial

Intelligence, and begin to be sacrificed in the subterfuge of the Media Complex.

Gibson divulges implicitly that the real time of dromosphere is becoming a site for installing, rewriting and editing memories. Instead of reclaiming memories from the sovereignty of machines, humans keep on blocking off desires of meat and emotions.

Such ways of diluting traumatic memories does not deprive humans of anguish and pain. In fact, by outsourcing emotions and desires onto mediated objects, humans are little by little giving up sovereignty to consensual hallucinations or data coups d’état.

A collective result of this nonchalant and convenience gesture will lead to a destruction of all humanity.

The inventor of Wintermute, Tessier-Ashpool (T-A) aims to propel a symbiotic relations between A. I. and humans. This corporation’s ambition is properly manifested in the two missions it assigns to Case. He is appointed to hack into a media giant’s system and install false information in an attempt to control the whole world. If the dromosphere dominates the noosphere and confines human activities within the frame of computer screens, such interface activities are to be colonized by the real-time. Consequently, T-A’s plan to control the whole world will be realized in no time. Additionally, T-A’s corporate maneuvers are indicated in the two missions executed by Case. In his first attack of Sense/Net, he cooperates with The Panther

Moderns, and together they launch an information war on Christian fundamentalists.

Specifically, Case and his crew install misinformation into Sense/Net’s surveillance system and frame Christian fundamentalists into the very initiator of spreading into

Sense/Net a virus called Blue Nine, “known in California as Grievous Angel, [it] had been shown to produce acute paranoia and homicidal psychosis in eighty-five percent of experimental subjects” (Gibson 61-62). In his second attack, Case writes up a virus code, hacks into Sense/Net’s command line, and invades the matrix unknowingly.

After having a word of Flatline, Case comes to a realization that Wintermute’s operation to control the world, T-A’s corporate conspiracy, and the anecdote of Corto,

44 in fact all point to the undercurrents of power mechanism in the age of global capitalism:

Power meant corporate power. The zaibatsus, the multinationals that

shaped the course of human history, had transcended old barriers. Viewed

as organisms, they had attained a kind of immortality. You couldn’t kill a

zaibatsu by assassinating dozen key executives; there were others waiting

to step up the ladder, assume the vacated position, access the vast banks of

corporate memory. (Neuromancer 203)

On the one hand, T-A freezes its family members, in order to pass on memories of family history, which manifests a will to life. On the other hand, after knowing that his cooling device stops to function, T-A’s father feels the threat of Death and becomes suicidal. His act testifies negatively the will to life.

Case considers Villa Spraylight, T-A’s house, as a demonstration of T-A’s corporate identity, which projects the quintessence of hypermodern society’s operation of Media Complex and data coups d’état. Moreover, pseudo-immortality and supervitality surging from desires of the consciousness cannot sustain motors of existence as flesh wants warmth and emotions. As Ratz aptly points out to Case: “In

Night City, you had it, in the palm of your hand! The speed to eat your sense away…”

(Neuromancer 234). The novel ends in the scene where Wintermute and Neuromancer become a matrix that exists “Nowhere. Everywhere. I’m the sum total of the works, the whole show” (Neuromancer 269). What is left to ponder upon is the impact of prosthetic memories on civilization and the disappearance of the will to life into the accelerated speed of the dromosphere and corporate power operation.

If we are in the century where symbiotic inhabitation between humans and intelligent machines is an inevitable reality, where the dromosphere cannot be ignored for its military dimension and as a convenient refuge from harsh reality, then

45 switching offline to a humanist speed embodies humans’ will to life. In the buffering moment between the yearning for a supervitality and the instinctual need to feel lies the seed of memories. These traumatic memories will grow sweet flowers as they contest with the colonization of the dromosphere. Case’s death drive brings forth problematic interactions among body, memory, and the dromosphere. Interface activities in cyberspace are immediately satisfying and overwhelmingly exciting.

Submerged beneath the narrative of speed and ecstasy lie the traumatic memories and defeated emotions of a disabled infonaut. As long as the body’s escape velocity toward cyberspace is disturbed by the gravity pull of memories, the will to body and life momentarily undermines the will to speed. The dromosphere not only configures how humans perceive, behave, and think but also translates memories and history into the regime of speed. Acceleration is kindled by a hyperactive motor and ends in a crash of culture, civilization and humanity. Defying the desire to control the world with big data, installing false memories, and editing history, memories toggle this apocalyptic velocity and wake us up to the feelings, warmth, and instinct of the human body.

Chapter Three: Traversing the Fantasy of Capitalism

Introduction

Cyberculture is deeply rooted in speed culture. An absolute speed drives modern men toward a sublime gesture of disappearance. Speed culture expresses contempt for and distrust against slowness. Just like in a war, fast speed is pivotal to survival and defeating enemies. High speed functions both as a defense mechanism as well as a weapon. Recent decades have seen the growth of research and curricular interests in unveiling capitalistic false ideology and narrative closure. By making a defamiliarized world that we live in but cannot see, as fantastic literature aims to do, William Gibson exposes the cultural hegemony and its mechanism in Pattern Recognition, which reveals the semiotic play of marketing and the production of cultural memory.

Postmodern narrative’s subversive discourse against totalitarian narrative was the focus of Gibson’s earlier Bridge trilogy: Virtual Light (1993), Idoru (1996), and All

Tomorrow’s Parties (1999). The last volume of that trilogy celebrates the pattern- random narrative that Katherine Hayles4 characterizes as the informatics as a transgressive force that goes beyond the capitalist ideological frame. The postmodern subversion not only is observed in its informatics narrative, but also in its battle between the angel of history and the capitalist chess game. In All Tomorrow’s Parties, the angel of history symbolizes the bridge in the storm that is shaken but still hangs in there. Ironically, in Pattern Recognition (2003), the chess master wins the game and manipulates the informatic narrative by creating an illusion of the narrative being random. Along with the help of hackers and otaku, the protagonist and heroine Cayce

4 In her How We Became Posthuman: Virual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics Hayles celebrates the bifurcation point in informatic narrative that will subvert capitalist closure.

Pollard traverses the capitalist closure, avoids its manipulation, and follows her real desires.

The story begins with Cayce’s cultural critique of a post-9/11 society that is built up by the illusion of happiness where negative emotions such as mourning is transferred to the consumption of commodities. Cayce works as a trend-forecaster for an advertising agency and is a member of Fetish:Footage:Forum (F:F:F) which is built by those who suffer from the traumatic memories of losing their loved ones in the terrorist attack. When watching the footage, the viewers receive the message of being understood and a sense of belonging to a community that shares the same loss. Cayce discovers that F:F:F is not only a community of mourners but also a place where market capitalism manufactures its future trends. If she reveals this secret to her boss

Bigend, the corporate advertiser (a name Gibson aptly creates to imply the end of times marked by late capitalist society), he will definitely insert commercial materials in the footage found by F:F:F, and mass-market the footage into commodity.

Instead of analyzing Cayce’s traumatic affect which has been done by Berlant and John, or viewing it as one of the functions of the spectacle and of fantastic literature in homogenizing knowledge in society, I would like to argue that it is

Cayce’s confrontation with the tragic events that forges a shield that prevents her from turning into an interpassive subject and commodity fetish, as happens to the masses. In a utopian society that neutralizes its unconscious desires with commodities and spectacles embedded in advertisement, Cayce’s phobia to brand names prevents her from being subjectified by advertisement. Furthermore, in the wake of the 9/11 incident, while the masses choose to forget it by consuming footages, Cayce chooses to remember by clinging to memories of her father. Her insistence to remember prevents her from being assimilated into administrated memory of capitalism. If

Cayce’s resistance to capitalism refigures the utopian society from its fixed hope for a complete wholeness and progress, Gibson’s Pattern Recognition itself resists capitalism’s closed narrative and hits the reality of history that has been haunting us since the early nineteenth century.

Bruce Fink’s introduction to Lacanian psychoanalysis and Slavoj Žižek’s speculation on the interpassive subject in consumer society as well as Jacques

Derrida’s justification of literature’s force to transgress closure and Fredric Jameson’s take on literature as a socially symbolic act all contribute to ground my explanations, analyses, and investigations in this chapter. I take Pattern Recognition as Gibson’s observation on the modern city becoming a spectacular space including footages, spectacles, and commodities where the masses are hypnotized to consume the spectacles as commodities at the same time as these spectacles shape a diplomatic history controlled by the corporation owner. With the manipulation of the capitalist, the spectacles become commodities sold to audiences; moreover, audiences also become commodities in the marketplace. The advertisement’s force in the capitalist marketplace is to be observed in the semiotics of the market as the big Other which manipulates the culture industry and deploys emotions of 9/11 incident’s survivors into the system of consumerism.

Gibson portrays a post-9/11 America in which those who suffer from the loss of their family form an online forum, find footages, and share their thoughts to one another for the purpose of healing and releasing pain. Owing to the found footages’ possibility of “cutting across boundaries, transgressing the accustomed order of things”

(Pattern Recognition 20), F:F:F eventually turns regional into global culture. The creation, production, and representation of footages add up to a capitalist dominated cultural industry, in which modern men and women have little resistance and are

49 unconsciously being molded into an array of collective commodity. F:F:F members are the target audience of media firms, their attention and emotion rendered into commodities that are sold to the advertiser. The impact of found footages by F:F:F members has been overwhelmingly powerful in suggesting what people should buy and what they should pay attention to. The footages then become collective images of capitalist ideology that situate audiences into capitalist’s utopian program: watching footages will decrease pain and following the message in the footage is the trend.

Embedded in the footages is a hypnotic message that renders the fantasy into the real: to believe that the world created by Nora the footage maker is reality, and that to buy associated commodities shown in the footage will cure your trauma. In short, the more you consume, the happier you will be.

As one of the footageheads Mama Anarchia writes on the F:F:F discussion board:

Really it is entirely about story, though not in any sense that any of you

seem familiar with. Do you know nothing of narratology? Where is

Derridean “play” and excessiveness? Foucauldian limit-attitude?

Lyotardian language-games? Lacanian Imaginaries? Where is the

commitment to praxis, positioning Jamesonian nostalgia, and despair as

well as Habermasian fears of irrationalism as panic discourses signaling

the defeat of Enlightenment hegemony over cultural theory? But no:

discourses on this site are hopelessly retrograde. (Pattern Recognition 278)

Mama Anarchia here inquires after the glorious days of cyberspace when it still had its position to criticize the hegemony of cultural history and when cultural critiques from various perspectives form dialogic discourses around Enlightenment rationality.

The site of subversion has degenerated and become permeated by capitalism’s narrative. The audiences’ fantastic desires are evoked by the capitalist diktat that consumption provides magnificent experiences which will introduce us into a

50 phantasmagoric realm out of our daily routine. Entering the corridors of capitalism’s mythic mazes, such as the department store, our desires are transformed into attachments to brand names. The brand names thus are one of the chess master’s designs of manipulating consumers’ desires into passively receiving ideological messages. Through the messages embedded with hidden false ideology, F:F:F members and the global audiences’ traumatic experiences will not work out as they hoped. On the contrary, their traumatic memories are to be edited and marketed as commodity.

Since footages are the media of capitalism’s conspiracy, footage viewers’ consumption will develop into collective commercial memories, instead of real memories of lived-through events. The consumption of footages develops into a cultural phenomenon, especially after the 9/11 incident, that turned urban men and women into Žižekian interpassive subjects and consumer fetishists. Their traumatic kernel and their void are projected in cultural artifacts which, however, are subject to the manipulation by the market. As a counter-factual belief, Žižek’s remedy to this void is to insist that the big Other (the global market calpitalism’s command) do not exist. In Pattern Recognition, the only one who “knows” there is no deeper meaning is Cayce Pollard, a cool-hunter whose phobia towards brand names intensifies her ability to forecast future trend. Since the pseudo-deeper meaning is disseminated through global franchised brand names, her phobia is a sensor and a stopper for the misinformation carried in brand names. While it is impossible for the collective unconscious to see the truth—the nonexistence of a big Other—her allergy to brand names (a manifesation of global marketing and mediatization) signals the conspiracy inscribed within the commodity.

Fantasy

Before speculating on Cayce’s phobia as a shield against the lure of capitalist fantasy,

I map out the utopian society in terms of its space, and its subject formation. Guy

Debord’s theory helps to explicate the society that becomes a “spectacular” space composed of brand names and signs of capitalist messages. According to Debord,

“The whole life of those societies in which modern conditions of production prevail presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. All that once was directly lived has become mere representation” (Society of the Spectacle 12). He notes that reality is mediated through spectacles so completely that our lived reality is taken over by spectacles that project Enlightenment progress and hope. Enlightened by

Debord’s theory, I will explicate how marketing forms a utopia that on the one hand functions as a lure for audiences to consume spectacles that cancel the pain and traumatic memories; on the other hand audiences’ attention and emotions are commodified as marketing goods.

I begin with this utopian society which fashions itself with modern facilities that virtually eliminates traces of the traumatic event. This tendency to cover up the lack bears similarities with the subject formation of an obsessive. Bruce Fink points out that “The obsessive, as conscious thinker deliberately ignores the unconscious—that foreign discourse within us, that discourse we do not and cannot control which takes advantage of the ambiguities and multiple meanings of words…” (“Neurosis” 122).

The obsessive represses the unconscious desires, or breaks the link between thought and affect, so as to emerge as a thinking subject without being barred by symbolic discourse. The formation of obsessive thinking, which aligns with that of the

Cartesian subject, is at work in Gibson’s utopia. It is a fantasy that builds upon a thinking subject devoid of separation from the unconscious desires. This thinking

52 subject occupies a fixed space and yearns to achieve a complete wholeness. In other words, the desire of formulating a utopia is grounded in the obsessive’s unconscious impulse to “neutralize or annihilate the Other” (“Neurosis” 119) whereas utopia is realizable only when desires are repressed. Therefore, an obsessive subject tends to formulate a symbolic fantasy that neutralizes the real. Žižek points out the relation between the representation and the real of the society in his “Between Symbolic and

Fantasmatic Spectre” in which he argues that “what emerges via the distortions of the accurate representation of reality is the real, i.e., the trauma around which social reality is structured” (265). Žižek implies that utopia is the symbolic fiction of the state which even though it tends to be a distorted version of the reality, it is nonetheless a referential text to the trauma or the real of the society. In Pattern

Recognition, it is the traumatic event that motivates people to formulate fantasy so as to repress the grief or to mourn for the deceased. When it comes to transforming the utopian impulse into a concrete utopia, Fredric Jameson remarks that utopia can be used as “the mere lure and the bait for ideology” (“Varieties of the Utopian” 3). While

Jameson rests more on fantasy’s/utopia’s deceptive mechanism, Žižek and Lacan emphasize the traumatic kernel, around which the state’s or the subject’s fundamental fantasy is formulated.

Lacanian fantasy, as discussed in Bruce Fink’s “The Dialectic of Desire,” is a conceptual space that stages “the way the subject imagines him- or herself in relation to the cause, to the Other’s desire as cause” (56). Fantasy is the subject’s imaginary relation rather than his or her real relation with the Other’s desire. Imaginary as it may be, it is a necessity in a subject’s formation process. In his “The Subject and the

Other’s Desire” Fink remarks that we subjectify the trauma by means of formulating a fantasy that neutralizes the traumatic experiences. In theory it is necessary because the

53 subject is itself a void circulated by various fantasies. In practice, however, the traumatic experiences are never to be worked out and thus the subject formation remains a fantasy. It is not to discourage us from constructing subjectivity but to reshape the Cartesian subject, a “mere place-holder in the symbolic, waiting to be filled out,” (58) into a Lacanian “desiring subject,” (58) a place-marker in the symbolic that shapes among index of desires.

Although the Lacanian subject appears to be promising in escaping the confinement of the Cartesian ontology when in our era, an active “desiring subject” can be easily subjectified by consumerism. As Jameson points out, fantasy has its positive and negative attributes. Fink explicates that fantasy functions at once as a discourse that repositions subjectivity in relation to our desires and as a necessary defense mechanism constructed by our psyche to circumvent trauma by means of providing the Other’s demand in place of the Other’s desire. While the former envisions the subject’s becoming process, the latter implies that the subject, though bypassing the confinement of the Cartesian subject, is trapped again in his or her making of a new fixation from the Other’s demand. In the following, I discuss and compare fetish commodity to interpassive subject in consumer society.

Commodity Fetishism and Interpassive Subject

As the name of Fetish:Footage:Forum suggests, members discuss, upload, share, and most importantly are being fed by fetish footages on the internet. In the novel, the survivors’ real desire is to mourn over the loss of their loved ones by means of tracing footages of war memories in F:F:F:, however, their real desires are subject to the manipulation of the market which disseminates its word onto culture industry. The targets of the manipulation are those who suffered from the loss of family members, and those who want to escape from traumatic memories by repetitively watching

54 those footages. It is as if by watching/consuming these footages, their pains can be cancelled. In Fink’s “Perversion,” he explains that fetish has to imitate the father’s law in order to decrease the traumatic impact brought forth by mOther’s desires. He states: “the perversion (that is, the fetish) serves to multiply the force of the father’s symbolic action (putting the mOther’s lack into words), to supplement or prop up the paternal function” (183). In the post-traumatic society, the masses consume footages to fill in the loss of meaning caused by the void/trauma. However, to neutralize the hole of the fetish masses, they are turned into mere objects by means of installing in capitalism’s narrative and command.

Another subject fantasy emerging in consumer society is the interpassive subject.

The function of traumatic audiences’ footage consumption matches that of the disembodied voice of the lift:

She can go there. There is a lift…. ‘I’m feeling rather excited,’ a woman

says, breathily, as the door closes, though Cayce knows she’s alone in this

upright coffin of mirror and brushed steel. Fortunately she’s been this way

before, and knows that these disembodied voices are there for the

amusement of the shopper….Whatever else these designer ghosts say, she

blocks it out, the lift ascending miraculously, without intermediate stops,

to the fifth floor. (Pattern Recognition 19)

Here Cayce experiences what collective shoppers encounter in the shopping center where shoppers’ happiness is displaced onto the consumption of commodities. This scene depicts an exaggerated scheme of Žižek’s “canned laughter” that he uses to exemplify a displacement of emotions onto objects. In his “The Interpassive Subject:

Lacan Turns a Prayer Wheel,” Žižek summarizes the cultural conditions of our contemporary society as under the subject position of hysterics who reject to be

55 manipulated as an exchangeable object whereas the subject supposed to know, the

Cartesian subject, is the ultimate big Other that tells him or her what to desire.

Regarding the position of the object in the formation of a subject, Žižek compares the interpassive subject with the fetish. While the former takes an object, for instance,

VCR as a stand-in for the big Other that passively endures the object a for the subject, so that he or she can actively engage with other activities, the latter is passively consumed by the object which he or she takes as manifestation of his or her real condition with the others, that is, the fetish substitutes symbolic order for the Real. In his “The Interpassive Subject,” Žižek states that: “This allows us to propose the notion of false activity: you think you are active, while your true position, as it is embodied in the fetish, is passive.” Although both the interpassive and the fetish are situated at the passive position, Žižek considers interpassivity as “the primordial form of the subject’s defense against jouissance.” Žižek further notes that “Such a displacement of our most intimate feelings and attitudes onto some figure of the Other is at the very core of Lacan’s notion of the big Other; it can affect not only feelings but also beliefs and knowledge—the Other can also believe and know for me”

(“Lacan Turns A Prayer Wheel” 27). The displacement of our feelings onto the Other will not only change our attachment to commodities, but also change our belief and knowledge of the world. Particularly in the consumer society, our knowledge and belief will be manipulated by market ideology. Therefore, when the F:F:F goers attach their emotions onto the footages, they are subject to the manipulation of capitalism.

As Bigend aptly points out for Cayce: “We have no future because our present is too volatile….We have only risk management. The spinning of the given moment’s scenarios” (Pattern Recognition 59). The future/uncertainty is mistaken to be the myth of the real/truth/big Other, manipulated by market capitalism as fate, whereas

Nora the footage author is taken to be the subject supposed to know, the person who,

56 as Žižek mentions, “embodies the absolute certainty (which Lacan compares to the certainty of Descartes’s cogito ergo sum) of the patient’s unconscious desire” (“Lacan

Turns a Prayer Wheel” 28). Since the Cartesian subject refuses to confront the unconscious, he fabricates an ideological closure of consumer society which displaces desires as demands, and makes him an easy prey to the control of capitalism.

This is what Žižek calls an interpassive subject who displaces emotions onto the subject who is supposed to know. Apart from capitalism’s assimilating interpassive subject and the commodity fetish it engineers, spectacles of the society are also part of the system of semiotics that writes a map to guide footage viewers and those who participate in the discourse and system of modernity. Spectacle inscribes its narrative on the fashion industry where the masses apply capitalism’s symbolic fiction on their bodies. In the place where Cayce meets Dorothea (who Cayce later discovers is the

F:F:F member Mama Anarchia), she sees a drawing on a Japanese brush which she recognizes to be the “in-house hallmark of Herr Heinzi [a designer] himself,” which for her “resembles a syncopated sperm” (Pattern Recognition 13). As Cayce forecasts,

“countless Asian workers who might, should she say yes, spend years of their lives applying versions of this symbol to an endless and unyielding flood of footwear….Would it work its way into their dreams, eventually? Would their children chalk it in doorways before they know its meaning as a trademark” (Pattern

Recognition 13)? While the lift symbolizes a transcendental excitement, the image of sperm on a brush encrypts a fetish idea, in which the general public unconsciously attaches itself to brand names and is objectified by capitalism. The attachment of the masses to the commodified Other can be described as retrograding back to the imaginary space. Linking the imaginary space with spectacles of the society, Debord remarks that late capitalist society sees spectacles not as images we consciously see, but as ideological signs spectators unconsciously receive in their minds, and then

57 integrate and assemble into a collectivity.

Since, in the Lacanian notion of it, fetishes imitate the symbolic order onto its subject formation, its memory will be configured to false memory deployed by capitalism’s semiotic. In addition to the interpassive’s displacement of emotions and commodity fetishes, the third symptom of the society is the unconscious assimilation of false desires. As such, a collective false memory will manifest itself in desirable clothes. The trademarks of the fashion industry then serves as lures of consumption, thus fitting in with the culture industry. As one of the F:F:F: goers, Parkaboy, explains:

“Homo sapiens are about pattern recognition. Both a gift and a trap” (Pattern

Recognition 23). The spectators might notice the pattern of capitalist mechanisms, but may not detect its maneuver as Cayce does. Even if they do, it is not easy to resist.

The spectacles disseminate big Other’s (global market capitalism) truth/conspiracy, inscribe it into the masses’ consciousness, and then assimilate those masses into the commodity flow.

Since footages are created out of Nora’s brain, in this regard, it is the factory of capitalist ideology. Borrowing Debord’s words in The Society of the Spectacle, Nora’s footage is “an impersonal memory that was the memory of the administration of society…The masters who, protected by myth, enjoyed the private ownership of history, themselves did so at first in the realm of illusion” (96-7). In Debord’s sense, the capitalist puppet masters create its symbolic fiction that disguises as ultimate truth while, at the same time, the footage viewers consume this fiction and transcribe it into their minds as false memory. As Žižek mentions, interpassive subject and commodity fetish exchange their emotions for comfortable numbness because the trauma is unbearable, from which they also exchange subjectivity for the impersonal memory designated by capitalist society.

In late capitalist society, cyberspace is commodified in the sense that the informatic narrative which was once taken as subversive can no longer escape being framed by capitalist narrative closure. In terms of shaping history, the footages are metaphors of history broken into fragments. As explained by the omniscient narrator:

“The one hundred and thirty-four previously discovered fragments, having been endlessly collated, broken down, reassembled, by whole armies of the most fanatical investigators, have yielded no period and no particular narrative direction” (Pattern

Recognition 24). The uploading process of footages suggests that there is no limit and frame before the footage #135, which marks the subversive spirit of the previous 134 footages; however, Cayce’s instinct tells her that the pattern of history is shaping into an unknown frame following footage #135. In a meeting between Cayce and Bigend,

Cayce poses a question about the sequential order of uploaded footages. While she speculates that those footages are not uploaded in “a logical narrative sequence…[nor] randomly…, ” (Pattern Recognition 67) Bigend tells her that the uploaders might aim to “provide the illusion of randomness. Regardless, and regardless of everything else, the footage has already been the single most effective piece of guerilla marketing ever”

(Pattern Recognition 67). From the uploading process of footages, through Cayce’s pattern recognition, to Bigend’s (a market insider’s) knowledge, there is a discrepancy that exposes the manipulation of history being random and subversive. The form of the footage being “endlessly collated, broken down, [and] reassembled” (24) brings to mind postmodern narrative. The much celebrated shifting identities of the postmodern subjects have become the prey of late-capitalism.

The T-shaped armament stuck in Nora’s brain is a metaphor of an inerasable traumatic event which has to be worked out through creating artworks, in which the creating process is completed through selecting images provided by the sponsor and

59 mentally projecting her traumatic memories into footages. Fink remarks that the real

“can be thought of, in a certain sense, as the connection or link between two thoughts that have succumbed to repression and must be restored. It can also be thought of as what Freud calls trauma—traumatic events…that have never been talked through, put into words, or verbalized. This real, according to Lacan, has to be symbolized through analysis: it has to be spoken, put into signifiers (“signifierized”)” (“Interpretation:

Opening up the Space of Desire” 49). In Gibson’s analysis, F:F:F goers try to symbolize the post-9/11 trauma by means of following footages as a cultural register, however, their symbolic acts are assimilated into market capitalism. In addition to the assimilation process, capitalism’s re/production of knowledge uses the same maneuvers as fascism does. Both systems invent a myth which is taken to be the real/truth, but in fact is a fantasy.

“Though the truth,” claimed by a documentary director Damien, “is closer to allergy, a morbid and sometimes violent reactivity to the semiotics of the marketplace”

(Pattern Recognition 2). In other words, this knowledge production parallels that of the capitalist mode of production in that Cayce the fashion forecaster happens to have a “violent reactivity” to brand names which dominate the global marketplace. Her subject formation follows the structure of a phobic subject which manifests itself in her clothes and in her defense mechanism against her allergies--brand names. As I have mentioned in Chapter One, CPUs, Cayce Pollard Units, is Cayce’s dress, however, there is more to its name. CPU is an acronym for Central Processing Unit, the heart of the computer; whereas its anagram is UPC that stands for Universal

Product Code, the bar codes we usually see on products. Thus, Cayce’s apparel implies that the fashion industry, as one of the most profitable industries in capitalist society, can be seen as the current central processing unit of capitalism. Since

60 capitalist maneuvers permeate the whole fashion industry, she quarantines capitalist’s fascist messages by designing her clothes completely devoid of contaminations of false consciousness. The other way to save her from phobic attack is by chanting a mantra out loud. “The Michelin Man was the first trademark to which she exhibited a phobic reaction. She had been six. ‘He took a duck in the face at two hundred and fifty knots,’ she recites, softly” (Pattern Recognition 35). If the obsessive Cartesian society deliberately ignores emotion to achieve capitalist progress, then Cayce’s blocking out mediated messages allows her to trace back to memories of her father.

This attempt aims to retrieve the forgotten past. Cayce, the seer of the future trend, and the archaeologist of the forgotten past is the nodal point5 of the narrative line. One thing that makes Cayce uncomfortable is that not only will the advertiser sell the traumatic memories as a commodity, but also by so doing history will be changed.

This is Cayce’s observation on how modernity works on our unconscious, its function and result. If displacement of emotions onto the Other functions to form a fantasy, Cayce chooses to go against the grain. She subjectifies the false-desire by insisting on attaching herself to the memory of her father who was gone missing in the 9/11 event. “She’s trying to remember what would have come after securing the perimeter, in Win’s [Cayce’s father] bedtime stories. Probably maintaining the routine of the station. Psychological prophylaxis, she thinks he called it. Get on with ordinary business. Maintain morale” (Pattern Recognition 48). When the masses turn collectively to fascination with narrative commodities they have to tell so as to forget the traumatic memories, she clings on to her real desire—memories of her father.

5 In his “Che Vuoi” Žižek’s explicates that ideology is “the multitude of ‘floating signifiers’, of protoideological elements, [which] is structured into a unified field through the intervention of a certain ‘nodal point’ (the Lacanian point de caption) which ‘quilts’ them, stops their sliding and fixes their meaning” (338).

Situationist International as Therapy

According to Žižek, we have to understand that “what precedes fantasy is not reality but a hole in reality, its point of impossibility filled in with fantasy. Lacan’s name for this point is, of course, the object petit a” (The Plague of Fantasies xiv). In other words, the fantasy, or the reality that fills the hole in with ideological surplus- enjoyment is not the opposite of reality but the ideological surplus-enjoyment of the subjects. Trauma is what makes the traversing of the fantasy impossible, which replaces utopian concept of a subject as a whole with the Lacanian concept of a subject as a hole. Cayce sees the trauma and the impossibility of traversing the surplus-enjoyment, but insists on confronting the deadlock while the masses are consumed by it. If this ideological surplus-enjoyment is responsible for society’s symptoms such as interpassivity and commodity fetish, Situationist International’s (SI) theory will provide a therapy for the prevalent plague of capitalist fantasy.

One of the leading SI theorists is Raoul Vaneigem who remarks that when our real desires are replaced by spectacles and commodities of the consumer society, we are trapped within the ideology of survivalism, which manipulates the sole value of life to the diktat of markets and commodities. Thus the phenomenon of interpassive subject and attachment to commodities becomes the Borromean knot of late capitalist society. Žižek’s antidote to the knot is in the hand of Lenin and Antigone who, as he argues, “does not merely relate to the Other-Thing; for a brief, passing moment of decision, she is the Thing directly, thus excluding herself from the community regulated by the intermediate agency of symbolic regulations” (“The Real of Sexual

Difference” 70). The thing is itself a being that empowered by desire, not by the law.

However, I do not agree with his example of Lenin being our revolutionary model,

62 because there lies a risk of another version of a fascist leadership. As Michael E.

Gardiner notes, “SI refused to consider itself as a political vanguard à la Lenin, for this would mean a return to specialized politics, a separation between leaders and led.

Instead, the Situationists strove to operate as a catalyst, to trigger the dissolution of false consciousness perfected by the spectacle and thereby enable the masses to actualize their own liberation” (119). SI serves as the alchemist that brings the magical process of counter-capitalist acts by refuting the economic logic as a false consciousness, thereby engendering our real desires to lead our lives. Since capitalism disseminates its ideology from the culture industry, SI criticizes the plague of fantasy mediated via information and the media

not as an end to itself, but as a prelude to a total revolution of everyday

life. For Vaneigem, this revolution hinged on the negation of three aspects

of consumer capitalism –the spectacle, or the replacement of reality by

appearance; separation, the atomization of social life; and sacrifice, the

renunciation of desire and personal happiness for the empty promise of

the commodity ….(Gardiner 120)

This system is what Virilio suggests as the mediatization in which media are in services of political and economic forces so as to filter out messages and disseminate ideology. In modern society, the media regime is a coup d’état that dictates consumers to meet its ideal state—phantasmagoria formulated by capitalists. As such, when subjects displace their emotions onto a mediated Other, they are subject to fascist control. In other words, without actively perceiving cinematic narrative, audiences’ alter egos are being framed by the projector, whereas the eyes are unconsciously and passively being integrated into the singular vision provided by the projector’s point of view. The world represented in the cinema then becomes the only version audiences

63 take to be real. Vaneigem proposes a reverse act of our everyday practice from ideological narrative of spectacles and false happiness toward the real desires and reality depleted of ideological surplus-enjoyment.

Hit the Real: Literature’s Socially Symbolic Act

Just as SI is the therapy to the Borromean knot of a consumer society that neutralizes the gap between the real and the imaginary, interpretation in literature will unravel the fantasy of capitalism. In fact, Gibson’s Pattern Recognition attempts to articulate what Luis Borges’s “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” (Hereafter “TUOT”) points out for us in 1940, where the content changes but the form remains. Gibson’s works thus pose as a remainder of the pattern of history. Gibson wrote an invitation to Labyrinths:

Selected Stories and Other Writings which included Borges’s “TUOT” as the first short story. He begins the invitation with his childhood memory of a bookcase on top of a desk which once belonged to the revolutionary hero Francis Marion. He writes:

“Its lower drawers smelled terrifyingly and chemically of Time, and within them, furled, lay elaborately printed scrolls listing the County’s dead in the Great War. I now know that I believed, without quite wanting to admit it to myself, that that desk was haunted” (ix; emphasis mine). His invitation to Borges’s story suggests that

Time/History itself remains the past and current struggle between the angel’s history and that of the chess master, and that the desk as a metaphor of symbolic order is still cast under the shadow of authoritarian history. “TUOT” was published in 1940, the time of WWII whereas Pattern Recognition was published in 2003, two years after the 9/11 attack. “TUOT” can be seen as an encapsulated version of Pattern

Recognition, which manifests a prototype of dictatorship and its pattern that Gibson takes as a cultural pattern that is deployed in consumer society. The point is not that

Gibson rewrites Borges’s story in a longer version, but that Borges’s message of 1940 again appears in 2003. The year 2003 particularly has seen a proliferation of criticism on terrorist attacks. This pattern of criticism reflects the concerns of the general public and also of academics. If “TUOT” represents a pattern of totalitarian regime in WWII,

Pattern Recognition demonstrates a capitalized utopian society that is modeled on the scheme of totalitarianism. If we take Cayce’s phobia as the pointer of the capitalism’s societal and historical symptoms, her temporary panic disorder indicates the cultural traits of a Cartesian society of Western civilization. Independent of whether or not the knot will be untied, Gibson articulates Cayce’s real desires, and those of her society and Western civilization as a whole.

Besides Gibson, Jacques Derrida also affirms the aim of literary writing as that of composing a symbolic act. As I have mentioned in chapter one, Derrida asserts the possibility and responsibility of literature to rethink the past and envision the future.

Literature’s fictionality is not a lie, but a subversive imagination that enables it to hit the real that is too unbearable to represent without the frame of make-believe. In addition to its fictional props as references to reality, literature is to Derrida an inscription of a condensed historical memory, which is encrypted with repression and desires. Writing is composed of the unseen and unsaid desires that are silenced by censorship, whereas reading is a way of decoding, and a way of reinscribing real desires into a certain historical context.

Other than literature’s task to say everything, the act of interpreting literary works (which is embedded with the unsaid and desires of the society) parallels the clinical setting where an analyst’s interpretation of an analysand’s symptoms

“restored a missing link in the chain of the analysand’s thoughts and feelings, and it could be said to have ‘hit the real’ in the sense that it verbalized (or symbolized) something that had never before been put into words” (Fink 48). In short, a literary

65 text is a blank screen on which society’s symptoms and ideologies are represented, a space that articulates real desires, and a bridge that leads to the real of history.

Conclusion

In his “On Interpretation: Literature as a Socially Symbolic Act,” Fredric Jameson writes that “History is what hurts, it is what refuses desire and sets inexorable limits to individual as well as collective praxis…” (102). Situating literary interpretation in a larger historical context, desires articulated in Gibson’s and Borges’s works can be understood as attempts to traverse the fundamental fantasy by means of writing. For

Jameson, history is the real that is so traumatic that we are afraid to directly confront it. Yet, he assumes that through interpretation, we can unveil the political unconscious in literary works as socially symbolic acts that strive to write into the deadlock of history, or to destabilize the impasse of history that is in total control of a particular social force. Gibson’s fictions are a fantastic literature that exposes the desires in our daily lives, problematizes the issues of global market capitalism, and gives critical voice to genuine emotions that resist the ideologically laden emotions. The counter- capitalist force of his novels exists in minute symbolic acts of everyday life that subjectify the trauma of history. Cayce’s clothing design and her insistence on not falling asleep in front of mesmerizing brand names and mediatization are examples of such minute symbolic acts.

Chapter Four: A Moment in the Great Object

That sense of some peripheral and prelapsarian beauty, of

something a little more than a hundred years past, but in

that moment achingly present, as though the city were

something you could wipe from your glasses and forget.

(Spook Country 34)

…most of the antiterrorist powers, such as detention or

deportation of suspects, depend on precise, accurate

information if they are not to be abused. Can such

accuracy be assured without constructing a surveillance

system so comprehensive as to represent a danger to

individual rights in itself? (Townshend 138)

Introduction

As humans sacrifice affect to boost speed, the desire to feel remains but the act to feel is entrusted to non-organic objects. Contrary to popular belief, emotions and rationality are not mutually exclusive. According to Hannath Arendt, “Absence of emotions neither causes nor promotes rationality.…In order to respond reasonably one must first of all be ‘moved’”(161). This incapability to feel or being moved that is caused by the accelerated culture problematizes the issues of surveillance and memories. In the year 2013 Edward Snowden unveiled that the National Security

Agency (NSA) had been secretly collecting civilians’ private information from their browser cookies and phone conversations in order to prevent possible terrorist outbreaks from happening again. The intention, according to the U.S. government, is

67 to protect civilians and narrow down possible risks. This pre-emptive measure cannot be justifiable as it is based on an infringement of civilians’ freedom. An Orwellian allegory of a strict government is enacted here. If we look at the way the majority of civilians react to the event, we will be surprised how much freedom they are willing to compromise in exchange for the consumption of security. Is freedom just a lip- service wherein civilians are “free” to say, do, and change what the government tells them to? In light of speed culture, we will discover ways in which we respond psychologically to state surveillance and terrorism as well as postmodern branding’s economic and political functions. William Gibson’s Spook Country answers to and reflects upon the issue of an on-going hegemony of webnization and surveillance attached to Augmented Reality (AR) technologies with GPS mapping systems.

The outbreak of the NSA scandal is not the only crucial event engendered by the webnization that emerged for the past few years. There arises an urge to speed up the internet, economic progress, and response time for problem-solving strategies. The

Economist Intelligence Unit made a report in 2014 entitled “The Challenge of Speed:

Driving Slow in the Fast Lane” which demonstrates a concern for not being fast enough and a worry that the current speed is falling behind the needs of the global industry. “In a survey of 461 senior executives based in Europe, 73% of respondents believe that their companies will need to be faster in order to adapt to changing business conditions” (2). Angst and anxiety therefore are felt by those who are eager to work on the same wavelength with the Progress led by computing speed. This product of modernity is the issue at stake now. Before the next challenge comes, there is only a little time to “feel” let along manage. Emotional intelligence can be costly particularly because stressed people tend to make more mistakes than those who are relaxed. Neglected emotions of citizens, however, do not create as much damage as emotions directed toward the citizens that are being ignored or neglected. For instance,

68 terrorism is a reactive measure focusing on a political body and its intention is to create a shock to get messages across. Terrorist attacks target a political body whose citizens share a common absence of emotion brought on by a technological advancement without concern for human emotions. The advent of technological development will not provide public well-being if the human criteria are omitted in the big picture.

In a society that propagates speed of productivity, the absence of emotion is not the result of the erasure of emotion but of externalizing senses onto objects. As humans sacrifice affect to boost speed, the desire to feel remains but the act to feel is delayed or postponed by means of entrusting senses to non-organic objects. That moment, however, is gone forever, once the senses are externalized. Bearing on

Virilio’s criticism of picnoleptic society, this chapter inquires into mass absences in a picnoleptic society, how the absences can be fabricated by postmodern branding, the possible risk of reducing life into a moment by outsourcing senses onto temporal objects, and how the utopian desire to be absolutely secured tragically cocoons us in total surveillance and military paranoia. Apart from Virilio’s keen observation on mass picnoleptics, Slavoj Žižek examines, psychoanalytically, the interpassive subject that marks the second symptom of the speed culture. While theorists offer criticism of symptoms of speed culture, Gibson provides the mechanism of terrorism and surveillance in a post-9/11 society, how civilians cope with the undercurrents of social tension, and how postmodern branding tries to describe reality for the masses. A relentless consumption of pseudo-happiness can be aggravated by postmodern branding, and ironically places us as an easy target of terrorist attacks. The state, in defense of civilians, contrives surveillance procedures that unavoidably sacrifice civilians’ privacy, one of the criteria that define a liberal democratic society.

Drawing on cultural events and two psychological and societal symptoms in

Gibson’s Pattern Recognition and Spook Country, I argue that the speed culture in our society produces picnoleptic and interpassive civilians. Under the premise that cultivation of humanity has the same footing as the development of scientific and technological development, this chapter takes together Virilio’s concept of a picnoleptic society and Žižek’s analysis of interpassive subject to argue that these cultural symptoms are a premonitory sign of infonauts in demise. These symptoms elucidate the conditions in psychology and phenomenology behind the unmindful willingness to delegate to digital gadgets the authority of human senses, turning the gadgets into their proxy. For one, ubiquitous computing allows the state to micromanage civilians whose private data become pawns in drafting political strategy on a global scale. For another, pervasive computing makes it easier for international advertising agencies to execute branding schemes with ways of customizing commodities according to the situational needs of each client. The affair between the state and the advertising agency is furthermore complicated by the invention of AR technologies, as one of the various forms that the politics of the real-time takes. AR gadgets in some ways enhance human senses and create what Virginia Woolf termed

“a moment of being” whereas in other ways they put the less cautious mind to be as

Virilio puts it “a moment in the Great Object.”

Gibson’s Pattern Recognition (2003) and Spook Country (2007) transform cyberspace from an imaginary landscape to a more concrete spatial representation.

Aside from Gibson’s ambivalent take on the myth-making and truth-revealing of the right- and the left-wing political debate, the protagonist’s superpower, and the critique of consumerism, his detective narrative brings up the issues of planetary technicity and its use in trumpeting civilians’ liberty to act, think, and feel. Hubertus Bigend, protagonist of Gibson’s novels, problematizes the hackneyed debate between art and politics by means of postmodern marketing, as he manipulates to align it to the

70 direction of his narrative. New technological productions of the present world such as

AR, VR, locative art, geohacking activities, and virtual renditions of the traditional media mark the nuances Gibson include in his narrative. This innovative way of producing reality is not so much a gimmick as a new area of accessing and staging memories and even a new platform of collecting personal information.

There is a pattern in the plot of Pattern Recognition and Spook Country. Bigend owns a global advertising agency called Blue Ant that hires Cayce Pollard to look for the next big trends and Hollis Henry as a journalist to write an online blog named

Node. Like all protagonisthas in Gibson’s novel, they have an acute sensibility. Every time they detect the pattern related to global tapping of individual’s invisible traces, they will be stricken with a phobic attack. In the process of collecting cultural artifacts, they discover, by their phobia, the sinister plot of Blue Ant. The main emphasis of this chapter focuses on two prevalent symptoms and a critique of terrorism and surveillance described in the story. Pattern Recognition examines interpassive subjects who delegate desires onto objects whereas Spook Country analyzes picnoleptic subjects whose absent-mindedness is a product of the acceleration of speed. In the second novel, terrorism is conspicuously taken as a homemade plot to strengthen state control. Underneath the state’s will to organize civilians with bombardment of terrorist alerts, Bigend’s advertising firm spies on and buys data collected by the state to benefit his company and ambition. With government agent

Brown’s tapping of Illegal Facilitator (IF) and Milgrim’s help to translate to English from Volapuk, IF’s language, the state is able to trace their money laundering and illegal transactions. While criminal activities are wired to prevent harm for society, civilians’ activities can also be wired through AR technologies. These cutting-edge technologies augment realities that intensify user’s experiences while at the same time compromising user’s freedom. Blue Ant is using AR technologies to write a script of

71 our future.

Surveillance

Lately there have been a few infringements of privacy conducted by governments as well as international corporate entities. In reaction to these surveillance measures, there emerged some acts and demonstrations that provoked further discussions of this matter. In the year 2014, Shawn Buckles,6 a student from the Netherlands, sold his location data, personal profile, diary, online conversations, emails, browsing history, consumer preferences, and all the online private data that can be accumulated by social media services for 350 Euro to make the point that private information is valuable. He argues that granting Facebook, Google, and other social media companies the right to obtain private information is the same as selling oneself out online. Aside from his personal awakening to an insidious exchange of privacy for free services, there are non-profit organizations such as Bits of Freedom to protect digital rights and privacy in cyberspace. These acts of resistance are a response to our social reality.

Modern devices that connect to the network of information problematize even more the clash between enforcement of security and resistance to surveillance. The form of mediating civilians for the betterment of the state never changes. What changes is the means that are used. In Gibson’s Bridge and Sprawl trilogies, cyberspace is represented as an imaginary space which exists outside the tangible world. Rather than being a utopian landscape, cyberspace is more of a utopian imagination. However, cyberspace has been evolving since the last decades and emerged from the realm of imagination into that of reality. In Gibson’s Spook Country,

Bobby and Hollis talk about the nature of cyberspace. Hollis the journalist mentions

6 http://shawnbuckles.nl/dataforsale/

72 that she is told that “cyberspace was ‘everting’” (86). Bobby Chombo, whom Hollis likens to “a kind of mimetic literalist” (70), concurs and says “once it everts, then there isn’t any cyberspace, is there? There never was, if you want to look at it that way. It was a way we had of looking where we were headed, a direction. With the grid, we’re here. This is the other side of the screen” (86). Bobby implies that the border between fiction and reality never existed. It is our mind that internalizes the limit between an imaginary and a perceptible space. In other words, ubiquitous computing, the building block of cyberspace, tries to configure our mind as it is the faculty that interprets social reality.

Information technologies, as understood by Virilio, are the same as motor vehicles that drivers use to go from one place to another (145 The Art of the Motor).

The difference between these tools is the speed. He states that “Speed is not a phenomenon, it is the relationship between phenomena” (The Art of Motor 140; emphasis original). Computing speed introduces a new relationship between infonauts and information the value of which does not so much depend on its content as on how fast it can be delivered on the screen. He states: “Cyberspace, or, more exactly,

‘cybernetic space-time,’ will emerge from the observation, popular with the press, that information is of value only if it is delivered fast; better still, that speed is information itself” (The Art of Motor 140; emphasis original). In a world pervasively connected by digital gadgets, to be disconnected implies not only the deceleration of speed but also that the value of information is decreased. As long as the speed culture prevails, the desire to be connected to the information highway will not be quenched. This phenomenon is unstoppable as all the digital infrastructures are built according to our consumption of speed. Just as science used to define how we see the world, it is now the acceleration of speed that tries to describe our reality. Additionally, connecting to computing speed means that humans entrust perceptions to digital devices. Virilio

73 contends that once we externalize our senses onto gadgets, we are easily chained to the gadgets’ programmed function and then will be reduced to impersonal objects.

Slowly but persistently humans are subjugated step by step by the process of depersonalization and dehumanization. He claims: “The world will then close in on itself, …we will have become a part or a moment in the Great Object” (The Art of

Motor 141; emphasis original). If the state’s agenda is to implement surveillance system in digital gadgets, explanation of this phenomenon is not enough to illustrate the comfort humans derive from outsourcing their senses and the reasons why they consent to this easy transmission. As speed accelerates in accordance with technological development, the natural course of our future will be populated with the picnoleptic instead of with mindful beings. That is to say, the picnoleptic will be willing to sacrifice their whole life simply for that particular sublime moment, inebriated by the ecstasy of speed. Whether this sacrifice is worth our life is not the issue, but what is at issue here is that we might sacrifice our moment of being for being in the moment of the Great Object that, unbeknown to us, is manipulating and spying on us.

Although Bobby points out that our cognitive mechanism decides the effect of cyberspace, it can be the medium of realizing ideological representations. The concept of cyberspace is not new to our imagination, but the fact that it has become a reality and a contested site in the power relations among netizens, the state, and the global corporations is still under scrutiny. Digital gadgets are as much the portals to cyberspace as the means of interpellating dispersed imaginary relationships into a certain ideology. Almost every invention comes with improvements of our life as well as side-effects. The invention of advanced technologies spells out a great achievement in the development of scientific progress, which is as important as the cultivation of humanity. The world we live in now is a white canvas that allows AR and locative

74 arts to project on it digital simulation on top of the layer of reality. As a new medium of producing realities, AR contributes to enhancing human senses. AR demands a connection to gadgets that are tied to the cybernetic system. Since the system is a network of circuits, private data can be monitored through the transmission, and the server will be able to tell the location a client is connected from through a GPS system.

The catch is that not only the location will be transmitted but also users’ private data such as preferences, behaviors, and user’s real names. Once the state gets all the information of citizens’ preferences and record of life, they can practice a social engineering on both their citizens and the global manipulation.

The issue at stake in Spook Country, as the title implies, lies with the state surveillance system. It tries to intrude on privacy of the citizens by means of GPS technology, locative art, and other devices that tap users’ location. If the purpose of amassing these data is to prevent state crises by closely monitoring malevolent intentions from civilians and alien residents, then this could lead to militarism as well as deprivation of humanity. AR and cyberspace cocoon us into a moment of Great

Object and force us into purchasing the lies of the state. The consumption of security can be achieved by means of creating fears and alarms of terrorist attacks. In one of the discussions Milgrim has with Brown, the state’s security measures are executed by means of creating terrorist alerts as a form of state violence. Milgrim is half thinking out loud and half talking to Brown who’s polishing his handgun while he’s eating: “A nation…consists of its laws. A nation does not consist of its situation at a given time. If an individual’s morals are situational, that individual is without morals.

If a nation’s laws are situational, that nation has no laws, and soon isn’t a nation”

(Spook Country 180). Milgrim further demands Brown to reply to his thoughts: “Are you really so scared of terrorists that you’ll dismantle the structures that made

America what it is?” (Spook Country 180). Milgrim disagrees with Brown’s action—

75 he is tapping citizens’ information— in the state of exception and argues that if his answer is positive, then he is taken in by terrorists’ tricks: “If you are, you let the terrorist win. Because that is exactly, specifically, his goal, his only goal: to frighten you into surrendering the rule of law. That’s why they call him ‘terrorist.’ He uses terrifying threats to induce you to degrade your own society” (181). Particularly, terrorists manipulate fear of the unknown which is so fundamental and prevalent in a capitalist society that is full of uncertainties and probabilities.

In their book The History of Terrorism from Antiquity to Al Qaeda, Gérard

Chaliand and Arnaud Blin argue that the fundamental objective of terrorism is to change a political status quo by disturbing the psychological condition of a society.

They state: “Terrorism’s style is political and psychological. Making an impression on the popular psyche and political regimes is the objective of any terrorist movement.

Technology is a secondary factor in attaining those objectives, because its primary resource is human and psychological” (179). Secondary to the two primary objectives of terrorism, technology of warfare might not play a pivotal role in terrorism; technology of modern social media devices is, however, still a significant building block that drives a wired country’s direction both politically and psychologically. In other words, when it comes to the issue of implementation of smart facilities and the set-up of a smart city, what pains citizens the most is whether they can outsmart those thinking gadgets or whether they will be dumbed down by intelligent machines. If these technologies are capable of monitoring citizens’ minds, they can easily destroy a whole nation by creating fear. In Gibson’s novel, Milgrim went on to enlighten

Brown about the nature of terrorism which is associated with uncertainty and probability. He remarks: “[Terrorism is] based on the same glitch in human psychology that allows people to believe they can win the lottery. Statistically, almost nobody ever wins the lottery. Statistically terrorist attacks almost never happen” (180).

In their talk, the psychology of terrorism is implicitly used as a strategy that scares citizens into a state of total control. While it is highly improbable to win the lottery, the mere probability of winning agitates the uncertain minds. “Homemade Security”

(228), a term that Inchmale coins, the lead singer of a band that Hollis is in, is an ironic parody of homeland security. The one who safeguards the nation is inventing terrorism to psychologically manipulate civilians into believing that the surveillance system is a necessary way of fighting terrorism.

Explicitly Hollis’s thoughts reflect upon the webnization of lived space through

AR and locative constructs and implicitly upon the conflicts between liberty and surveillance. She is wondering if the “untagged, unscripted world would gradually fill with virtual things” like a “cartoonishly smooth Statue of Liberty hand…the salt- metal sky. Would it all be like this, in Alberto’s new world of the locative? Would it mean that the untagged, unscripted world would gradually fill with virtual things, as beautiful or ugly or banal as anything one encountered on the Web already?” (Spook

Country 184). Security breaches through AR gadgets are more than fiction. In their article “Security and Privacy for Augmented Reality Systems” Franziska Roesner,

Tadayoshi Kohno, and David Molnar point out that it is highly possible for AR gadgets to lure users into executing a false action and even to make users confuse real-world and real-time screens. In order to provide the best AR experience, users have to grant AR devices full authority to communicate with input, output, and data access, such as camera, GPS, microphone, display, earpiece, and wireless communication with other AR systems. Not only the privacy and security of users will be infringed upon during the process of immersive feedback loops between clients and servers, but users who are not always mindful of vicious AR systems will also be easily scammed. They state: “a future malicious application might overlay an incorrect speed limit on top of a real speed limit sign (or place a fake sign where there

77 is none), or intentionally provide an incorrect translation for real-world text in a foreign language. More generally, such an application can trick users into falsely believing that certain objects are or are not present in the real world” (91). Their prediction of future AR devices bears an uncanny resemblance to Hollis’s discussion with Bobby in which they have noticed that cyberspace is everting or that cybernetic space-time is being translated into reality. The process of translation is particularly involved with organizing reality according to the state’s will.

The drastic measures of tapping civilians’ devices can kill the liberty of America.

Terrorism can be one of the state’s strategies in managing itself and its civilians. If terrorism is not a product of the Department of “Homemade Security”, the production of terrorism is liable to the political structure of the state. According to Alex Schmid, liberalism, which is greatly celebrated by most democratic societies, is especially vulnerable to the emergence of terrorism. “[T]he weakness of democratic societies,” he remarks,

is that they focus not on the expression of public will (in Isaiah Berlin’s

famous distinction, ‘positive freedom’) but on the guarantees of individual

liberty (‘negative freedom’) which are so characteristic of Western

Liberalism: freedom of movement, assembly, speech; protection against

arbitrary government, equality before the law—in Anglo-Saxon terms

‘due process’. Within the composite of liberal democracy, it seems to be

liberalism rather than democracy that is the perceived source of

vulnerability to internal violence. The crucial assumptions of the civic

culture: toleration, moderation, reasonableness, non-violence, form the

conditions for the exercise of ‘civil liberties.’ Terrorism, however defined,

is certainly a calculated assault on the culture of reasonableness.

(Terrorism: A Very Short Introduction 136-37)

Whether it is the reasonable tolerance of violence in a liberal democratic society that opens the door for terrorist activities, or the fact that the state is using terrorist alerts to manage internal affairs, civilians are subject to being deprived of their freedom and to be in a state of constant fear.

It is irrational to sacrifice liberty for the sake of preventing terrorist attacks as this would lead to an infringement on personal liberty that defines what America is. It is not that civilians are not sensible but that lies are oftentimes more logical than facts and thus are easier to believe. In her essay “Lying in Politics” Hannah Arendt explains why civilians are easily duped by politicians’ promises and lies. She claims:

Lies are often much more plausible, more appealing to reason, than reality,

since the liar has the great advantage of knowing beforehand what the

audience wishes or expects to hear. He has prepared his story for public

consumption with a careful eye to making it credible, whereas reality has

the disconcerting habit of confronting us with the unexpected, for which

we were not prepared. (7)

As “smart” computing devices are pervasively used and the data generated by users are conspicuously monitored simply by collecting civilians’ big data via AR constructs, a storyteller with a particular will in mind, is capable of manipulating the minds of the most rational civilians. This is not only a debate between privacy and surveillance, but also a struggle between mindful civilians and smart technologies.

The human psyche can risk anything out of fear, even fabricated images created by a liar. Arendt continues her analysis of this liar’s goal, specifically the reason to liberate a nation with war, by remarking that

The ultimate aim was neither power nor profit. Nor was it even influence in

the world in order to serve particular, tangible interests for the sake of

which prestige, an image of the ‘greatest power in the world,’ was needed

and purposefully used. The goal was now the image itself, as is manifest in

the very language of the problem-solvers, with their ‘scenarios’ and

‘audiences,’ borrowed from the theater….Image-making as global policy—

not world conquest, but victory in the battle ‘to win the people’s minds’—is

indeed something new in the huge arsenal of human follies recorded in

history. (18)

If a war directed outward has lost its magic in forcing civilians to buy the liar’s story, a war directed inward is put to practice in the form of surveillance system and in the name of preventing terrorism. This journey inward is as wide as the globe connected by the network of information and as deep as fear shared by paranoid citizens. The world is turning on its paranoid mode owing to both mass surveillance and sporadic terrorist attacks. Zooming into everyman’s psyche, the camera lens finds a mind trapped by interpassive and picnoleptic symptoms.

Symptoms

Trauma always leaves a scar. Spook Country shows how information junkies cover the psychological problems by means of accelerating the consumption of fancy technological gadgets as first-aid of no healing ingredients. The side-effects of these stylish band-aids are the trade-off of citizens’ private data for corporate marketing and state surveillance. Instead of becoming more alert and critical of allocated information, civilians are taking information as placebos. Since the dormant citizens cannot unshackle their psychological chains away from post-9/11 trauma nor can they successfully release suppression by means of transferring senses onto other objects, they become aggressive. Aggression and discontent are manifested through terrorist acts disguised as civil disobedience to penetrate a society that is only paying attention to the upper class while disregarding the underclass. It might shake up psychological

80 turmoil in the face of the unbearable past; yet to compartmentalize fear by putting it into a box is not a proper way to treat the wound. The way the society manages fear without treating its root can also cause great damage in the long run. Externalizing senses onto objects is the obverse way of sealing fear in a box, which can be easily developed into a negligence of feelings. The result of mistreating interpassive subjects is the loss of the sensibility of feeling for the self and others. Once the human body is devoid of the ability to feel, it becomes merely an interface for the inscription of information.

With the pervasive usage of technological gadgets and the development of artificial intelligence, discussions on artificial affect have brought much attention to the study of humanities. Nonetheless, we do not sufficiently understand human affect to shift the focus from humanity to artificial intelligence. Our constant need to connect and interact with smart gadgets implies that we have a strong affinity with the gadgets that we own or are owned by. Žižek’s theory of the interpassive, as I mentioned in chapter three, implies that subjects who have more affinity with digital gadgets are more likely to be interpassive. Other than being interpassive, picnolepsy is also largely observed in cyberculture. While the speed culture engenders the fantasy of being hyperactive humans that helps cultivate interpassive subjects, Virilio points out that the symptoms of the picnoleptic not only are conditioned by acceleration, but also produce it. The picnoleptic subjects have a tendency to involuntarily miss certain moments and to fill in inconsistent missing gaps with manufactured narratives that go with a logical and consistent story. Žižek puts psychology into perspective whereas

Virilio argues that the constant replenishment with fabricated memories has to do with the phenomenology of time. Virilio introduces the term picnolepsy to describe this phenomenon, which lends sympathy to Žižek’s interpassive subjects as the change of perception of time contributes partially to their symptoms. To discuss this

81 phenomenon, Virilio describes a blurry moment upon waking up in the morning which he likens to the symptom of the picnoleptic subjects, in which the subject is waking up but the senses have not yet quite caught up with the conscious.

The lapse occurs frequently at breakfast and the cup dropped and

overturned on the table is its well-known consequence. The absence lasts a

few seconds; its beginning and its end are sudden. The senses function, but

are nevertheless closed to external impressions. The return being just as

sudden as the departure, the arrested word and action are picked up again

where they have been interrupted. Conscious time comes together again

automatically, forming a continuous time without apparent breaks.

(Aesthetics 9)

The subject who experiences this phenomenon is considered picnoleptic. Although the example provided here happens in the morning where the subject is slowly waking up, picnoleptic subjects experience the lapse throughout the day. It is not the lapse that is accentuated in this phenomenon but the absence that escapes our conscious. As the event happens faster than the mind that tries to keep up with it, the picnoleptic cannot record the missing moments. The absence never exists since the picnoleptic tend to invent an alternative story to fill in the gap of sporadic absences they experience at times.

No matter how alert we are, as Virilio notes, we are probably as out of control when we are awake as we are in our dreams. If speed culture renders us more picnoleptic throughout the day, absences during picnoleptic episodes poeticize as well as problematize picnoleptic subjects. Virilio remarks:

There is a tendency to patch up sequences, readjusting their contours to

make equivalents out of what the picnoleptic has seen and what he has not

been able to see, what he remembers and what, evidently, he cannot

remember and that it is necessary to invent, to recreate, in order to lend

verisimilitude to his discursus. (Aesthetics 10)

Representation of the absence contains alien elements that do not exist in the first place. The picnoleptic subjects cannot refer to memories as reliable sources since what they remember is not entirely what they perceived but what they create. They could poeticize presence with an invention of absence that can be problematic if this phenomenon is shared collectively. Directly associated with the matter of absence is the perception of time. It has definitely changed owing to the acceleration of speed with the invention of photography. Virilio illustrates the change of perception with a game that a photographer played when he was young.

In this vignette of a modern picnoleptic, the body’s relation and reaction to the surroundings is conceptualized as the process of developing photographs. The photographer remembers that

he’s assimilated his own body to the camera, the room of his eye to a

technical tool, the time of the exposure to turning himself around three

times…Owing to an acceleration of speed, he’s succeeded in modifying his

actual duration; he’s taken it off from his lived time. To stop ‘registering’ it

was enough for him to provoke a body-acceleration, a dizziness that

reduced his environment to a sort of luminous chaos. But with each return,

when he tried to resolve the image, he obtained only a clearer perception of

its variations. (Aesthetics 12)

This is one of the experiments that the photographer performs to experience the world

83 and to inscribe presence in terms of developing photography. Owing to the acceleration of time in speed culture, the subject cannot keep up with the world and needs to re-invent absences to go with a less spasmodic presence. The photographer’s game epitomizes picnoleptic subjects’ perception of the world, in which acceleration makes reality ostensibly less real than the traces they recreate. The body cannot register any meaningful presence without simulating a logical script of the world out of invention of absences. When AR technologies come in, the disparity between absence and presence breeds more problems to this already distrait mind of the picnoleptic. Not only that the picnoleptic subjects have to create absences to go with presence, but also that they will have a hard time differentiating reality from AR.

According to Virilio, this mass picnoleptic state has transformed society into a

“Child-society [that] frequently utilizes turnings, spinning around, disequilibrium. It looks for sensations of vertigo and disorder as sources of pleasure” (Aesthetics 12).

The symptoms of the picnoleptic are the key to the emergence of surveillance technologies. This is not only an age where society accelerates and generates chaos but also an age where society calls for parenting measures to control risks made by the child-society.

The picnoleptic masses care not so much about being able to tell the difference between what they perceive and what they are manipulated to perceive, as about the exhilarating sensations immediately provided by the acceleration of speed. Aside from simulating the body as a camera, the invention of modern technologies also expedites the overall physical, social, and cultural speed. Acceleration of speed creates dizziness and disorder which invites the picnoleptic subjects to rely on technological instruments to help them stabilize and control the uncertain future.

When asked how, at an advanced age, he was able to keep his youthful look,

Lartigue answered simply that he knew how to give orders to his body. The

disenchantment, the loss of power over himself that obliged him to have

recourse to technical prostheses (photography, easel painting, rapid

vehicles…) have not entirely abolished the demands on his own body that

he made as a child. (Aesthetics 13)

Pertinent to this phenomenon, the difference among photography, easel painting, and rapid vehicles is their relation to speed. These are technologies that serve as prostheses of the body. In this case, the change of technology is not the goal but the byproduct of the acceleration of speed and shrinking of time. Virilio explains how

Lartigue maintains his youthful look by using technical prostheses to “replace or complete failing organs” (14). He remarks that behind the obvious reason of indulging oneself in certain pleasures, Lartigue and the picnoleptic subjects embody themselves as the mechanical process of developing photography for a less obvious but deeper reason. Lartigue simulates the process that creates dizziness and pleasure and

“develops” experiences among random “exposure” of snapshots. Behind the pleasure provided by this process, he uses photography as prosthesis of his body. The fear of aging suggests a pursuit of youth, which is time itself. Consequently, the invention of technological prosthesis during each epoch is not so much created out of the desire to improve the content provided by the previous epoch, as out of the desire to grab hold of the ever-vanishing time. As the speed of the technological equipment quickens, it points to a fact that there emerge more chances and randomness within the same period of time. Thus acceleration of technological invention is our “contract on the aleatory” which “is only the formulation of an essential question on the relative perception of the moving; the pursuit of form is only a technical pursuit of time”

(Aesthetics 14; emphasis original). In other words, regardless of the technical

85 prostheses the subject uses, the ultimate goal is a pursuit of time. To put it in simpler terms, modern technologies that boost the speed of the society, that change the motor of the body, are a pursuit of time, a desire to maintain youth or a desire to be immortal.

The desire to live to the utmost of life is displaced by means of acceleration.

The experiment Lartigue makes is not a singular case, but a mass phenomenon.

The dizziness, production of absences, and the reactive invention of presences are the symptoms of “paradoxical sleep (rapid-eye-movement sleep), which corresponds to the phase of deepest dreaming. So our conscious life—which we already believe would be inconceivable without dreams—is just as difficult to imagine without a state of paradoxical waking (rapid waking)” (Aesthetics 15; emphasis original). The collective picnoleptic subjects are in a constant state of paradoxical waking, which poses a threat to society. The fact that they cannot have full control of their minds even when they are consciously awake is a sign of the subjects’ consciousnesses being compromised by their own desire to be youthful. Their antidote—using technological prostheses to put disorder into order—makes the symptoms of paradoxical waking even worse as these prostheses are considered proxies of the body.

In some rare cases the risks of connecting our bodies to technological gadgets can be an opportunity for creating new ways of connecting to the world and even can be instrumental to those who are disabled. If as Žižek argues, desires dissemble as demands that cannot be fulfilled, the drive to take risks in the culture of chance and speed puts us out there to welcome randomness, but also directs us to a culture of preparedness. As Virilio aptly points out: “progress has pushed our hyper-anticipatory and predictive society toward a simple culture of chance, a contract on the aleatory”

(Aesthetics 20-1; emphasis original). Terrorism and casino culture exemplify the negative and the positive sides of this contract as acceleration creates more accidents

86 and opportunities at once.

If we see the mechanism of a camera as an embodiment of the picnoleptic subjects paradoxical waking, we can expect that they are not fully in control of what particular moment they want to put to exposure and then develop into presence. On the one hand, the culture of speed advocates us to increase the number of exposures by accelerating the developing process. We cannot be as mindful as we think when a picnoleptic episode strikes. On the other hand, the culture of speed hinges on a desire to vivify our life to the sublime moment where one can disappear into the ecstasy of speed.

Even though picnoleptic subjects ostensibly expand their perception of senses by driving toward their desire to seize the day, in reality they blindly close their senses and create absences. The nineteenth century marked the beginning of speed culture that witnessed a mass production of absences. The shift of perception can be observed from the commonality between a symbolist poet and a young seer, between Edgar

Allen Poe and Bernadette Soubirous (42). According to Virilio, this “lack” of presence is “creator of an extrasensory perception” (Aesthetics 43), often understood as a sixth sense “which would be the moral perfection of the abstract human idea of time” (Aesthetics 42; emphasis original). The logic behind this seemingly supernatural perception is rather that when one perception is closed, the other will be enlarged. The subjects feel a sense of time being suspended as if being in eternity because the sixth sense opens up a portal to a timeless dimension. Virilio remarks that this “mystical materialism” in the nineteenth century develops into parapsychology where hegemonic powers as Russia and America started to experiment on configuring consciousness by means of manipulating collective senses (Aesthetics 43). In extreme cases, picnoleptic subjects are reduced to mere bodies that exist solely as speed itself.

The development of picnoleptic symptoms is parallel to that of science: “The ideal of scientific observation would therefore be a sort of controlled trance, or better yet, a control of the speed of consciousness. And it would be first of all as a reconstitution of picnoleptic savoir-faire that it could be communicated and recognized as common by each and everyone” (Aesthetics 30; emphasis original). In other words, science does not so much observe events with an objective perspective, as inspect events with a subjective goal to control the speed of consciousness.

Whoever is capable of regulating the speed of our senses controls consciousness, memories, and perspectives of looking at the world. Regardless of its literal meaning,

AR technologies do less to augment reality than to discipline the senses, consciousness, and memories of the picnoeptic subjects. The domino effects of the scheme of controlling senses all boil down to a management of knowledge.

Virilio remarks that it is not a secret anymore that whoever can control the speed of consciousness can control the knowledge of the world. It is not that speed is power, or power is knowledge, but speed is knowledge. Technologies are double-edged swords where they create a culture of the aleatory and we create technologies to control the speed. Already we see that Virilio’s innuendo of the association between the Apollonian and technology of speed, in which the disparity of our memories that do not go with the Apollonian narrative will be forced to be changed. It is to say that our consciousness during paradoxical waking can be aligned by means of controlling the speed of consciousness because the reconfiguration of the form is the reconfiguration of the perception of time. Here we enter the realm of knowledge that serves to fill in the gaps during picnoleptic episodes. As memories are indispensable in building up knowledge, memories that are lost and reconstructed by the narrator of the speed culture during lapses are significant when accidents take place. They are not

88 so important when everything goes normally as it should. Since our memories are not always reliable and logical, we tend to believe in what we read and what is compatible with the story we are told at large. Virilio argues that since “the information of a memory without gaps, failures, absence is displayed at very high speeds,” we often find ourselves become subjects who are “afflicted with fly-catcher memories where whole masses of useless facts are glued together…which make us judge them inferior to those computer screens” (Aesthetics 32; emphasis original). Soon enough we will easily take whatever that is on the screen as reality whereas what we see in life as virtual reality. It might be a misuse of words to refer to information as knowledge.

The content of the information is not the pivotal point in mentioning the fact that we privilege information amassed on computer screens over memories as if they were unreliable. It is, however, how the information is formed that requires scrutiny. Our desire to know it all has put us into the trap of an uncontrollable speed of consciousness. There is a sense of the sublime moment in the crisis of information overload which disturbs the order and calmness (Aesthetics 33). Therefore, it is for that uplifting moment only that the infonaut would be willing to sacrifice all his or her life. If it is knowledge that we accumulate, we should obtain more wisdom than confusion, more understanding than calculated facts. The thirst for knowledge is usually mistaken for a thirst for information. As Virilio points out, the trick of overloaded information gives us the impression that the infonaut is in control the more information he obtains. In reality, “the more informed man is the more the desert of the world expands around him” (Aesthetics 46).

Contrary to this sublime moment produced by the speed of information which triggers the exhilarating pleasure of disorder, Virilio argues that “A mourning, an impression of profound unhappiness can, according to Bachelard, give us the feeling

89 of the moment” (Aesthetics 34). Even though in the name of progress, technology strives to improve its speed to accomplish tasks, this is not to say that technology and science are capable of making us see clearer than we saw before. Virilio rebukes intellectuals for privileging technology’s false awakening. He claims that:

A technology detached from socio-economic or cultural preconceptions,

desires to become the metaphor of the world, while envisioning itself as a

revolution of consciousness—finally replacing the pseudo-state of rational

wakefulness with an artificial condition of paradoxical wakefulness, while

furnishing people with an assistance-become-subliminal. (Aesthetics 42)

This particular technology that Virilio has in mind is the one that serves military purposes. Since technology that works on the improvement of speed and agility is instrumental in war scenarios, unconsciously the picnoleptic society is marching towards cohesion of senses and consciousness. Under the disguise of a revolutionary power to improve the society, technology that accelerates our bodies creates picnoleptic subjects that enjoy ecstasy of speed and pseudo-wakefulness. While the picnoleptic society moves faster than society used to, more accidents are to be expected and will catch unmindful picnoleptic subjects by surprise. There will be less time for them to react each time before the next accident takes place again.

Absences and Politics of the Real-Time

Spook Country illustrates the issues between terrorism and surveillance. The political intention is the first step in the act of terrorist attacks and surveillance systems. While these two interrelated yet antagonistic forms may seem easy to be spotted, the measures they take change according to the timely medium. Since Napoleon, media

90 have always been used as an accomplice in military strategies. Fiction writing and today’s society are not exempt from this so-called Media-Military Complex. While it is movies that are used to operate military deployments in the past, it is AR technologies and locative gadgets that will be used in the future. Looking back at the evolution of technologies, Virilio argues that the structural change of them serves to provide more efficiently a sense of temporary release in perceptions. He states:

The film temples, palaces, transatlantic boats, were, so to speak, emptied

from one day to the next, and now it’s the turn of television, in the

developed countries, to lose millions of spectators every year. They speak

each time of temporary crisis, but in fact when a technique dies it’s

replaced by another that’s considered more effective, for none of the

changes are independent, all comprise a single basic quest for the

prostheses of subliminal comfort. (Aesthetics 62; emphasis mine)

Looking back at the evolution from film to television, spectators are tied to chairs.

The invention of automobiles and airplanes boosts the speed of traveling thereby shrinking space and shortening time. The windows of automobiles and airplanes replace movie and television screens as projection screens. The shrinking effect produced by technologies lends a new meaning to dwellings. Virilio remarks that

The question today therefore is no longer to know if cinema can do without

a place but if places can do without cinema…. In spite of people nostalgic

about History, Rome is no longer in Rome, architecture is no longer in

architecture, but in geometry; the space-time of vectors, the aesthetic of

construction is dissimulated in the special effects of the communication

machines, engines of transfer and transmission; the arts continue to

disappear in the intense illumination of projection and diffusion. (Aesthetics

64-5; emphasis mine)

Here Virilio makes an analogy between moviehouses and cities where architecture of the cities is considered a darkroom and mobs of the cities are the new spectators of movies. The “voyeur-voyager” (65) embarks on a trip to experience subliminal comfort by means of any form of technologies, such as cars, airplanes, and cellphones that activate augmented realities. With the accelerated speed of these technologies that provide subliminal comfort by means of projecting consciousness from reality to a temporary escape to other space, a voyeur-voyager disappears faster on the journey to oblivion. Our memories are tied to the mind, the source of problems, which controls emotions and perceptions. If anything, the screen that takes away spectator’s attention serves as the means that takes spectator away from the reality and toward the real- time. Memories are the targets that the real-time aims to replace with fantastic imagery. The mind does not register distrait moments that were perceived. Virilio notes:

The speed of the transport only multiplies the absence; travel to forget, they

used to advise the neurasthenic, travelling lessens the suicidal tension in

opposing a substitute for it; the little death of the departure, the gain

acquired in the increase in rapidity of displacement was a disappearance

into a holiday where there’s no tomorrow, which amounts, for each, to a

deferred rehearsal of his last day. (Aesthetics 65; emphasis original)

In Virilio’s phenomenology, “day” often carries the meaning of light as in daytime and opposed to nighttime of darkness. In his discussion on films, he argues that the whole film industry works on productions of the “false day” (63). He delineates the real-time on the screen of movie-theaters as false day. Light is significant in Christian culture as well as in photography. God created the world by saying “Let there be light.”

Light is the source of all beings. False light does not so much remind us of a life that is misleading, but rather reflects a life that is lived with regards to an other-worldly reality instead of a physical reality.

As he considers photography an epitome of people’s body in contemporary society, life can be taken as a photon-writing or light-writing. Life’s burden will be lessened if all sorrowful memories were erased. Acceleration of the speed of technologies serves the purpose of replacing painful memories with aggregated and fragmented snapshots of the phenomenal world that are projected on the screens. He continues: “To produce prostheses of subliminal comfort is to produce simulators of day, even of the last day, metamorphosis of the objects of industrial production where the ensemble of economic realities would be the relay for the cinematic function” (73).

In other words, the screens of automobiles, television, computer, and AR devices are real-time screens that simulate life, only with less anxiety and more comfort. To see the prostheses of life in another light, there remains our longing to dwell in a utopian space where all worldly worries will be taken away and only happiness exists.

Regardless of all instances of consumption of happiness exemplified in instantaneous entertainments, we use technology mostly for its alluring motor. In an era where science-fiction representations are produced profusely in texts, movies, urban architectures and AR constructs, it is a sign that our thirst for motors still persists.

According to Virilio, science-fiction narrative is an indicator of a society where “our presence in the world” is incompatible with

the various levels of a certain anesthesia in our consciousness that at every

moment, inclines us to see-saw into more or less extensive absences, more

or less serious, even to provoke by various means instantaneous

immersions in other worlds, parallel worlds, interstitial, bifurcating, right

up to that black hole, which would be only an excess of speed in these

kinds of crossings, a pure phenomenon of speed, abrogating the initial

separation between day and night. (Aesthetics 75-6; emphasis original).

In Virilio’s analysis, technology is a seductive force that is often played by Eve in

Biblical narrative. Her power is to seduce humans into another realm of the universe.

She embodies as movement, “the ideal vector between man and the new world” (77).

AR technologies then represent our latest invention that enables us to approach the unapproachable worldly heaven, and representing the unrepresentable—the loss, the irretrievable time, and the unreachable space. The name “Augmented Reality” first comes to mind as a form of representing reality. If the intention of approximating the unapproachable time and space is to expand our consciousness that incorporates and expands our perceptions, so that we will be able to experience the fullest of each vibrating moment; then interpassivity and picnolepsy have been proven futile. In the trips of traveling in the real-time-scape, the field of attention of the voyagers is not directed inwardly as a quest to one’s own knowledge, but outwardly to a commercialized fantasy which attracts one to be carried away by an immersive motor.

If the missing moments of the picnoleptic subjects mark the pivotal point in configuring our consciousness, the absences not only serve the military purposes but also those of the advertising industry.

In a discussion between Hollis and Bobby on cyberspace and its mutated form of locative arts, Bobby the locative arts technician tells Hollis that the cutting-edge technologies are often manifested in realms of art and politics. He says that “The most interesting applications turn up on the battlefield, or in a gallery” (86). Alberto,

Bobby’s co-worker mentions that GPS technology, however, was strictly military to begin with, the same as maps and grids. Before May, 2000, geohacking was strictly a

94 military system because civilians did not have options to turn off the surveillance system. The purpose of grids and GPS leads to a discussion of cyberspace which as

Odile terms it, is a “See-bare-espace” (28) that “everts” (28). Odile remarks that artists including herself have been curating arts everywhere with “Cartographic attributes of the invisible” and “Spatially tagged hypermedia” (31). In a way, she remarks: “The artist [is] annotating every centimeter of a place, of every physical thing. Visible to all, on devices such as these [gadgets embedded with GPS functions]”

(31). Bobby corrects Hollis’s annotation of cyberspace and says that there never was a cyberspace. It was but “a way we had of looking where we were headed, a direction”

(86). While blogs “are trying to describe reality” (88), netizens of the internet are contextualized in the network of blogs. AR, VR, and cyberspace then are manifestations of our mind; that is, it is our mind that is turning inside out. These advanced forms of representing our mind convey to us that physical reality has stopped to satisfy our mind’s insatiable need of representation. A Faustian mind is capable of breaking off the boundary and initiating new patterns of thoughts.

However, this powerful means ceases to be creative if it is being directed to the service of militarism.

In this case, cyberspace is very likely being posed as a military instrument in micromanaging netizens. If cyberspace is and was always a figment of netizens’ imagination, the difference between VR and locative arts is that the latter requires a

“nervous system” (88) whereas the netizens “have internalized the interface” (88) and forget that the interface exists. Once VR experience is incorporated into one’s prosthetic existence, one’s perception is likely to be duped to experience something one does not want in the first place. In a recent review article from Association for

Computing Machinery “Security and Privacy for Augmented Reality Systems,” scholars claim that “Future application AR systems may develop new techniques for

95 tricking users into interacting with elements, and system designers must anticipate these threats” (Roesner et al, 92). Commercial GPS technology, for instance, makes use of the loophole of humans’ perceptive leakage for intruding on privacy and making corporate profits. For nostalgic purposes, Alberto the locative artist designs a virtual rendition of the death of River Phoenix and a virtual shrine to commemorate

Helmet Newton. He designs them as an augmented reality by attaching a GPS unit, which he understands as “smallish consumer electronics” (30) on it, so that pedestrians will not be able to tell the difference between reality and VR. Once you put the visor on, you will notice that “Alberto had littered the street with dead celebrities” (159). Alberto’s virtual piece of River Phoenix pops up subliminally on

Viper Room concrete when Hollis is having a talk with Bigend who owns a corporate advertising company called Blue Ant. For commercial purposes, Archie the virtual giant squid is being created for advertising in a Tokyo department store over a street in Shinjuku. For aesthetic purposes, he also creates a locative installation of Monet’s poppies. For sentimental reasons, he designs a virtual rendition of Scott Fitzgerald’s heart attack because for Alberto, Fitzgerald still lives in his heart, or because he wishes that he had not died.

The absences particularly refer to memories of certain moments that are missing during the outbreak of picnoleptic episodes. The production of absences results in our not being able to control the speed of consciousness on our own. As we delegate our senses to technological objects, we also outsource the task of controlling consciousness to them. By losing ourselves in the speed, we drop our worries and cares in the sea of overloaded disinformation. Absence is an intriguing presence of all kinds of possible fabricated discourses. Node, the online magazine, is particularly marketing on the curiosity for absences in order to increase the value itself. When

Hollis points out to Bigend that Node has not attracted much gossip from the industry,

96 he describes it as an “Anti-buzz,” or “Definition by absence” (111). Bigend’s strategies of branding is served as an installation of absences. Blue Ant is operating as a black hole or an absence (146). Operating as a black-hole that sucks everything into disappearance where there is no light but darkness, Blue Ant becomes a project of oblivion where interpassive subjects entrust their senses and picnoleptic subjects abandon part of themselves for the sake of momentary pseudo-uplifting experiences.

As one of the Blue Ant staff members puts it, the project Node which Hollis is working on for Bigend is particularly “a species of dreaming, the company’s equivalent of REM sleep” (146). The purpose of Bigend’s postmodern branding is to install a system of REM Waking, intended to disappear human subjectivity.

Augmented reality registers several things. It is not only defined by absence, an annotated layer of realities, a direction of the future, and a description of reality, but also the grey area of non-human objects attached to our bodies. This new way of describing reality elicits discussion of the politics of (augmented) vision. By using AR technologies, Bigend aims to translate what we see on the screen into what we perceive in the physical realm, AR into reality, absence into presence. Virilio notes when our mind dwells entirely in the space of real time, or in this case, the AR space,

“The thing described takes over from the real thing” (Art of the Motor 43). The politics of Augmented Reality is brought to our attention again when Hollis notices the pique of this realm of representation. Hollis thinks to herself when looking at a scene in front of her: “That sense of some peripheral and prelapsarian beauty, of something a little more than a hundred years past, but in that moment achingly present, as though the city were something you could wipe from your glasses and forget” (34).

The politics of describing reality can be easily replaced by the real-time. It is as if the memories of the past can be easily erased and forgotten, following by the erasure of traces and lack of intensity.

The pursuit of speed derives from the drive to disappearance that is but an obverse of the desire to live forever. If technologies intensify our desire to be immortal, advertising unleashes our gush to want more than what we need.

Combining with media, technologies tend to distract human beings from paying attention to life by means of alluring fantasy. An emerging platform of presenting absences with phantasmagoric holographic images and haptic sensors (something that creates tactile effects), that is, the AR devices, are invented to fill our sometimes painful but beautiful losses/absences. AR gadgets are not only interactive, blurring the differences between Virtual Reality and reality, but also immersive in that users are capable of navigating from reality into the AR seamlessly. Alberto suggests that how we perceive the world is changing with the introduction of AR technologies. Being able to amble between AR and reality without fission suggests that our perception of the world is expanded outside reality. Even if the boundary between VR and reality disappears, it however occupies a space in our mind as our spatial construction of the world depends on perception aside from objective reality. AR technologies are conducive to the disabled by tricking senses into believing the fictive space actually exists and then successfully augment their capacities to perform certain tasks that the disabled cannot do without connecting to AR technologies. As much as they contribute to improving the lives of the disabled, they are also used in realms that lure desires. In Spook Country, AR technology is represented as a new technology that not only augments reality but also stealthily replaces picnoleptic subjects’ missing moments with advertisements. How can we tell whether what we are looking at is the reality that we want to manifest or the AR that the advertisers want us to perceive?

Exemplified in the production of Node, Hollis understands that she can only witness history that is about to happen and agrees that in the process she becomes a participant of history and her writing will be suppressed by the powerful person.

Gibsonian narratives often cover the dialectics between the ancient and the modern, the left-wing and the right-wing, art and the politics, Spook Country does not exclude these complex issues. In the end, there arises a balance instead of a favoring either side of the discourse. Rausch wants Hollis to be aware of geohackers’ patterns of global shipping and data collecting. Consider these patterns of data as crowd-writing the history of our future; it is just as if every individual is participating in the process of writing history without knowing it.

The interpassive subject is participating in the crowd-writing of a future that might be compromised by oneworldedness, to use a term coined by Emily Apter. In her “On Oneworldedness: Or Paranoia as a World System,” Apter states that the paranoia of terrorism makes the world ever more encroaching upon itself, since surveillance is the strategy most governments are using to ward off danger and risks of outside attacks for their citizens (366). This oneworldedness is a unity of the material but not of the immaterial consciousness. Our pervasive computing constructs a space that provides for a dwelling place for our mind that is in constant and persistent search for an alternative space other than our limited physical reality, VR, and AR. While Virilio uses the term Great Object to name the pathology of interpassive subjects who shrink the complex textures of life into a moment of objects,

Apter, who sees this world in reduction in another light, broaches the notion of

“oneworldedness” to describe a world, neglecting the nuances of meaning across different languages, that is shifting to forget the value of differences. To challenge the oneworldedness path some of us are marching toward, she encourages paying more attention to differences thereby breaking up the singular plot of taking the U.S. as the

Other, the scapegoat of every disaster.

Conclusion

Whether it is Žižek’s take on interpassive subject or Virilio’s analysis of an emerging mode of picnolepsy in the society, the implication of the societal symptoms is a lack of mindfulness and a propensity to the consent of mass surveillance. If social science’s task is to find out social illnessess and to offer cures for it, literature’s task is to understand the ways that define who we are. Memories, or moments of absences that have not been eclipsed by acceleration, configure our perceptions, and our perception of time. Technology of various forms provides an unattached moment from memoires. During these moments, simulated existence grants us a temporal oblivion and instantaneous gratification. The desire to escape the present time can take many forms; in a repetitive oscillation between boredom and excitement, we are riveted to speed and become sheer speed itself.

100

Chapter Five: (Toward an) Ontological Appropriation of Digital Beings

Introduction

In the previous chapters I have discussed the social mores of the digital society and theorized how, from the perspective of digital vision, cyberpunk literature and cultural artifacts as means of mediatization can possibly reinforce capitalist ideology. Then I probed into the pathology of high-speed web junkies and the trauma that grounds their symptoms of addictions. Memory serves as a hinge that switches on and off their attachment to cyberspace. Our fear to confront traumatic memories results in the outsourcing of senses onto gadgets. They either function to shield us from the risk or anxiety of being reminded of the past, or are used as a displacement to channel away harsh feelings. After that I discussed that our fear to confront traumatic memories results in outsourcing senses onto Great Objects. Once the human body cannot activate its faculty to feel, it only serves as an empty shell for transmitting information.

This behavioral pattern in the postmodern society germinates more boredom and leaves not enough room for transcendence. According to Canadian media theorist

Arthur Kroker, these cocooned and interpassive humans live under a “Will to

Technology,” as replacement for spiritual awakening. Cyberpunk literature and cyberculture embody this ontology as well as project cultural practices of surplus of life.

Cyberpunk narratives often portray people who experience recurrent anxiety, sleeplessness, emptiness, but hardly people who experience boredom. It is not only because cyberpunk narratives are novels, fictional constructs, that readers choose to read for entertainment in their leisure time, but also because the fear of being bored propels readers to be inebriated in a variety of entertainments. It is as if boredom itself

101 is a certain kind of virus against which digital beings are automatically vaccinated right after their birth. One way to approach this crucial problem is by understanding what is lacking in digital utopias. Boredom, by and large, which could be nihilistically destructive, is a state of mind that expects constant stimuli but can never be satisfied.

Ecstasy, on the other hand, is a force of mental escape velocity that propels digital beings to forget the nihilistic aspect of being. The quintessential issue, however, is neither the sense of nihilism digital beings face, nor boredom and ecstasy as two polemic states of being. The core of the digital being’s problem lies with a void constructed within the occidental ontology. Contrary to the perspective of occidental ontology, the void will not be comprehended as a lack from the perspective of oriental ontology. With this understanding in mind, this chapter intends to apply insights from oriental ontology to liberate digital beings from their current conundrum, oftentimes generated by the blind spot of occidental ontology.

The theme of boredom has been widely discussed since the beginning of the early modern period. In her “Martin Heidegger’s Existential Grammar of Boredom,”

Elizabeth S. Goodstein argues that modernization commodifies conditions of human existence and produces boredom as its byproduct. She remarks: while Georg Simmel investigates boredom in relation to social and historical conditions, Martin Heidegger considers boredom in relation to mortality (282). Heidegger especially contributed greatly to the understanding of social and political functions of boredom in everyday life. In this capitalist society, modern men put more emphasis on replenishing life with various events and willfully generate boredom in this process (290). Among the various forms of boredom Goodstein mentions in this article, existential boredom is most influential and pervasive as there is no referential sign to its source; boredom comes neither from the phenomenal world nor from the need to fill up the time with

102 events: “it is a modification of temporality that brings time to a halt in a present which, since it is cut off from past and future, ‘expands.’ In experiencing this ‘now,’ which has been retrospectively revealed as ‘our own, but abandoned and empty self,’ we realize that we were bored the whole evening” (322). This is the grammar of existential boredom. “As a fundamental mood, it does not determine us as subjects, as individuals with identities in the everyday world, but rather exposes us as beings faced with the problem of the meaning of our transient being” (325). Interestingly

Heidegger does not intend to find a cure to this existential crisis, but rather consider it as twilight to the understanding of the relation between self and world. Thus, this profound form of boredom invites modern men to contemplate the essence of being.

Boredom unveils the suppression of emptiness which produces inauthentic being. For

Heidegger: “Incessant activity and movement manifest Dasein’s fallenness to the everyday temporality of clock-time. The superficial forms of boredom fostered by modern life project the source of the emptiness outside the self, but phenomenological analysis shows that such a misapprehension of the mood merely serves to suppress awareness of existential emptiness” (330). To exemplify this existential quest of modern digital beings, Bigend’s and Tito’s relations to the surroundings manifest distinct attitudes. While the former contrives a scheme of branding culture in his global corporate business enterprise, the latter embodies a breakthrough of boredom by weaving in Yoruba culture, one of the African cultures.

Gibson’s Spook Country and Zero History provide a glimpse into the digital being’s existential struggles. Just as in his other works, Gibson continues to destabilize the definition of humans with posthuman perspectives. However, in these two novels he replaces cybernetic organisms with spiritual entities that combine human sensitivity with the powers of African deities. His protagonist Tito in these

103 novels, rather than relying on AR technologies designed by Bobby Chombo and

Alberto, summons Yoruba deities to augment his consciousness and intuitions.

Interpassive and picnoleptic subjects who intend to expand consciousness by augmenting perceptions are unable to combat postmodern branding’s manipulation of absences and its maneuvers of the real-time. On the other hand, Tito expands his capacities by concentrating on his consciousness and intuition. In other words, Tito switches on a posthuman-warrior mode to perform what Gibson calls a “systema7” to amplify intuition, and to erase (unnecessary) traces that a capitalistic-cybernetic system has created.

Situated in the contexts of speed and voyeur cultures, nihilism and boredom are two existential crises closely related to the meaning of life for twenty-first-century digital nomads and netizens. In his book/digital node The Will to Technology and the

Culture of Nihilism: Heidegger (Hereafter Will), Marx, and Nietzsche, Arthur Kroker contends that the contemporary plague of ubiquitous technicity has replaced metaphysics as a means of transcendence and “a postmodern epoch constituted by the sovereignty of (electronic) space has profound boredom as its ‘fundamental attunement’” (54). With the help of Kroker’s observations on contemporary cyberculture’s two monumental symptoms, boredom and nihilism, this chapter aims to provide a possible remedy for the metaphysical mal-adjustment of digital beings. In his analyses, Kroker uses eastern mysticism as an essential guideline to re-read

Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Marx in order to re-appropriate technocracy to the concern of humanity. Nevertheless, he does not supplement us with the quintessential ideas of eastern mysticism that make his theories vital for understanding digital beings. I

7 According to Black Belt, one of the oldest magazines that introduce martial arts in the United States, systema is “a Russian martial art notable for its hand-to-hand and close-quarters-combat ways. It is the system of choice for many Russian Spetsnaz which is a catchall term for Russian special-forces units. In fact, one of the most prominent practitioners of systema today is Mikhail Ryabko from the early Spetsnaz era. He learned systema from one of Joseph Stalin’s personal bodyguards.”

104 propose that oriental metaphysics, particularly Indian philosopher Nagarjuna’s ramification of ontology, is not only essential in re-reading theories on digital society but also capable of providing possible remedies for the existential crises of digital beings. With the help of Nagarjuna’s fourfold dialectical approach to ontology, digital beings will be liberated from boredom and nihilism, and from the shackle of polemics between progress and the void. Specifically, cybercultural practices exemplified in this chapter are forms of brand culture created by Bigend and Tito’s Yoruba rituals, respectively a product of virtual capitalism that causes boredom and nihilism and an alternative ontological manifestation of life. This element of magical realism is new in

Gibson’s novels, but not new to Gibson. He once wrote an introduction for Jorge Luis

Borges’s Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Stories. His short stories often represent anti-authoritarian and anti-capitalist voices.

The disappearance of transcendence and emergence of unbearable boredom are premonitory to the practice of cyberculture. In Ancient-Roman culture, gladiators were an entertainment of the Romans who enjoyed spectacles of violent battles between humans and beasts, spectacles that served as a way of channeling the social anxiety of the Romans. In the twenty-first century, these violent scenes have been replaced by reality TV shows, pornography, and tabloid news that expose the primitive sides of civilians and celebrities. Cyberspace has now become a playground of voyeurs. The spectacles of violence are triggered by various mental explosions normally suppressed by boredom. In Spook Country, Bigend’s branding strategy has stirred up an immensely large scale of cultural phenomena in all dimensions of society. People are lured to find out the “secret” that Bigend is holding. The best marketing strategy aims for the fundamental desires that humans have. The desire to know all and to acquire all information possible confines us to be info-maniacs. The secret or forbidden fruit is revealed in the sequel Zero History where Bigend hires a

105 fashion designer to produce military fashion in order to make a fortune out of equipment fetishists and the masses.

In addition to this obsessive desire to know all, we are telling stories that are not critical to, but subservient to mechanisms of capitalism. Serving as a striking contrast to Bigend’s operation of the material system of the world, Tito aligns more with a mystical system of the world. If Bigend is using AR programs to spread a capitalistic perspective of the world that tends to be limited and constrained to materialism, and ends up consequentially in states of boredom and nihilism, Tito counteracts that with another dimension of our phenomenal world that is fluid and constantly creating meanings. In unfolding my argument about these two contrasting approaches to the world, I will divide this chapter into three parts. Part one discusses the distinct difference—between Bigend’s brand culture practices and Tito’s Yoruba culture practices—which lies with how they see the world as the Other. While Bigend considers the world an inanimate object, Tito considers it as an animate being that needs to be communicated with continuously at all times. Part two applies Kroker’s re-reading of Heidegger’s theories on technology, Nietzsche’s theories on will to power, and Marx’s axiomatic principles to the problems of boredom and nihilism. In this re-reading, the possibility of a new form of metaphysics opens up. Part three works out that possibility with reference to Nagarjuna’s radical ontological understanding that provides a remedy to boredom and nihilism.

Thou and It

In his Spook Country and Zero History, Gibson portrays two distinct perspectives of life and means of seeking for transcendence in his novel. The notion of life in Yoruba culture is entirely different from the one Bigend promotes. While the former considers the other as active and a part of oneself, the latter considers the other as passive and a

106 separate entity. In their article “Myth and Reality” H. and H.A. Frankfort delineate how speculative thoughts in the ancient oriental civilization, even though not systematically documented and structurally developed as a discipline, are instrumental for understanding life in crisis. They remark that “speculative thought attempts to underpin the chaos of experience so that it may reveal features of a structure—order, coherence, and meaning” (3). They argue that scientific understanding of the world is rather limited in scope and cannot serve as an answer to our contemporary existential crisis. On the premise that a human being shares a need to see beyond the current world in order to improve upon self and the community, the “need of transcending chaotic experience and conflicting facts leads him to seek a metaphysical hypothesis that may clarify his urgent problems” (4). Why then do we look for a metaphysical hypothesis in ancient oriental civilization, rather than in occidental civilization where all the academic and systematic knowledge has been developed? A good reason is provided here. The insufficiency of western philosophy to provide meanings for the digital being leads me to read beyond Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Kroker. In his analysis, Kroker remarks that eastern mysticism inspired Nietzsche and helped him break through his impasse on philosophical thoughts. The formulation of knowledge and attitude toward life in ancient oriental civilization is different from that in occidental civilization. While the latter refers Enlightenment to a scientifically-laden notion, the former tends to identify enlightenment as an awakening of the inner self, in which the inner self is closely connected to the dimension beyond the phenomenal world. The speculative thoughts of ancient oriental civilization serve as a springboard for my following analysis. Therefore, Chinese and Indian philosophies from the East are discussed in general as the oriental philosophy that differs from the occidental philosophy.

The attitudes of the West and the East toward the phenomenal world are

107 absolutely sui generis: “for modern, scientific man the phenomenal world is primarily an ‘It’; for ancient—and also for primitive—man it is a ‘Thou’” (4). The way the moderns and the ancients consider and interact with the phenomenal world will effect how they solve the worldly and metaphysical problems of their own. Although the

West and the modern were a great contrast to the Oriental and the ancient, the boundary between the two is broken down in today’s society by the global circulation of knowledge. People from the East clearly can adopt the Western ideas as they see fit and vice versa.

An object, an “It,” can always be scientifically related to other objects and

appear as part of a group of a series. In this matter science insists on

seeing ‘It”; hence, science is able to comprehend objects and events as

ruled by universal laws which make their behavior under given

circumstances predictable. “Thou,” on the other hand, is unique…. “Thou,”

moreover, is not merely contemplated or understood but is experienced

emotionally in a dynamic reciprocal relationship. (5)

This passage is not only critical of capitalist society’s alienation and impersonalization but also conveys how a shift of attitude towards the Other, in this case—from “It” to “Thou”—is capable of evoking affects among us. If the way we see the world reflects on how we see ourselves, then the attitude of understanding and analyzing the world in the same way changes how we understand our own self. In the case of Tito, he sees the world as a “Thou” that is composed of spirits whose workings in the world are deemed no less, but even more powerful and significant than the acts of human beings. On the other hand, Bigend treats the world as “It” with maneuvers of capitalism around which virtual capital circulates. Digital beings that are conditioned by virtual capitalism have embodied “It,” and so does the digital epoch where evidence of humans losing their emotions and the process of

108 impersonalization are growing and expanding. As interpassive and picnoleptic subjects, humans are in a way distanced from their emotions while they yearn to feel.

There are many articles, theories, and analyses that put emphasis on the understanding of the “I” subject. It is, however, how the “I” subject treats the Other—one’s surroundings, nature, world—that is at stake here. H. and H.A. Frankfort argue that there is a great contrast between the attitudes of treating the Other in the ancient oriental civilization and the modern western culture. They note that in the ancient oriental civilization, “‘Thou’ is not contemplated with intellectual detachment; it is experienced as life confronting life, involving every faculty of man in a reciprocal relationship. Thoughts, no less than acts and feelings, are subordinated to this experience” (6). Although the Yoruba religion does not belong to the ancient oriental civilization, the speculative thoughts of the ancient oriental civilization are aligned with and convey the same mythical speculations as Tito’s practice of Yoruba religious rituals. In contrast to modern capitalist society, both the mythical thoughts of the ancient oriental civilization and Yoruba religious rituals are considered as more primitive and less scientific, but they both cherish and deem the phenomenal world as

“Thou” instead of “It.” On the other hand, Bigend recognizes the world as “It” instead of “Thou,” as experiments of his ego-tourism in this world. We see a clash between a unidirectional cultural practice and a more reciprocal cultural practice that values a harmonious relationship with the phenomenal world. Since there is always a gap between our recognition of the world and the reality, stories are often used to neutralize the inconsistencies between them. Bigend tells his narrative with a systematic branding culture based on Augmented Reality—which is mediating our recognition and physical reality—whereas Tito strives to establish a symbiotic lifestyle between humans and the world by smuggling Yoruba mythic practices into the making of reality.

109

Tito is very much an embodiment of a cyberpunk figure in this novel. His punk spirit is manifested in his Yoruba combat styles which counteract Bigend’s branding strategies that characterize capitalist society right now. Specifically, Tito exudes an attitude that de-centers human subjectivity in ways of communicating with the world.

By adopting this attitude, he in turn destroys Bigend’s commercial facades. In Spook

Country, Tito practices internalizing Guerreros, a combination of the powers of

Yoruba deities Elluggua, Ogun, Oshosi, and Osun (165), which manifest as Tito’s systema, an amplified intuition. Among these divine spirits, namely, Elleggua, Ogún,

Oshosi, and Osun, Elleggua is the owner of the fork between “human and the divine”

(120) who “opens every road” (211); Ogún, is “God of iron and wars, of labor, owner of every technology” who “clears each road with his machete” (211); Oshosi is “The orishas’ hunter and scout” (212). Ogun, Oshosi, orisha, “along with Osun, were received by an initiate of the Guerreros” (212). Aside from systema, his aunt Juana also taught him “how the holding of knowledge in dignified privacy helps ensure desired results” (212). “Oshosi was allowing him a less specific way of seeing. The life of the street, its pedestrians and traffic, was becoming one animal, an organic whole” (212). The Guerreros here functions as something that goes beyond symbolic fiction or a filter of barricades. Tito completes the mission against Bigend’s conspiracy with the help of the Guerreros, which filters danger and provide a safe path for Tito. In particular, Guerreros helps Tito get away from “the unconscious dance8 formed here by this clearing amid the long city’s buildings” (239) as the “dead

8 This unconscious dance seems to refer to the specters of Marx as Juana says to Tito: “It might as well say Marx and Lenin” (239) since Tito cannot fathom the religious meaning of entering in the spirit of God and Jesus Christ in this kind of religious ritual. In other words, this is similar to Christ’s second coming. This is a proven evidence that Tito’s life or philosophy is closely associated with communist, or manifesting messianic power of the coming of Marxist ideas. Tito (Josip Broz Tito, Yugoslavian authoritarian in the 1950s.)—“The ‘Golden Age’ of Terrorism” (193). On the other hand, this

110 spots” pointed out by Oshosi were mere “pretenders, watchers” (239). Just as any of

Yoruba religious practices, Guerreros can only be done after being initiated by a higher priest. The word Guerrero is Spanish for warrior. On the one hand, this word illuminates Tito’s attitude when facing Bigend, which insinuates a big end, that is, apocalypse. On the other hand, Guerreros combat style illuminates how African people incorporate spirits into warfare. According to Anthony Afe. Asekhauno and

Valentine Ananafe Inagbor:

the Etsako conceive of ‘force’ as being—that ‘Being is force’ and the

concept of ‘force’ is inseparable from the definition of ‘Being’; thus there

is no idea among the Africans of ‘Being’ divorced from the idea of ‘force’.

Horton, comparing African thought and Western science, tried to

determine why explanations in modern Western culture tend to be

couched in an impersonal idiom, whereas explanations in traditional

African society tend to be couched in a personal idiom. (“Magic,

Witchcraft, and Sorcery in Warfare” 247)

Asekhauno and Inagbor’s observations of African understanding of being and force share the same mindset with that of the ancient oriental conception of the world as

“Thou” as “whatever force a man acquires is given him by a superior being” (247). In other words, the Other is not recognized as inferior but superior in the interaction with the subject “I”. The subject formation of African and ancient oriental people can be considered a post-human point of view in the sense that human beings are not central but a nodal connection to the Other. Additionally, “the Etsako conception of war and warfare, tied as it is to their metaphysical outlook and mythology, involves God,

unconscious dance can also refer to the religious elements in African warfare where ghosts and the dead play a significant role. Perhaps this part also has to do with god Babalaye or Lazarus manifests the Dance of the Walking Dead (122).

111 ancestral, terrestrial, and celestial forces” (249). The use of Tito as a counter-force to

Bigend’s apocalypse now is significant not only because warfare is tied to the metaphysical realm, but also because technology is essentially a form of magic in a different dress.

Tito is more of a destroyer of the façade of commercials and manufactured lies, rather than a smuggler of illegal containers. The following two scenarios explain how the modernity of speed and spectacle confined within commercial discourses engulfs people into eternal void and emptiness. It is not that all speed and spectacles are destructive of humane values, but those that tend to produce ideologies that dictate a unidirectional meaning are. “Into the Locative” focuses on locative art, an Augmented

Reality that remixes virtual reality with physical reality. Entering into Augmented

Reality and away from physical reality, Hollis perceives the city in front of her “as though the city were something you could wipe from your glasses and forget” (34). A path away from physical reality into virtual reality indicates a process of Hollis’s memories of the city being removed from her focus of attention. With the development of AR devices, it is not only easier to mix reality with AR, but also to generate an impression that we are capable of wiping off, forgetting physical reality and building and designing a virtual reality that goes in accordance with our imagination. Since what we imagine can be perceived through constructions of VR and AR, VR and AR no longer satisfy our mind and subsequently produce boredom.

The quantity of information does not create sublime feelings anymore. These zero- degree media are pieces of infotainment, or as Virilio terms them, “web-junkes” that no longer excite digital beings. The infrastructure of virtual reality has made our mind much more difficult to be up-lifted than it was before although the perception is satisfied.

After the deconstruction of Western ontology with Yoruba and ancient oriental

112 philosophy in mind, it becomes clear that Tito’s superpower creates another layer of distance between the phenomenal and the metaphysical realms. Together with other

Yoruba deities, Tito performs Guerreros, a perceptive mode that amplifies his intuition and allows him to dodge surveillance and prevents him from getting caught by Bigend. Tito is a perfect example of Kroker’s digital flâneur. If the virtual class is a mediator between technology and capitalism, then this class also serves as a coder of will to planetary technicity and will to virtuality into our body, economy, and culture. If these wills ultimately subjectify the humanist will to life into void and nothingness, then the street civilians are digital flâneurs who conduct street readings in parallel to “a Paris Commune rebelling against the digital mode of production”

(149). In the same way as the street flâneurs, cyberpunk denizens are manifesting creative possibilities and embodying poetic utterances as a counter-discourse to digital modes of production. The cyberpunk denizens remember and collect cultural debris discarded by the virtual class. In doing so, they emerge as an alternative value-form that releases the repressed amnesia and then prevents digital beings from allaying their angst by means of accelerated speed. Furthermore, the cyberpunk denizens in

Gibson’s novels oftentimes collect memories of the forgotten future and salvage cultural remains that are forced to be obliterated or filtered off by the dominant cultural dynamics. Countering digital streaming, cyberpunks “follow a human vector”

(Will 150; emphasis original). “Opposing the technocratic closure of the digital nervous system, the anti-virtual class deals in the symbolic exchange of digital dirt: noise in the system such as issues surrounding environmentalism, human rights, economic justice, labour and education” (Will 150; emphasis original ).

Kroker’s analysis of street citizens’ counter-narrative against the virtual class is useful for theorizing cyberpunks. However, there is more to his criticism of this anti- virtual class. Apparently he considers this class a double-edged sword that has the

113 resistance of economic, social, as well as military motors. He states:

Constituted on the basis of the virtualization of knowledge, this class of and

for virtuality represents the first militant signs of a political form of digital

resistance that in its immediacy and globality is the historical successor to

the socialization of labour. A Net community, a necessarily planetary

community, a community of and for human rights, the anti-virtual class is,

in effect, the new digital proletariat. (Will 150; emphasis original)

Kroker’s statement is embodied in Tito’s cyberpunk spirit. His spirit is not only a fictional construct, but also being realized in a cultural practice. The spirit of cyberpunk was, for instance, recently manifested in a social event and exemplified in

“Democracy 4 am,” a website that documents the event of civil disobedience against the Taiwanese government’s decision to sign an agreement with the Chinese government. Marked as one of the sunflower activist movements taken place on

March 20, 2014, student activists collaborated online and offline by occupying the

Legislative Yuan to stage a peaceful demonstration against the government’s decision of passing the Service Trade Agreement with China stealthily and equivocally. This secret handshake with China may bring economic benefits to the virtual class, but will drastically harm the digital proletariat and the democratic progress in general. Kroker considers cultural practices of the anti-virtual class movement and events as signs of a symbolic resistance to “the high-intensity market directives of the new economy”

(Will 150). A seemingly provocatively symbolic rewriting of cultural history may, however, not be so promising after all—Kroker ends this analysis with a pertinent observation: “From city to city, continent to continent, the symbolic protest of the anti-globalization movement is met with escalating and highly coordinated policing strategies in which state violence is brought to bear on democratic protesters newly signified as subversives now, terrorists soon” (Will 153). This insightful analysis

114 mirrors the clash between the veiling and the unveiling of the ideology of virtual capitalism, between Bigend’s postmodern branding and Tito’s cyberpunk ethos, respectively led by pseudo-alertness or intensification of perception generated out of the use of technologies and a more mindful intensification of perception generated out of spiritual and natural elements.

Between It and Thou

The way we interact with the phenomenal world mirrors the way we want the world to see us. If we see the world as “It” instead of “Thou,” we will be documenting “It” instead of relishing in the reciprocal relationship between us and the phenomenal world. The problem of voyeurism and peep culture also shares the same cause. By fixing our gaze on an object, we are in a sense turning what we attend to into passive recipients of our attention. On the contrary, if we interact with the phenomenal world as “Thou,” the world becomes actively involved in our existence. Kroker’s re-reading of Heidegger invites us to interact with the world as “Thou” by turning technicity from a technological into a metaphysical entity.

If memory is the material that obfuscates our mind, then it is logical to think that erasure of memory will solve all the world’s problems. “Two Kinds of Empty” in

Gibson’s Spook Country focuses on Tito’s perception of the city where he finds the meeting place of Alejandro and his curators “a dead-end continuum of watered drinks and low-level anxiety” (36). The title implies the emptiness in the morning and the emptiness of the heart at night when people find solace in obsessive consumption.

Existential emptiness and boredom are two sides of the same coin. Other than implicating the void of existence, boredom has its social and political functions. If it can control how citizens spend their leisure time, the government will be able to monitor and control their citizens. The issue of boredom comes down to how

115 metaphysical concepts influence social, economic, and political realms. In his Will ,

Kroker argues that nihilism, or the will to will without direction is a recoil effect of a lack of will by and large. Since technology has replaced metaphysics in terms of transcendence, the will to technology dominates how digital beings live their lives.

The compass of technology points toward the discourse of commerce, in the hands of the Nietzschian blond beast and the virtual class. As much as Kroker warns against the risks of technicity in the hands of commercial profits, he also emphasizes possibilities of “poeting” technicity to the benefit of the humanities.

Heidegger’s thoughts on technology contribute to a new understanding of a wireless culture. Kroker borrows two contemplations of Heidegger here. First, Kroker is aware that technology is the essence of human identity and it has its “split consciousness” (38) of both calculation and meditation.9 In our digital beings, we must create a new fundamental attunement of “poeting technology” (38) with “eastern mysticism” (38) as a train of thought to compensate for western rationalism’s lack.

Before getting into technical issues of how to poeticize technology, the question of how “eastern mysticism” is at work here needs to be tackled first. Although Kroker only mentions eastern mysticism in passing, this concept however plays an important role in deconstructing cyber-centrism in a culture that values calculation and precision.

Thus extending Kroker’s insight, I apply oriental philosophy, in this case, the Chinese concept of “de” into Nietzsche’s “will to power” and even more so, into the construction of existence of the digital being. In doing so, the digital being is capable of being emancipated from the prison house of language that also confines existence.

9 In an article from BoingBoing, a renowned technological blog, Mark Frauenfelder introduces a newly published book The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We’ve Lost in a World of Constant Connection. On this post, an image of a Buddha wearing a headphone embodies meditation and constant connection to the cyberspace. The latter coincides with the logic of calculation of cybernetic network systems by connecting to computers. The post can be accessed at http://boingboing.net/2014/09/05/iia008.html.

116

In his “Nietzsche’s ‘Will to Power and Chinese ‘Virtuality,’” Roger T. Ames compares the concept of “de” and Nietzsche’s “will to power.” In his research, he discovers that the concept of “will to power” encompasses multiple works of

Nietzsche, crossing a large range of his time, so it is difficult to pin down the complex meaning of “will to power.” The biggest difficulty, however, rests on the limit of

Indo-European languages. Since in Indo-European languages, “subject-predicate grammar insists that ‘will’ must have a subject that wills it, Nietzsche requires that there is no subject or superordinate faculty that ‘will’ power—rather, ‘will’ is categorial, the impetus underlying the process of existence and the phenomena that constitute it” (131). Nietzsche even considers that “this will does not exist at all”

(131). In his analysis of “de” in the archaic sense of “virtuality,” that is, “having inherent virtue or power to produce effect” (132), Ames points out the essential difference of the world view between Chinese and Western society. While in Chinese culture, the relationship between dao and de is analogical to western construction between whole and particular, but more so between focus and field. In other words, each person is a carrier of “de” who has potential of achieving “dao.” Every individual is a node of “de” that impels to be focalized.

Oriental understanding of transcendence does not depend on the otherworldly realm as a collective influence on each individual. It depends on how concentrated an individual is to a centripetal force in this world. As a digital being is taken as a node in the network of transcendental portal, eastern understanding of transcendence prepares us for transforming a technicity that has been going toward the technological to be a technicity that is moving toward the metaphysical. In addition to a metaphysical spectrum of technicity, a new understanding and thinking of technicity will also prepare us mentally for poeting technology. Heidegger contends that “it is not technicity in itself which is uncanny but the present degree of unpreparedness for

117 thinking the meaning of technology as destiny that is uncanny” (40; emphasis original). Toward poeting technology, our task is not to bash technology but to develop a new understanding of metaphysics for digital beings and ethics of technology and be prepared at all times for thinking the meaning of technology in our hypermodern society. Unearthing Heidegger’s untimely thinking on technology,

Kroker contends that hyper-being embodies oppositions of “calculation versus meditation, world versus earth, ordering versus revealing, technicity versus art” (43).

Furthermore, such a being is a storyteller of human essence in which discourses of capitalism and virtuality intermingle. Psychologically speaking, this hyper-being faces a cultural rootlessness and suffers from “malice of rage” (44). Such a cultural symptom is sometimes transferred to forgetting by means of “exteriorizations of human sensorium” (44)—an idea shared by Virilio—or to be “temporarily appeased in the sacrificial language of ethic scapegoating” (44). Language of violence is likely to be manifested in actions. Thus a backward look to Heidegger’s contemplations on technology contributes to a forward-dawning of a “planetary technicity” (46) that does not consist of a dangerous impulse of technotopia but of an impulse to a saving- power. If a reverse engineering of this planetary technicity can be successful, it will be entirely different from Apter’s view on the world turning into oneworldedness.

Specifically this messianic spirit needs to be considered by means of a Heideggerian thinking which takes technology as metaphysical instead of technological concept.

Technology is capable of creating virtuality that makes room for the space between conditioned reality and thought constructions. Heidegger envisions a coming-of-age planetary technicity with an ethics of technology in mind. He challenges the danger of technology that might destroy hyper-being into non-being and oblivion. He sees the ambivalence and double languages of technology. An art of technology proposed by

Kroker aims to poeticize technology in the hope of animating forgotten memories of

118 hyper-being and of technoculture. Probing the strife this hyper-being encounters,

Kroker borrows Heidegger’s observation of a prevalent cultural “standing-reserve” 10 a quintessential phenomenon of a technoculture. Kroker coins it “vampire metaphysics” 11 (50), and considers the digital being’s vampire metaphysics akin to

Virilio’s politics of dromology.

A reverse-engineering of a technicity going technological and a possible remedy to reverse it to be metaphysical are the two dominant digital discourses on a larger structural scale. In his Zero History, Gibson shows how negligence of technological technicity not only breeds boredom but also will eventually develop into a collective rage. In addition to a destructive impact of this existential crisis, virtual capitalism manifests vampire metaphysics that not only sucks the blood of economics but also the flesh of existence. On the way to meet Meredith, Hollis Henry bumps into Rausch, who is the editor of Node “the phantom digest of digital culture” (156). The textual invention of Node magazine is materialized in the real world into a tumblr blog by an anonymous netizen who composes entries that are related to the novel itself. In the meantime, Hollis is worried about George, and thinks that he is more of a symbol of

“scrawling graffiti on the secret machineries of history” (154). What Rausch and

George have in common is that they both pertain to a piece of micro-history that is on the verge of disappearing but in all fairness equally important as the macro-history.

This micro-history marks the conservation of the technicity turning toward the metaphysical instead of the technological as the latter is prone to forgetting of histories. The side-effect of going technological is the improper care of emotions.

Instead of going in depth, a massive consumption of junk culture can at best touch the surface of our emotions, which not only does not heal the wound but also aggravates

10 “Standing-reserve” is Heidegger’s term for describing the end of metaphysics. 11 “Vampire metaphysics” is Kroker’s term that combines vampire capitalism with metaphysics. It refers to a metaphysics that sucks the blood out of the beings in an accelerated speed.

119 negative emotions. One of the scenarios of Zero History depicts this situation when

Hollis arrives at the restaurant. She observes that paparazzi lurk and emit “A sort of rage, born of boredom, waiting” there, and she waits for “the sound of machine-driven image-collection” (155). Rage and boredom are tied to virtual capitalism. Existential boredom is destructive not just on the metaphysical level, but on the socio-economical level as well. The attention economy in Gibson’s narrative space focuses on Icelandic celebrity Fridrika Brandsdottir,12 meaning Brand’s daughter in Icelandic, and “Bram,” the Christian name of vampire novelist Bram Stoker. In Zero History, both Brand’s daughter and Bram Stoker imply vampire capitalism intruding upon the realm of metaphysics. Iceland has experienced a financial crisis in 2008. It also signifies the economic crash and the void of circulation of virtual capitalism. This scenario echoes

Kroker’s criticism on boredom and how this social phenomenon is created not to the benefit of the society but is instrumental for the booming of media of infotainment.

The negative impact of technological technicity is affixed to virtual capitalism that centers on the void of circulation. A re-reading of Marxism helps reverse the streamlining of virtual commerce that Kroker calls “streamed capitalism.” He intends to re-read Marx as a competitive force against virtual class and propels Marxism, instead of Marxism’s nemesis virtual capitalism, as the not-yet-conscious of digital future. The Marxist approach to criticizing capitalism is essentially an unveiling process by politicizing economy’s mode of production. Kroker notes: “Marx’s critique of capitalism was always premised on taking capitalism out of the cycle of

(economic) production and putting it into political circulation” (126; emphasis original). A transformation of capitalism’s mode of production into virtual capitalism’s mode of circulation grounds Kroker’s analysis of the merger between

12 Iceland has experienced a financial crisis in 2008. This Icelandic name, Brand’s daughter, suggests that Iceland is a successor of Brand, inheriting the commercial culture. Brandsdottir and Bram imply the combination of commerce and vampire in the circulation of virtual capital.

120 capitalism and technology. Furthermore, Marx’s concept of capitalism as a form

“wherein ‘value valorizes itself’” (118) contributes to Kroker’s theorizing of virtual capitalism’s virtuality.13 Kroker contends that Marx “was always and only writing about the disappearance of capitalism into technology, the vanishing of a materialist theory of political economy into a metaphysics of the ‘value-form’ of Capital- the pure code of technicity” (123; emphasis original). To think of virtual capitalism as a cybernetic system revolving around the value-form of capital instead of the materiality of the capital signals to Kroker that metaphysics of the political economy is the primary concern for digital beings. He considers that “circuit of circulation”

(124) is the condition of virtual capitalism as well as a possible answer to question of the oblivion of the digital being.

Based on Marx’s nineteenth-century critique of capitalism but with a slight twist of the digital paradigm shift, Kroker elucidates virtual capitalism as a transition of:

material production into the virtual logic of streamed capitalism…. Here,

streamed capital announces its presence, at first in the now failed language

of e-com ventures and the exuberantly priced shares of cyber-business at

the forward edge of the wireless future, and then, once purged through a

worldwide recession, in terms of the global consolidation of multinational

corporations into branded electronic networks, not domiciled in a fixed

geographical location, but representatively only of a strategic node in the

circulation of the digital circuit. (126; emphasis original )

The latter transition has much to do with Kroker’s interpretation of the will to will, planetary technicity, and the virtual class whose predecessor is the bourgeoisie.

Unlike the bourgeoisie that makes profit out of the surplus value of production, the

13 Virtuality here is not to be mistaken for the quality of virtue itself.

121 virtual class feeds on the logic of circulation. Instead of focusing on the commodity- form, virtual capitalism centralizes “the circulation of the digital circuit itself” (127; emphasis original). He aptly defines: “As the decisive knowledge factor in the new knowledge theory of value, as the collective designer of the digital mode of production, as the essential intellectual circuitry in the circulation of digital circuits, as the key aesthetic node in the cultural economy of the new media, the virtual class carries out the necessary historical task of materializing the digital nerve as the key code of virtual capitals” (128; emphasis original). In other words, virtual class manifests the blond beast’s spirit in the mode of political economy. To summarize the transition from capitalism to virtual capitalism, not just mode of production is replaced by circuit of circulation, commodity-form by the digital circuit, bourgeoisie by virtual class, theatre of representation by virtuality (128), there also rises a digital production defined as “a qualitatively new historical epoch typified by knowledge- power not labour-power, virtual-value not exchange value, and the transformation of capitalism in the direction of a culture of technicity not surplus-value” (129).

What Marxism excels at is uncovering the dirt of capitalism, only this time its archenemy is virtual capitalism. In Zero History Hollis meets Cayce Pollard, the

Hounds designer and also the cool-hunter from Pattern Recognition. She is allergic to corporate mascots, that is, to brand culture, and thus avoids using logos on her designs.

Cayce reveals to Hollis that her marketing strategies are based on secrecy without advertising because this scheme is based on virtual capital, that is, knowledge, instead of wealth. She was Bigend’s cool-hunter looking for a clue for the next big thing, a tipping point that would develop into a trend. She finally found the catalyst of trending by unearthing the “ruins of American manufacturing” (336) and started to recreate a new line of clothes out of those she found from warehouses and thrift shops.

She reveals to Hollis that the reason why she salvages clothes from the past is that the

122 design from the 1935 will always be better than the ones designed in the present. As

Cayce is collecting cultural debris of the past from clothes, Bigend is currently

“curating suits that do retinal damage” (336) as one of his major projects now. Bigend uses guerrilla marketing strategies: “Weird inversions of customary logic. That

Japanese idea of secret brands. The deliberate construction of parallel microeconomies where knowledge is more congruent than wealth” (337). Cayce divulges to Hollis that if she would develop a brand, it would be a secret. “The branding would be that it was a secret. No advertising. None. No press. No shows”

(337).

It is not so much the will to technicity that we should be worried about as the will to technicity in the service of a corporate business profit. Kroker is particularly skeptical of Bill Gates’s Business @ the Speed of Thought: Using a Digital Nervous

System (1999) and argues that this book “is a rhetoric machine” (Will 108) that diminishes planetary technicity’s poetic utterance. Gates is compared to B.F. Skinner who manages to build a digital Walden 2 that installs the digital nervous system in the cultural and social infrastructure. In addition, the digital nervous system is rooted in a business model, and then spreads through “special enterprises-education, medicine, government, warfare” (Will 106). In other words, digital Walden 2’s strategies of realizing the will to technicity are formed by a business model and then assimilate other social sectors into its system. Digital business pattern, then translates cybernetic procedures into human organism. For Kroker,

ideology is understood as a rhetoric machine that projects into power an

underlying vested interest by presenting as the general will the specific

interests of a particular will, then Gates’s ‘management with the force of

facts’ is the precise rhetoric machine that spearheads the emergent class

interests of the virtual class—the dynamic, although inherently unstable,

123

coalition of ‘knowledge workers’ and digital capitalists dominating the e-

commerce and e-government and e-medicine and e-education and e-war

of the twenty-first century. (Will 108)

Masquerading a particular will as the general will of the netizens, Gates and the virtual class makes use of the planetary technicity but narrows its possibility to

Microsoft’s four leading war tactics- “standardization, surveillance, subordination, and solicitation-are the dynamic expressions of the hegemonic ideology of the virtual class” (108). Kroker is critical of the book’s ideological production in strengthening the calculative force of digital being. Microsoft, along with its subsidiary enterprises, installs ideology into our brain while we are surfing as well as receiving the messages of the will to technicity on the Internet. Kroker remarks that “Microsoft, then, as not so much a ‘global brain’ but as a downloadable, ready to install, virtual memory: a cyber-Panopticon plugged into the flesh circuits of human subjectivity. …Cybernetics finally comes alive, or as Gates like to say: ‘Information flow is your lifeblood” (Will

107).

Gates’s position in our digital realm is reminiscent of Napoleon who strove to build a “universal rational state” (109), except that Gates’s plan goes beyond the state toward a planetary scale. In Virilio’s words, this is Gates who reins in the data coups d’état. Just like Napoléon Bonaparte, Gates also aims to realize a utopia by establishing formulations to a digital utopia. This contributes to the enclosure of history and prohibits the digital being’s poetic story. The sinister story behind the digital nerve tells of Gates’s muses: “the organizational genius of General Motors in

‘standardizing’ large-scale business practices and the digital vision of ‘augmented reality’ authored by MIT’s Laboratory for Computer Science” (Will 109). A twentieth-century Fordism rises on the horizon of today’s digital practices where standardization and assimilation of heterogeneity are penetrating into the digital body.

124

The body is not only inscribed with the business model of Microsoftization but also of a pseudo-transcendent illusion. Such a utopian mapping of the digital future illustrates that Augmented Reality is not utilized to initiate a creative utterance from augmenting human capacity, but to extend human capacity to the use of Microsoftization. Kroker notes: “For Dertouzos, human flesh will assist the cybernetic development of an augmented digital future” (Will 110). That is to say humanity will try to keep up with the technological development in order to obey the narrative of digital nerve. Aside from appropriating human organic system to the mapping of information technology,

Gates asserts that “information work is thinking work” (Will 110). Here he expresses unconsciously that he intends to puppeteer the global system with the information network as his strings and human flesh as the puppets. In Gibson’s Neuromancer, the body that has lost its consciousness exists as a meat-puppet. Nietzsche’s contemplation on the will to power is furthermore elaborated as the triumph of the virtual class and the realization of planetary technicity @ Microsoftization. In theory, a digital being is healthy in mitigating bad conscience by mass forgetting. In practice,

Microsoft’s implementations of the four cybernetic procedures are enslaving the digital body into an apprentice of machine language. Nietzsche’s contemplation on the will to power is furthermore elaborated as the triumph of the virtual class and the realization of planetary technicity.

Planetary technicity is looking for a representational truth instead of Truth, as

Truth is either nowhere to be found or dead. The digital soul can never be free from the representational truth that the body is looking for. The uplifting feeling is ephemeral but the aftermath it brings will last forever. Digital morality has to be taken into consideration in the scope of discussing digital beings. As Kroker aptly points out, the assumption of individual free-will is refuted by Nietzsche’s political view on the state apparatus of psychic repression. Nowadays individuals are coaxed by the state

125 into believing in the illusion of being free to choose and live and to disregard a gradually increasing state surveillance and the false ideology of the globalized marketplace. Therefore, the gap between an ostensibly free state and the state apparatus is the secret to digital beings. The secret, blatantly disclosed by Nietzsche, is conscience. Kroker argues that a digital being forgets not only because it is the

“basis of the modern self,” (Will 90) but also because to forget is healthy for digital beings as it makes room for new memory. Kroker considers that lingering on not forgetting is dangerous because it breeds bad conscience. As conscience “is burned into the will,” conscience could be the drive to action: “The ‘good conscience’ looks for victims, for likely scapegoats, upon which to vent its displeasure….Providing social scapegoats to appease the violence of the dominating instinct of the bad conscience, that’s the rhetoric of public life in the culture of fully realized technicity”

(Will 90). From the archaeology of Christianity, the secret of our desire to transcendence is revealed, and reemerged in digitality. The digital being’s inclination toward oblivion is a good way of setting bad conscience free from its vicious retaliation and its following actions. Perhaps it is not so much the issue of the will to planetary technicity that is at stake but the bad conscience that is propelling the politics of digital beings. Alternatively, is not the selection of what to remember the key to this bad conscience instead of an ingrained nature of forgetting?

On a larger scale, eyeball culture influences digital beings insurmountably. The digital being has found a way to liberate the shackle of the body by projecting bad conscience to the digital. The digital nerve is a receptor of the digital ascetic priest’s preaching. The founder of Microsoft, Bill Gates, is our contemporary digital ascetic priest. “Microsoft as Nietzsche’s ‘pack of blond beasts of prey, a conqueror and master race which, organized for war and with the will to organize, unhesitatingly lays its terrible claws upon the [digital] populace perhaps tremendously superior in

126 numbers but still formless and nomad” (Will 105). Kroker applies Nietzsche’s understanding of ascetic ideals to the eyeball culture. Ascetic ideals that were manifested through the embodiment of the bourgeoisie or blond beasts for Nietzsche, are now embodied through the virtual class for Kroker. To elaborate the importance of the blond beasts as a predecessor of the virtual class, I illustrate how the blond beasts were evolved to be responsible for meaning-making. In his Nietzsche: A Frenzied

Look, Robert John Ackermann illustrates the importance of values in interpreting facts.

Specifically, he wants to investigate how Christian values successfully dominate the western culture. Nietzsche tries to search in the history of Christianity for traces of the development of the moral concept, instead of its origin. He discovers the power struggle between the noble, the common, and the priest. The priest takes on the value of “goodness” whereas the noble and the common are renounced as the “bad” collective. The noble and the priest then develop conflicts against each other and breed a vicious cycle of revenges. “What the nobles called ‘bad’ becomes ‘good’ in this transvaluation, and what the nobles had called ‘good’ becomes ‘evil’” (92). It is the noble, instead of the priest that creates values. “The sinister connotations of ‘evil’ are the expression of priestly revenge. This new valuation was then assimilated and enlarged in official Christianity” (93). He furthermore argues that “The blond beast passage, famous from its Nazi appropriation, seems really only to describe nobles suddenly released from social constraint and their behavior under these circumstance”

(94). As he understands it:

Culture is the means of domesticating the noble utilized by the mob, not

something forced on the mob by the noble….Nietzsche seems clearly to

imply that an unbridgeable distance between noble and slave is healthy,

allowing nobles to provide constant renewal of society by daring and

original action that breaks the encroaching rigidities of forming traditions.

127

But the triumph of the ‘maggot man’ is equivalent to the overturn of this

situation, is equivalent to nihilism and to exhaustion. Without occasional

superior human beings, the thought of human society is suffocating. Man

which prefers total leveling. (94)

Ackermann tries to figure out why ascetic, a continuous resentment against life, keeps coming back to the history, which Ackermann sees it as parallel to “a self-denying

Kantian reason” (102-103). The answer to this question is that “The ascetic ideal is an artifice for the preservation of life” (103). In short, Nietzsche brings up the issue of ascetic ideal because he considers that it will generate resentment against life, and it does not even curb the force of change coming from the common and the weak.

Rather than an embodiment of a strong will, ascetic ideals issue from a weak will as they intend to subdue animal instincts to achieve the will to will. Digital nerve gradually becomes “a war machine” (Will 98) biologically engineered with the gene of the blond beasts, which continues to subdue the maggot man as the slave race.

According to Kroker: “The ‘maggot man’ is the creative leader of virtual capital feeding on dead flesh” (Will 97). As opposed to the blond beast/the bourgeoisie in the traditional paradigm before digital society, the maggot man/ragpicker is creative and feeds on dead flesh. The blond beast is manifesting militarism by means of training digital nerves into an unidirectional function, that is, a war machine. Historically speaking, the maggot man is equivalent to, if not identical with, a rag-picker in the digital age. Unlike the blond beast that drives most digital nerve toward an embodiment of a war machine, the maggot man on the contrary, is “Like a scavenger machine tuned to a fast recycle loop” (Will 97) that scavenges “the wasteland of human feelings, not a cultural stone is left unturned, no energy of the street is exempt from his attention…” (Will 97). Most of the characters in Gibson’s narrative are reincarnations of the maggot men who manifest the ethos of the cyberpunk movement

128 of recycling the ruins of the culture that are quickly forgotten by the digital streaming flesh. Tito, for instance, is a perfect embodiment of a maggot man. “He is a parasite/predator: the ascendant character type of contemporary culture” (Will 97).

The description of two extreme characteristics of the maggot man conveys the power of the maggot man to actively scavenging the cultural debris and the beatnik spirit of a streaming body.

In the novel, Tito embodies the maggot man whose contemporary manifestation is a cyberpunk. Tito, the facilitator of cyberpunk ethos, “had sometimes carried, for months on end, decaying wallets bulging with fragments of the identities Alejandro’s apprenticeship had generated, prolonged proximity to his body removing every trace of the new” (16). As opposed to aesthetics of disappearance in the speed culture, Tito is enacting an extreme measure of suspending the perception of time by removing the newly generated time. In addition to this détournement, a technique often used by members of the Situationist International to reverse the advertising of spectacular capitalism, Tito incorporates into his life Guererros, a kind of systema that makes him ultra-alert and rises beyond the systemic assimilation of global branding. However, his mindfulness can be worn out by the will to technology that is largely encoded with governmental control on the society. “The strength of Juana’s magic had faded, Tito knew, amid new technologies and an increasing governmental stress on ‘security,’ by which as meant control” (16).

Ontologically speaking, Gibson’s narrative of Tito’s amplified intuition implies that “All images of ways in which the world and the worlds are linked, and all these ways under the orisha” (129) which can be achieved by a collaboration between

African tribal spirits and computer network system. When Tito looks at on the World

Trade Center on the calendar, memories of the life after 9/11 rush back into his mind.

His mind is painted with “Concrete covered with asphalt, gravel, secret traces of the

129

World Trade Center” (Spook Country 163). Then he begins to perform a “ritual disassembly,…scrubbing out of traces, erasure. As Juana would say, the washing of the threshold of the new road” (165). What Tito does is a combat form or “guerreros”

(Spook Country 210) that makes good use of his amplified intuition. In his Terrorism:

A Very Short Introduction, Charles Townshend mentions that “…the weak may adopt a strategy of resistance which does not require terror: guerrilla operations, however

‘unconventional’ by regular military criteria, work by normal military logic” (7).

Considering Bigend’s branding as the overwhelming manifestation of virtual capitalism, Tito belongs to the weak force that needs to find an alternative measure to negotiate in this war that does not end.

Since technicity is tied to virtual capitalism in speed culture, to create something out of the old forgotten culture is a way of poeticizing technicity. Gibson, in his novel, tells of a cyberpunk recycling of history by poeticizing technicity. Narratives of refurbishing the old into the new take place in a scene where Milgrim is looking into

Foley’s close-up shot of his hand where he discovers a logo. He looks it up online and finds a website that seems to be one of those ghost sites that are forgotten on the radar of cyberspace. These ghostsites are put up by ghostbranders who find extinct brands

“with iconic optics or a viable narrative” (Zero History 216), buy them and refurbish them under their original label. Cyberpunks tend to revive the forgotten with new blood. They salvage forgotten and deserted objects into something creative and exclusive. This manifests how digital beings can poeticize technicity and how cyberpunks tell a counter-capitalism narrative through garments. To be precise, these ghostsites are buried and ignored, which is a different kind of being left behind than the condition of being forgotten in recent debates about deleting data on Google where users can request Google to forget their private data since Google remembers everything. Aside from unraveling the cultural tendencies of the consumer desires and

130 the practices of equipment fetishism, Bigend also reveals that Foley might be a designer for fantasist consumers. Bigend is interested in how Gabriel Hounds’

“reinvention of exclusivity” (216) works. If “exclusivity” of an object is how the market decides on the price of a commodity, then these ghost-branded goods are not endowed with the “old-school geographical exclusivity” (216), but with an atemporal- creative exclusivity, an exclusivity that depends on a designer’s sense and creativity to exhume something buried and discarded by streaming capitalism. Other than archeologizing the old with the new, another way of poeticizing technicity is to counteract speed culture and disrupt its aesthetics. In this dwelling in new media art, the digital being is capable of “reversing the technological field: an art of (electronic) slowness, an art of digital dirt, an art of boredom” (Will 65). With having a more refined lifestyle in mind, a slow moment has been slowly installed into speed culture.

Slow television is firstly introduced by a Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation that showed a 7-hour train ride on the TV screen among other tranquil activities such as knitting,14 which is entirely different from the over-stimulating fastness of traditional

TV programs. In other words, new media art is against speed culture and, paradoxically, the art of boredom is a means of resisting speed culture.

Attunement to A New Ontology

The essential difference between occidental and oriental ontologies is the interpretation of reality. In Vedic philosophies, reality is not conditioned in any way.

In the book Fifty Eastern Thinkers, Diané Collinson, Kathryn Plant, and Robert

Wilkinson provide a brief introduction to Indian philosophy. One of the major philosophers of the East is Nagarjuna. Born in the second century in South India, he is

14 Reuters covers Norway’s new interest on watching knitting on Slow TV. http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/11/01/norway-tv-knitting-idUSL3N0IM24420131101

131 one of the most important Buddhist philosophers and the founder of Mahayana

Buddhism. For him, “ultimate reality can be described only as a Void (S: sunyata, i.e. is not properly characterizable in conceptual terms)” (“Indian Philosophy” 66). In cyberculture, reality is largely conditioned by the real-time which projects the utopian imaginations and takes over the lived realities. To attach oneself to either lived reality or the real-time will generate disillusions and discontentment, and breed boredom and nihilism. An intensified attachment to the real-time does not in any way liberate the digital being from the control of the real-time. By installing Nagarjuna’s philosophy into the digital being’s ontology, I strive to switch on the plane of technology as metaphysical. According to Kroker, in our digital beings, we must create a new fundamental attunement of “poeting technology” (38) with “eastern mysticism” (38) as a train of thought to compensate for western rationalism’s lack. To extend Kroker’s thought, I encode Nagarjuna’s understanding of ontology into poeting technology. In addition to unconditioned reality, for Nagarjuna, being is a “play” of the distance, between the body and the mind, utopian imaginations and Utopias, which exists to make room for creative processes to work. In other words, the eastern transcendence does not take place in an other-worldly realm, but in this-worldly realm that can be activated anytime anywhere as long as the being is alert enough to switch on its sunyata perspective.

In most cases, immersion to a state of mind is often interpreted as an act of losing subjectivity and even to the degree of brainwashing. However, Heidegger discovers a saving power in the danger of immersion. He considers that in a time of thoughtlessness, a thinking toward the redemption of humanity will emerge. This is what Kroker terms the state of Heideggerian turning: “Once we are so related and drawn to what withdraws, we are drawing into what withdraws, into the enigmatic and therefore mutable nearness of its appeal” (65). This moment of thoughtlessness

132 can be achieved in meditation, a moment in time where the “play” of existence can be activated and at which the shift of realities can be arrived.

Nagarjuna’s fourfold dialectic explains how meditation can achieve this thoughtlessness and activate sunyata experience. According to Nagarjuna and thinkers of Mahayana Buddhism and the Madhyamika School, engagement and detachment are two sides of the same coin for our being. The essence of our being is a void, nihilism. This void of emptiness is distinct from how western philosophy understands emptiness. The opposite of void is not repleteness. Instead, he argues that “This experience of emptiness is regarded as the condition of a poised and perfect wisdom, prajnaparamita, in which intellect and intuition are united” (Fifty Eastern Thinkers

96). His procedure of achieving enlightenment is done by negations. One achieves enlightenment when one recognizes that “opposing poles of thought may be negated by reasoning, [and when] the mind is able to acknowledge that reality is neither of them, and is able to experience sunyata, an emptiness or void which, although it defies description, is not nihilistic in its import” (96). His method of the dialectic is fourfold: “first, it considers the affirmation of something; next, its negation; then, the affirmation of both the affirmation and the negation; and, finally, the negation of both the affirmation and the negation” (98). Nagarjuna’s approach to being is not framed by the dialectic between the affirmation and the negation, the Utopia and the Dystopia.

On the contrary, he plays with the distance of utopian imaginations between two polarities, between zero and one. Through a fourfold dialectic, the digital being does not stop at the limited scope of being between the void and the fulfillment, but realizes the beyond of the beyond in the metaphysical sphere. Nagarjuna’s ontological tactic combines the programming language of zero and one and the existential grammar of the oriental philosophy, in which the process of poeticizing technology is at work in the digital being.

133

Vedic philosophy does not only reconfigure digital ontology, but also shed lights on the moral conundrum that is associated with conscience and nihilism. Kroker argues that a good conscience, contrary to popular belief, does not really prevent the future generation from making the same mistakes, but is what stops the future generation from moving forward. He borrows Nietzsche’s take on conscience and mentions that a standing-reserve has to do with a good conscience that prevents mortals from forgetting the mistakes and make them relive the guilt. Nietzsche notes that conscience is in fact a form of social control where “The person of conscience becomes a predictable robot” (97). In this case, a good conscience is the source of resentment and revenge. The cure that Nietzsche prescribes to the resentment of his contemporary is the deadening of feelings by emerging in mechanical repetition. Even so, conscience stays because it is tied to memory. This conscience breeds nihilism and does not solve any problems but aggravate the shackle on the future generation. Not letting go of anger by holding on to a good conscience and try to appease the mind by looking for a scapegoat do not help recover from the damage that has been made.

However, forgetting certainly will not right the wrongs, either. The digital being still cannot be set free not because they identify excessively with meanings dominated by a grand signifier called conscience, but because planetary technicity dominates the meaning-making business that is grounded in capitalism and material instrumentalism.

While material instrumentalism is a means to ontological play of the digital being, it is not the end or the purpose of the play itself as what the capitalist assembly line promotes.

In Vedic philosophy, detachment of the body, the mind, and memory is the most fundamental and essential practice:

The world of ordinary human experience, of individual standing in mutual

causal relations in space and time (in S the samsara) is not reality. Reality

134

is an oneness or absolute, changeless, perfect, and eternal, Brahman.

Again, human nature is not exhausted by its samsaric elements of body

and individual consciousness of mind (S: jiva): there is further present in

each one of us an immortal element, our true self, the atman. The atman

has no form, and whatever is without form is without limit; whatever is

without limit is omnipresent, and whatever is omnipresent and immortal is

God. This is the basis for one of the most striking and central of

Upanisadic doctrines…. (“Indian Philosophy” 64)

With practices of shifting a perspective on perceiving reality, the digital being is capable of taking the shape of atman, under the condition that the digital being is not willingly enslaved by capitalist discourse. Nonetheless, its manifestation of being is different in attitude. The digital being’s referential sign or Reality is cyberspace which is made of materialistic driven capitalism, not Upanisadic understanding of Reality which has no form, and without a referential sign.

As Nagarjuna understands it, there is no good or bad in conscience. Categorizing good and bad is only useful for making his fourfold dialectic processes and arriving at the final stage: the negation of both the affirmation and the negation (Collinson 97).

Nagarjuna’s ontology emancipates the digital beings from living in any kind of delusions and from the existential crises of nihilism and boredom. As the world is a

“play” between the mind and the body, it does not mean that the digital beings bear no responsibilities for their actions and consequences. On the contrary, the distance between the ultimate reality/Void and sunyata allow them to be creative, perceptive, and skeptical in remaking collaboratively a more vibrant and sustainable digital society, where each digital being is a node in the circulated network of cyberspace.

135

Chapter Six: Networks of Industrialized Synapses

Introduction

Commercialized digital media tend to reappropriate the vision of humans to meet the design of programmers. Along with the market force, the development of technology accelerates beyond the learning curve of human capacity. The byproduct of the accelerated culture is that technical gadgets are oftentimes designed for obsolescence and thus pose a threat to the environment. Computing algorithms were invented to boost the speed of calculation to save time and energy for the brain. The saved time and energy do not generally contribute to the improvement of life, though.

On the contrary, they are redistributed to consumption of images and entertainments.

Calculation, which is the grammar of the computer network system, needs to be combined with eastern mysticism as a form of deep meditation to keep a rhythmic vibe. It is a vibe that is not tied to the absolute speed of capitalism but choreographed to the music of humanities. Similarly, hyper-attention engendered by ubiquitous computing, according to Katherine Hayles, needs to cooperate with deep attention.

Bernard Stiegler investigates how ubiquitous computing creates a new grammar that must be translated from the toxicity of industrialized programming into the care of noopolitics that includes physical, mental, and noetic well-being. Through this translation our overloaded mind will free up space for conducting deep meditation.

What prevents the digital being from being caring and mindful is the fact that speed culture has configured our synapses to be short-circuited and renders engagement of thoughts rather difficult. Whether machines augment our ability to remember a large amount of information or program us to forget, these two factors point to the fact that memory is the site of a power struggle in forming the future of

136 humanity. In 1983 Donna Haraway published “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science,

Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century” where she celebrates the cooperative power of machines and organic entities to augment human capacity. With the same attitude of enlarging human capabilities, Katherine Hayles claims that through the feedback loop of pattern-random/presence-absence discourse, a posthuman narrative will transgress logocentrism and open up more possibilities as well as risks. This yearning to construct a utopian body still exists today, but the question of what it is to be human remains to be elaborated. Two decades after she published “Cyborg Manifesto,” Haraway was interviewed by Nicolas Gane entitled

“When We Have Never Been Human, What Is To Be Done?” (2006). In the interview,

Haraway presents the cyborg as worlding15 and fiction as still a nightmare that needs to be confronted. However, disappointed by the development of cyborg discourse towards the annexation of humans into cybernetic control, Haraway translates the concept of posthumanism into that of companion species where “cyborg is one of the figures but not the dominant one” (149). One of the nightmares that cyborgs face is the accelerated speed of evolution which is at once alluring and distracting our attention away from “thick continuities as a kind of prophylactic against the euphorics of speed as a cultural aesthetic or as a cultural-theoretic aesthetic” (155). The wound of cyborg can be healed through adjusting the rhythm of relating to the world between thin and thick continuities. The crux of thick continuities, in particular the relation between humans and cybernetic system, can be expounded in detail in science fiction.

In an interview with Arthur Piper in “How We Became Posthuman: Ten Years On,”

Katherine Hayles mentions that scientists have often ignored that literature such as science fiction can contribute significantly to affective aspects in the development of

15 Worlding is understood in the sense of building the world through cybernetic network system.

137 cybernetic studies (321). With the recent development of the Internet of Things and wearable technologies, the body as “flickering subject” that is coded with various discourses remains useful and valid in describing digital beings. When objects are embedded with sensors that connect to the network of the Internet of Things, data frequently exchange between humans and nonhumans. From an anthropological point of view, the human is positioned in the phase of “Pleistocene brains” (321) where

Hayles believes that our brain can be configured through cultural and literal discourse.

Specifically, she considers that the emphasis should be “put in the context of the adaptability of the brain” (321).

Flux is at work between non-linearity and linearity, nodes of subversion and over-saturated mediation, grass-root production and capitalist consumption. The discussions on humans are developed into rhythmic relations between the human and cybernetic systems and the translatability of synapses in the transmission of mediated memory. On a personal level, synapsis concerns the matter of Dasein, whereas on a larger scope it broaches the subject of collective memory. The culture of acceleration configures the digital being’s perception of time and synapses. The more a digital being tries to grab hold of the finiteness of life by documenting experience with infinite data, the less he or she remembers and the more difficult it is to construct experience. Paradoxically the digital being leads a life in which life stories outweigh life experiences. A virtual life constituted by archiving experiences is a better version of our life being “remembered” instead of experienced. Caught between creation and destruction, digital beings will be more likely to consciously seek a discourse of care to suspend and ameliorate accelerated disappearance if their thoughts have not been cut short by the will to expedite. Stiegler considers that technics are both the poison and the cure of digital culture. Current cyberculture has seen more grammatization of the toxicity and less formation of the cure. The grammatization of industrialized

138 programming inscribes a market force of knowledge where discipline of science is privileged over humanities, speed over slow culture, short-circuited over long- circuited synapses.

Industrialized Memories and Synapses

Before introducing the discourse of care, which will be extrapolated in detail in chapter seven, I intend to provide the mechanism of an industrialized network and how synapses have been curtailed so far. Cyberpunk literature, electronic literature, cybercultural art and practices together construct a critical discourse to scrutinize a large part of digital culture that remains problematic. Various aspects of industrialized memories are manifested in representations of outsourcing, adaptation of, and rephrasing memories in cyberpunk movies and literature. In her “Rewind, Remix,

Rewrite: Digital and Virtual Memory in Cyberpunk Cinema” Sidneyeve Matrix discusses protagonists’ over-dependence on mnemotechnics and how organic memories are capable of interrupting the control of synthetic memories in manipulating identities, histories, and truths in Minority Report, The Final Cut, and

Vanilla Sky. In her account, cyberpunk cinema serves as “cautionary fables concerning over-reliance on digital technology” (62). In various scholarly journals and science fiction novels and films, depictions and discussions of the subversive power of organic memories have been broadly explored, and so has the danger of total domination of synthetic memories. The representations of industrialized synthetic memories in cyberpunk cinema are invisible markers of our speed culture. How memories are duplicated, dissimulated, and disseminated has been discussed at large, but how industrialized memories curtail our synapses, experiences, and existence, along with how organic memories collaborate with prosthetic memories, however, is underexplored.

139

In his Technics and Time I: The Fault of Epimetheus, Stiegler attributes the cause of the production of synapses on an assembly-line to industrialized memories. In

Stiegler’s rendition of the myth of Prometheus, Epimetheus forgot to ascribe a feature to humans, so Prometheus was forced to give humans technics to supplement their being. Non-human objects or technics that store memories are essential to existence.

Primary memory is genetic memory coded in our organs whereas secondary memory is epigenetic memory as a recollection of the primary memory. The memories that are saved in technics are tertiary memories, or epiphylogenetic memories as they are more than the combination of genetic and epigenetic. Tertiary memories are independent of the mortal body and can be outsourced onto non-human objects to be passed down to the next generation. Programming as our current technics takes the form of informatics and carries the means of writing history and knowledge transference. Having been programmed by the speed culture, the synapses of digital beings are configured by the technics to be vigilant and forgetful at once. I argue that

Googlized memories, BRAIN Initiative, and Foc.us16 are projects of industrialized programming that are toxic to our noetic and existential well-being as the ways in which they are programmed render the brain forgetful and addicted to speed. Our synapses are configured by the grammar of speed programming to be short-circuited instead of long-circuited and more accustomed to hyperattention instead of deep meditation.

In the Beginning Was the Command-Line

In Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash (1992) society runs as a big computer. The beginning of the world was not light but command lines made of a binary system.

Natural light that maps out the world’s shape and curves are redetermined by

16 http://www.foc.us/

140 computing algorithms and big data. The genesis was written by calculation instead of care. As programmers’ brains are trained to read binary codes, their brains develop into “deep structures,” (115) and are capable of being affected to be stricken into a state of coma by reading overloaded information. Deep structures are “neurolinguistic pathways in your brain….Your nerves grow new connections as you use them—your bioware selfmodifies—the software becomes part of the hardware” (115). Snow

Crash is a term that describes the blue screen when the computer has crashed due to system overload, virus, or technical errors. In the novel, Snow Crash is a hypercard that creates “Infocalypse,” a nuclear-data bomb that can destroy a hacker’s neurons through deep structures. By reading Snow Crash, programmers’ brains trigger system failure and get Brain Crash. Not all digital beings are programmers, but their brains are more or less configured to be more receptive to coding by command lines of industrialized programming systems. Stephenson suggests that it is dangerous if the informatics and digital formation takes over humanism and analogical formation. His imagination of the future is a place where programmers become new oppressed labor in the digital sweatshop of the government by means of controlling their neurons. The representation of neurons being destroyed by information overload and synapses being configured by network of information do not only happen in cyberpunk literature, but also in cybercultural practices.

Foc.us and BRAIN Initiative: Engineering Neurons

141

Technics conditions us to be captured by hyperattention that stimulates rather than saturates the insatiable mind. Industrialized memories become prey to the calculated logic of the capitalist monster. Foc.us (see fig. 3.) is a neurostimulator that serves as an add-on to the brain and boosts productivity whenever and wherever one needs it.

The device creates electronic impulses to stimulate the brain. For 200 US dollar, one can activate the brain in fast speed and monitor the productivity of one’s neurons through cellphones. With the emergence of Internet of Things, a security breach will put the brain in the control of the third party. Foc.us is just one of mnemotechnologies that engineer short-circuiting synapses and stimulates our synapses to achieve the efficacy and desired results of capitalist productivity.

Fig. 3. Foc.us: a gadget that stimulates the brain; Foc.us.com; Web; 10 Dec. 2015.

The grammar of industrialized programming tends to boost working memory instead of long-term memory because the logic of the capitalist market demands immediate result. The emancipatory power of informatics is corrupted by the industrialized programming and the logic of late-capitalism. Recently the technics of our time has embarked on the haptic dimension where our five faculties of perceptions will be captured in totality. In order to eliminate the lapse between the

142 tertiary memory and perception, we are forced to economize our attention to the real- time instead of the lived time. Our synapses are labored intellectually to meet the grammar of capitalism instead of our noetic awareness. As the lived time demands self-reflection and long-circuits of thinking, it becomes a burden to the mind that has to maintain as little lapse as possible in order to be “on track” with accelerated speed.

Eye-candy, ear-candy, and even head-candy are invented to completely colonize our senses.

James Ash investigates how the gaming industry has been systematically disorienting gamers by engineering physical reactions and attention. Through analyzing the perception and tertiary memory in the case of playing videogames, he discovers that certain actions and a particular mood can be triggered by audio stimulations. In his article “Attention, Videogames and the Retentional Economies of

Affective Amplification” Ash examines how the sound of weapons can attract player’s attention for the game and argues that the sound can in fact amplify player’s affective emotions. Similarly, this kind of practice can be applied to monitor every sense and movement of our body as an infra-discipline. Extensive research has been done by companies to monitor and track our physical responses to certain technics and media (5). The gaming industry has a distinct goal that is different from educators, one that focuses on distraction and short-circuited synapses rather than on attention and long-circuited synapses. In her “Hyper and Deep Attention: The Generational

Divide in Cognitive Modes,” Hayles points out that with an appropriate game design, gaming can generate the kind of deep attention that is experienced in reading printed books (187–99). Therefore, against the common understanding that gaming is detrimental to the brain of the young and can disorient our attention, Hayles considers that serious gaming with the intention to help learners can create immersive effects and make learners engage on the teaching materials. Even so, the gaming industry

143 oftentimes designs games that distract attention and force synapses to be occupied with stimulation. Collectively Foc.us and the gaming industry constitute a network of industrialized synapses that cannot sustain slowness and attention.

The problem of this data generating, speed accelerating Machine of cyberculture lies in its default design: obsolescence over sustainability, science over humanities, short-circuited over long-circuited knowledge. The gaming industry is one of a number of large projects that configure our brain and body in the service of an ever- acceleration of technics. In 2014 President Obama launched the BRAIN initiative and spent 100 million dollars to cure Alzheimer’s and epilepsy.17 One of the projects that they have done so far is to restore the memories of the soldiers. The name of the project “The Restoring Active Memory (RAM)” conducted by Defense Advanced

Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is a branch of the U.S. Department of Defense that is responsible for researching and advanced technologies for the military.

According to DARPA Program Manager Dr. Justin Sanchez, “The end goal of RAM is to develop and test a wireless, fully implantable neural-interface medical device for human clinical use.18” Unlike the traditional method of taking medication and psychological consulting, DARPA engineers are inserting a physical neuroprosthetics into the brain and encoding memories back to the synapses. Regardless of the recent controversy of doing experiments on humans before testing on animals, the project also tries to do deep brain stimulation by using implanted electrodes to deliver electrical signals to specific parts of the brain. The mission statement on its website writes:

The BRAIN Initiative will accelerate the development and application of

17 The website of the Brain initiative and its project proposal can be accessed at http://braininitiative.nih.gov/. 18 http://www.darpa.mil/program/restoring-active-memory

144

new technologies to produce dynamic pictures of the brain that show how

individual brain cells and complex neural circuits interact at the speed of

thought. These technologies will open new doors to explore how the brain

encodes, stores, and retrieves vast quantities of information, and shed light

on the complex links between brain function and behavior.

The goal of the BRAIN initiative is limited to the encoding, saving, and retrieving of information and not concerned with the attachment of tertiary memories to the care of the body and mental well-being. As always is the case in scientific-medical practice, the intention of curing a patient can degenerate into control. From governments to internet enterprise, the brain is the new-found territory taken off-guard by the intrusion of the predatory institutions that try to install and uninstall programs in the data bank of the brain.

Industrialized tertiary network system connects to our brain neurotically and culturally through commercial, medical, military, and many more aspects in our everyday tasks. Google remembers personal information, stores e-mails, photos, documents, what users read, and search. This global corporation has become a verb due to how frequent we search for information on its webpage. Google, along with companies that track users’ data, knows every secret; users may not even notice this as its algorithm also calculates, makes profiles of users, and even predict their future.19 When supplements such as tertiary memories become the core of digital beings, they become Googlized: beings for whom tertiary memories are privileged over lived memories. Tertiary memories are engineered to meet a certain goal. To be free from lived memories, digital beings can now redesign their tertiary memories

19 Target, an American supermarket predicts a girl’s due day and sent her coupons on those things before she even realized that she’s pregnant. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2102859/How- Target-knows-shoppers-pregnant--figured-teen-father-did.html

145 according to the demand of their mind. A frame is set to be refilled with certain tertiary memories. The risk is that perception and primary retention of memories will be marginalized by tertiary memories. Feelings and perceptions are deferred because there is little time for the body to respond when tertiary memories are by default being collected in large number. Whether users have been Googlized is by no means the issue because Google is just one of many mnemotechnologies, a signifier of a larger industrial programming. Techno-capital-culture quantifies our body, brain, and consciousness that are written all over with the name of calculation and consumption.

Users of mnemotechnologies may not have time to question how much data they have uploaded and where the data were stored since cloud computing is invented to make the saving and uploading as fast and seamless as the way information transmits through our nervous system. John Gerrard, an Ireland-based artist20 unveiled and photographed Google’s data farm, which is where the world’s tertiary memories are physically located and hidden from the public. Gerrard hired a helicopter in order to take a snapshot of the world’s digital center of tertiary memories. Perhaps there is good reason to shield it from the public as it is indeed a beehive of secrets gathered from users who sacrifice their privacy for free services. Users can be so dependent on services of Google that they hardly notice how much chaos it might bring when the service is down or overloaded. If users do not encounter error 404 or 502, they will not realize that tertiary memories can disappear because their digital nerve will be cut off. One part of their memories will be irretrievable if the data-farm that reserves collective tertiary memories is sabotaged. The data that we knowingly or unknowingly saved is the extension of our memories and what defines us. We should

20 An article from The Guardian reports how John Gerrad challenged Google’s protection of digital farm and reminded us of our digital memories that are not abstract but concrete extension of our being. This article can be accessed here:

146 be able to decide how much access we have to tertiary memories whenever we want and the right to delete them when we want to forget. Speed culture quickens the collection and production of tertiary memories while at the same time barely providing us time to conceive of humanities beyond the system of industrialized tertiary network.

Synapses Being Short-Circuited by Industrialized Memories

Tertiary memories come in the forms of prosthetic memories and data. They are transmission nodes in the global network, just as the digital nerves in the network of human body. Data, as part of our being, is the crux of current social, cultural, and political matters. Not only do the data that we consume define us, but also the data that we produce shape the future of humanity. Data, or tertiary memories are properties shared by everyone and thus everyone has equal rights to access them without being restricted by capital. Recently the uploading and downloading tertiary memories have become an issue as Internet Service Providers (ISP) need to enlarge the bandwidth to sustain a large traffic. The American ISP Comcast was accused of trying to disturb the equity of accessing and spreading tertiary memories, or to use its technical term: net neutrality. Although Chile, USA, Holland, and Canada have passed laws that protect net neutrality, many countries have not established the laws to regulate bandwidth, which is the virtual currency of digital network system.

Doctoring the plan to disturb net neutrality, capitalism, in its pursuit of efficiency and progress, favors short-circuited synapses whereas it prevents the use of long-circuited ones. The need for sustainability would require favoring long-circuited synapses. A design for obsolescence is thus created for industrialized memories. Since the price for storage is decreasing, users click, generate, and save data without a second thought in various technological gadgets. Our attention is being distributed to various

147 perspectives within the network of informatics that has contributed to a repositioning of our subjectivity aggregated by the accelerated speed of the machines. While digital beings are more vigilant, they are less mindful and prone to be forgetful. Mindfulness connotes thoughts that mere vigilance cannot form. Advertising and the game industry master the tracking of our senses through various experiments exemplified in Ash’s essays. Capitalism creates possibilities of innovation but innovators need to draw on long-circuited design, as well as address and recruit consumers who share the same cause. As the speed culture is engineering our synapses to be acclimated to short- circuited discourse and hyper attention, mindful consumers are the minority. The majority only functions as what William Gibson calls the meatpuppets of capitalism to transfer short-circuited infotainment. Although short-circuited synapses and thought do not directly lead to short vision, long-circuited synapses need to be involved in order to think fast and act effectively, ethically, and responsibly.

Not only are humans culturally encoded to accelerate, but also genetically encoded to enjoy speed. Thus deep attention and long-circuited synapses are acquired through a reverse-cultivation. In his “The Pleasure and Pain of Speed,” Tom

Vanderbilt brings about how cinema engineers viewers’ attention. Vanderbilt, taking cues from James Cutting, expounds that Hollywood cinema tends to use short cutting not only because it is easier to edit but also because it is effective in capturing audience attention. Viewers are programmed to receive short cutting, fast animated images, and thus have short-spanned attention. The reason behind the programming speed of Hollywood is not only to capture viewer’s attention, but also because short cutting makes viewers happy. Emily Pronin argues that there is indeed a connection between speed of the technics and speed of the thought. Her experiment controlled reading speed and fast-forwarded a silent-video to accelerate or decelerate thought speed. In her “Psychological Effects of Thought Acceleration,” Pronin discovers that

148 thinking fast not only makes one feel happier and motivated but also more prone to take risks. Her research suggests that “listening to fast music also can elevate positive mood while listening to slow music can deflate it” (597). On the contrary, long duration makes us feel less appetitive to pursue goals and less engaged. To keep consumers “hungry” for more and make them engaged, the capitalist system produces new commodities within a short period of time. This is a deal made between a digital

Faust and a capitalist Mephistopheles since the accumulation, documenting, and consumption of experience make our life more virtual and less tangible. The appetitive industry engineers our synapses to be addicted to speed and consumption.

Consumers are vigilant, stimulated, and happy mentally in a short-circuited cycle.

Nevertheless, this cycle is pernicious to the body that cannot stay stimulated at all times. Speed fatigue follows.

In her “Stuplimity: Shock and Boredom in Twentieth-Century Aesthetics,”

Sianne Ngai devises the term “stuplimity” to describe boredom and speed fatigue within the postmodern sublime represented in Samuel Beckett’s The Making of

Americans and Gerhard Richter’s Atlas. Contrary to an uplifting feeling that Kantian sublimity prescribes, stuplimity generates in readers a sense of fatigue and boredom that enervates them. Thus she calls for a new term to describe the nuance of the sublime, “since here the experience of being aesthetically overwhelmed involves not so much fear, terror, or even euphoria, but something much closer to an ordinary fatigue” (emphasis original). Instead of revolving around the Kantian sublime, she reformulates it with experience of the stuplime. She maintains that “the stuplime paradoxically forces the reader to go on in spite of its equal enticement to surrender, inducing a series of comic fatigues or tirednesses rather than a single, earth-shattering blow to one’s conceptual apparatus, thus pushing the reader to constantly formulate and reformulate new tactics for reading.” Although her description of stuplime is

149 based on reading texts, the state of mind aptly fits into that of the digital being’s encounter of digital stuplime. The sublime of experience is replaced by that of stuplime, an experience constituted by constant consumption of short-circuited sublime that does not make a meaningful contribution to existence. When this stuplime becomes the grammar of our existence, we favor the survival instinct over intellectual engagement with the society and existence. The survival instinct is mutated into the capitalist logic of thirst and hunger for signifiers without signified, consumption without conscience. The linkage between capitalist logic and configuration of our synapses is that we are trained to have a good working memory which is short-circuited rather than long-circuited synapses. Long-circuited synapses that provide us with deep attention are decreasing and the weight of primary and secondary memories give way to tertiary memories that we outsource to mnemotechnology and pharmacology. As the brain synapses are engineered by industrial programming to be stimulated by appetitive speed, the digital being grows more vigilant instead of being mindful and thoughtful.

Although industrialized memories on the one hand give us a large database to consult for information, they on the other hand make it easier to corrupt memories.

The industry supplies digital beings with cheap and large storage vaults because they have the desire to grab hold of every experience and save it. Digital beings are programmed by the industry to archive experiences. They yearn to freeze the moment by saving the data and memories in different forms. They save the memories before they have the time to contemplate what they just perceived because there is more to come. Although the data hunting mode makes them happy, the pleasure it brings is gone just as fast as the experience itself. The industry encodes the narrative of consumption in digital beings to treasure their life by constant clicking, phubbing, and infofeeding. While Virilio stresses the colonization of real-time on lived-time, Stiegler

150 argues that real-time has subversive power to discretize linear time and bring about alternative knowledge. As a supplement to our memory capacity, data are not just a prosthetic memory but the DNA of our culture. Just as our biological DNA, what we select to keep or delete will be passed on to the next generation and decide what mortal being we will become and what we still have to do on the way to be posthumans. In the time of risk, there emerges a counter-narrative to help speculate on how our outsourced memories play a role on the horizon of a reified capitalist technoculture. Googlized memories, Brain Initiative, and Foc.us are current cultural practices of the industrialized network of synapses. They all point to the fact that our memories are short-circuited by capitalism, acceleration, and stimulation.

Technologies that facilitate this short-circuited discourse are bound to crash not only the industrialized synapses, but also the economic system because poorly designed structure ultimately leads to errors that need to be reviewed again.

The Origin of Humans and Tertiary Memories

The counter-discourse to this industrialization of synapses has to be formed and has to intervene through tertiary memories. They not only serve as a supplement to our being, but also as an inalienable part of us that transforms our being, by means of configuring synapses. In his Technics and Time II: Disorientation, Stiegler argues that tertiary memory is essential to the evolution of humans. Technics conserves and inscribes with tertiary memory our knowledge of the past. Aside from a tool for self- reflection, technics is the collective tertiary memory that can be passed on to the next generation in the form of cultural heritage. It is this epiphylogenetic memory that differentiates humans from animals as they do not have technics to conserve their knowledge, so they cannot pass it on after they die. Although we have the means to improve our life, the recent development of industrial programming turns the blessing

151 into a curse. Tertiary memories function less as an extension than a limitation to our existence as they are techno-logically configured by speed culture to oblivion.

According to Stiegler, before the end of orthographic writing, tertiary memories were

“e-laboration” (8) rather than self-conservation. Digital memories are flatlined by industrialized programming that often use our memories for the service of surveillance in the name of security. The digital being’s tendency to save tertiary memories is also problematic as archiving does not mean remembering. The more tertiary memories we conserve, the easier and more precise it is to be monitored and identified. In his “Bernard Stiegler’s Pharmacy: A Conversation,” Marcel O’Gorman discusses with Stiegler the risk of storing tertiary memories and the need to bring forth a politics of leaving our traces. Instead of preventing recording of traces, which is rather futile, digital beings should focus on deleting, and selecting traces so as to develop “a consciousness of the recording of traces, a politics of the recording of trace”

(468). Furthermore, although regulating the recording of tertiary memories is crucial to the protection of digital beings, a larger ethical guideline should be established. The programming industry is partially at fault for thinning out tertiary memories as it closes the possibilities of synthesis, typical of memory’s “analogic, numeric, and biologic technologies” (O’Gorman 9). Digital beings save memories instead of savoring them. Similarly, cognitive science is disappointing in its promise to understand human beings because it fails to conceptualize a pivotal aspect of existence, namely retentional finitude and metaphysics. The development of cognitive science is moving towards the direction that renders us more agile and informed in a sweatshop where our brain is merrily enslaved by the diktat of speed. While Virilio develops his critique on the speed of modernity in terms of military sense of dromology, Stiegler explores accelerated speed in terms of the relationship between perception and tertiary memories. As Virilio considers the world becomes a Great

152

Object to the deployment of military services, Stiegler considers the world being short-circuited to the development of obsolescence instead of sustainability.

Speed and Evolution of Technics

Stiegler discusses the concept of absolute capitalist speed through ways in which the informatics encodes synapses and inscribes the grammar of behaviors to our synapses, memories, and social conditions. He remarks: “Speed is the result of the negotiation between the dead and the living—between primary retentional and tertiary memory”

(11). The speed is understood in terms of the rhythm between synapses and technics and the symbiosis between them. Absolute speed of the techno-capitalist culture deprives us of the deep attention and renders us incapable of conducting self- reflection that demands more long-term memory than working memory.

Technoculture will accelerate to destruction without the intervention of long-circuited thought to suspend the circuit. In his Technics and Time: The Fault of Epimetheus,

Stiegler remarks that:

Technics evolves more quickly than culture. More accurately put, the

temporal relation between the two is a tension in which there is both

advance and delay, a tension characteristic of the extending [étirement] that

makes up any process of temporalization. …What would be the breaking of

a time barrier if this meant going faster than time? What shock would be

provoked by a device going quicker than its “own time”? Such a shock

would in fact mean that speed is older than time. For either time, with space,

determines speed, and there could be no question of breaking the time

barrier in this sense, or else time, like space, is only thinkable in terms of

speed (which remains unthought). (15; emphasis original)

Stiegler elaborates in the later part of the book that the rhythm between technics and

153 culture is the key. In terms of the technics’ speed of evolution, Andrés Vaccari and

Belinda Barnet give an account of how technics evolves and the implication of its threat and amenities. In their essay “Prolegomena to a Future Robot History: Stiegler,

Epiphylogenesis and Technical Evolution,” Vaccari and Belinda explain how technics evolve. Unlike organic beings, they state, “Technical machines are different. There is no extinction; nothing is irrevocable, as long as it is remembered in the form of artefacts or in documents” (emphasis original). Organic beings can only evolve through vertical transmission, namely, inheriting from the previous generation. On the contrary, technical machines evolve through horizontal transmission, that is, they can borrow innovations beyond the linear time. Computing technology not only is capable of accelerating collections and reservations of tertiary memories, but also precisely targeting perception and configuring memories of our perception. As the technoculture becomes the grammar of our society, our synaptogenesis is constantly taken off the track by the productions of eye-catchings and ear-stimulations. We are being programmed to reposition and resituate ourselves as often as we are distracted by the frequent hyperstimulation of new technologies. Digital beings are hyperstimulated in technological ecstasy as they have the syndrome of “Weltschmerz.”

Jean Paul Richter defines the German word as “a feeling experienced by someone who understands [that] the physical reality can never satisfy the demands of the mind.”

The myriad of digital interfaces promise a world that exists beyond the constraints of logic, psychic, and différence. The mind that used to take pleasure through a deep attention that initiates and activates the chain of sublimation now demands a new paradigm of mental exercise that combines hyperattention with deep attention.

Currently in Nordic countries there is a discourse of slowness that interrupts the short- circuited synapses. A discourse of care that aims to alleviate the damage of speed culture will be examined in the next chapter.

154

Chapter Seven: Transductive Discourse of Care

Introduction

The previous chapters heavily stressed the critical impact of cyberculture on humans; this chapter, by contrast, will focus on how cyberculture benefits contemporary society by engaging with it positively and critically. In this positive manifestation, the textual analyses and cultural practices that cyberculture produces will rest more on the reappropriation of technology to the benefits of humans, such as rethinking industrial programming through digital art practices, enhancing vision through analogico-digital practices, imagining a not-yet-future through the lens of digital culture production and inspecting the emerging production of Augmented Reality as the emblem of a dawning culture. While current practices of cyberculture are mostly short-circuiting synapses, symptoms of speed and adrenal fatigue emerge that call for our attention.

Thus, a discourse of care emerges within cyberculture to rehabilitate and alleviate this short-circuited network of industrialized memories. It is that discourse of care that this chapter will delineate by focusing on how short-circuited synapses can be suspended by a discourse of care that encourages digital beings to pace themselves and distribute their limited attention towards the critical matters of the society.21 A discourse of care counteracts the production of dopamine by suspending the synapses from circulating in the infinite loop of a reward circuit of speed and obsolescence engineered by late capitalism. It is, however, more rewarding in the long-run regarding overall cultural, social, and economic development. American scientist and science fiction writer

Vernor Vinge’s Rainbows End, Australian artist Benjamin Forster’s “A Written

Perspective,” and Reiner Strasser and M.D. Coverley’s “ii -- in the white darkness:

21 Critical matters are social, cultural, and political crises that need our attention and awareness.

155 about [the fragility of] memory” taken together form a discourse of care that aims to challenge the industrialized memories and serve as a possible paradigm of speculation and suspension if not reverse-engineering of the current techno-capitalized memories.

These cultural practices cultivate long-term vision, intensify elaboration of memories that have been forgotten by humans in the process of accelerated disappearance, and serve as a critical lens to see the world as the naked eye cannot. The discourse of care makes it possible to extend the short-circuited synapses of the brain and the society and in so doing suspend the accelerated destruction of late-capitalist progress.

Slowness: A Cultivated Speed

As the brain is biologically engineered to feel more stimulated in speed, reverse- engineering a speed culture that is ingrained biologically is not an easy task. The present moment, however, needs a cure in the form of insistent intervention into speed culture, to be conducted through cultivating deep-circuited thought that allows space for deep meditation. With this minute tuning of our brain, thoughts, and culture, the detrimental capitalism that is in close tie with cyberculture will be configured to the benefit of digital beings. In his Taking Care of the Youth and the Generations (2010),

Stiegler remarks:

Only the establishment of a psychopolitics can constrain the ravages of

these kinds of ‘innovations’22 in a world of psychopower, which becomes

the public’s primary responsibility—notably in terms of the battle for

intelligence but first as a matter of public health. It must be a politics of

pharmaka, of psychotechniques and psychotechnologies. As the battle for

intelligence, this psychopolitics must then be translated into a noopolitics,

22 These innovations include various technologies that are being invented, such as smart phones, augmented reality technologies, 3D printing technologies, and many more.

156

not only through the limitation and regulation of these psychotecnologies’

use, especially for the young, but through a transformation of poison into

remedy. (92; emphasis original)

The emphasis on translation of care into psychopolitics is potent particularly because law and regulations do not completely prevent intentional sabotage from malicious security crackers who do not abide by a consensus of ethical hacking. Stiegler believes that a discourse of care plants the seeds of hope and envisions that this not- yet of the future lies in the discourse of care that takes on several levels and layers. He remarks that “Truthfully, education is an entirely other form of care: it is in fact a metacare, neither care of the body nor even of numbers of bodies but of what have for centuries been called ‘souls,’ whose collectivity constitutes a spirit” (177; emphasis original). For one, care pertains to the caring of the soul. For another, care can also carry a cultural critique on the society. The care of the soul is referred to as a discourse that reminds digital beings of their retentional finitude and the fact that they are mortals with a body. If the brain is addicted to speed because of the mental stimulation of dopamine, then the digital being should turn away from the poison of technics by deep meditation as it produces dopamine but does not curtail the synapses.

Stiegler also notes that the modernity of the early twentieth-century did not provide a critical instrument to improve the society. On the contrary, modernity contributed greatly to the making of the human into the inhuman. “The State’s biopower,” he states “as it modernizes, reduces existences to subsistences, to mere producers or consumers: to the diminished status of proletarized beings condemned to inhumanity and inexistence; this is the sense in which Marcuse’s thought was referenced in the movement called ‘68’” (178). Modern technologies, driving the spaceship of

Promethean spirit, accelerate the speed, and manipulate human’s vision, in an orientation of dehumanization.

157

Stiegler’s concept of care is quite utopian. As he understands it,

To take care, to cultivate, is to dedicate oneself to a cult, to believe there is

something better: the non-inhuman par excellence, both in its projection to

the level of ideas (consistencies) and in that this “better” must come. This is

exactly the ēthos for which techniques of the self are required; to take care

is to know that since there is a “better,” there is a “worse,” and that it must

be combated, without cowardice, since it endlessly returns through the

window of those who, whether naïve or presumptuous, believe they have

shut it out, or that they can “not give a damn.’” (178-9; emphasis original)

In other words, to take care is to cultivate critical attention and a belief that something better will come. Education as a metacare must be installed into the network system of the programming industries in order to reverse-engineer the reified discourse of carelessness that is the result of a collective drifting of attention. He remarks that

In the current world, this metacare must become a psychopolitics, an

industrial politics of techniques of the mind, even before it struggles against

the disastrous effects of the savage use of psychotechnologies by the

programming industries as they destroy attention and consciousness,

disseminating a global attention deficit disorder at the very moment when

the development of a planetary consciousness is appearing to be the single

hope for the survival of we non-inhuman beings. (179)

The problem of distracted attention is just one of the aspects of a systematic disappearance of subjectivity. Attention is not destroyed but diverted to something less meaningful in life and can do damage to our soul and consciousness. The tertiary memories that are supposed to supplement our existence become one of the standardized objects produced by technocultural industry. The project of this industry aims to design a large amount of creative products in a short time. The constant

158 renewing of products satisfies consumer’s shopping appetite as well as producer’s pocket. The shorter the circuit of supply time, the more customers’ attention is digressed to the “newness” of the same product with different color and features. This systematic writing of industrialized memories creates a culture of obsolescence. As

Stiegler claims:

Now, these thingly supports of everyday life, which supported the world

and the making world essentially grounded in and through this making-trust,

have become disposable and structurally obsolescent as capitalism

concretized what Schumpeter theorized in his Theory of Economic

Evolution, namely, the chronic obsolescence of industrial products

henceforth furnished and swept away by a permanent innovation leading to

an ineluctably self-destructive short-termism. Today, it has become an utter

commonplace to see objects disappear into garbage disposals and garage

sales faster than they appear on the market. (“Interobjectivity and

Transindividuation” 2012)

The “make it new” spirit of the modernism has evolved to “be creative.” While designers are not creative based on sustainability, they constantly renew themselves on the creative assembly-line. The creative industry engineers customers’ appetite to expect new products in a shorter span and less concern with keeping and repairing things. Extreme capitalism consistently carries out the project of obsolescence in terms of being creative and in the form of service update. Technological gadgets fit seamlessly into this category. Proprietary software makes profits if it is renewed constantly. While software produces less damage environmentally, hardware poses more of a threat to poison the planet. The culture of obsolescence produces DIYers as alternative producers that scavenge obsolete equipment to make gadgets that are new, unique, and creative in their own endeavors. In terms of the food industry, the rhythm

159 of fast production and disposal elicits Freegans as alternative consumers who salvage food that goes to waste after the expiration date.

To suspend the vicious cycle of short-termism, noopolitics takes part in the production of knowledge that supports the long-termism. If the discourse of metacare is the bone of noopolitics, then attention is the flesh of the discourse. Attention is the first step to initiate translation of long-circuited from short-circuited thought. In

Stiegler’s account, “To take care also means to pay attention, first paying attention to taking and maintaining care of oneself, then of those close to us, then of their friends-- and thus, by projection, of everyone: of others whatever they may be, and of the world we share with them; formation of this kind of attention creates a universal consciousness grounded on (and profaned by) a consciousness of singularity” (179; emphasis original). Stiegler considers that the acceleration of the technics renders us forgetful yet at the same time occupies the brain with overloaded hyperattention.

Computing is the contemporary technics that is writing a new grammar of generating data, memory loss, and hyperattention. Emerging out of its predecessors television and cinema, Augmented Reality devices are looming on the horizon as the future of mnemotechnology. The process of synthesizing AR and reality demands big data and high computing speed. AR is an emblem of current digital culture where acceleration, eyeball culture, and haptic senses together are combined in the total immersion of the digital being.

In the first volume of his Technics and Time, Stiegler argues that technics not only configures our synapses, but also renders us forgetful.

Technicization is what produced loss of memory….With the advent of

calculation, which will come to determine the essence of modernity, the

memory of originary eidetic intuitions, upon which all apodictic processes

and meaning are founded, is lost. Technicization through calculation

160

drives Western knowledge down a path that leads to a forgetting of its

origin, which is also a forgetting of its truth. This is the ‘crisis of the

European sciences.’ Without a refoundation of rational philosophy,

science—having lost the object itself of any science--leads, it is argued, to

the technicization of the world. (3)

Here he argues that calculation initiates a systematic forgetting of origin, which is part of the process of the technicization of the world. The risk of forgetting the truth is contested by alternative perspectives of interpreting truths. “The theme of forgetting dominates Heidegger’s thinking of being. Being is historial, and the history of being is nothing but its inscription in technicity” (4). The connection among Dasein, technicity, and history is understood by Kroker as the standing-still of Dasein that can be turned over through meditation and, in my argument, by adopting Nagarjuna’s shift of consciousness. In line with Nagarjuna’s shift of consciousness, a noetic perspective on the digital being is forming through Stiegler’s utopian formulation of the issue of

Dasein.

Stiegler maintains that “Dasein is in the mode of ‘having-to-be’ because it never yet totally is; inasmuch as it exists, it is never finished, it always already anticipates itself in the mode of ‘not yet’” (Technics and Time 5). He envisions that modern technics develops toward an orientation of political domination where rationalization, in fact, means systems of domination, of purposive-rationalization over communicative action (Technics and Time 12). Just as the deconstruction of the

Grand Narrative opens up a variegated plethora of petite narratives for subverting and rethinking the status quo, the inventions of computing technologies fragmented our focus, attention, and the ability to conduct critical thinking in times of crisis. Exactly what differentiates analog and digital apparatus is that the essence of the latter is its features of discrete, discontinuity, and unchronological. In his essay “The Discrete

161

Image,” Stiegler argues that although the essence of analogico-digital technology is manipulation, unlike the “it was” of analogical image, its “not having been” (150) destabilizes normative knowledge produced by the analogical paradigm and invents new knowledge. While late-capitalism is doctoring the grammar of machine writing as a normative knowledge, analogico-digital apparatus subverts the production of knowledge and creates a critical distance and reorients our attention. Analog technology implies continuous and linear time whereas digital technology implies discrete and unlinear time. He writes: “As a discretization of analog continuity, digitization opens the possibility of new knowledge of image—artistic as well as theoretical and scientific” (157). In other words, analogico-digital technology is forming a new paradigm of writing and of “analytic apprehension of the image-object”

(159). I start my reappropriation of digital knowledge production through the use of care instead of through the use of destruction by weaving the discourse of creative analogico-digital practice as an elaboration of industrialized memories that are closed by reified narrative of capitalism. The first analogico-digital discourse is analyzed in

Australian artist Benjamin Forster’s “A Written Perspective.”

Analogico-Digital Discourse of Care

Before analyzing how analogico-digital practice23 is inscribed in Forster’s works, an explication of the theory of analogico-digital is needed. According to Stiegler, what has changed over time is not how humans manipulate the technological devices, but

23 The lecture on the discrete image was given in the 1990s in France with a warning of digitization of analog image, but ended with a positive remark on the future of analogico-digital image. Stiegler states that “new image-objects are going to engender new mental images, as well as another intelligence of movement” (162). Furthermore, he makes a hypothesis that “life (anima – on the side of the mental image) is always already cinema (animation – image-object)” (162; emphasis original). If life is already cinema, technics translates new knowledge and synaptogenesis into the brain. This invites the spectator of the analogico-digital image to walk into a new sphere that can never been imagined or seen before. This new-found territory is also alarming in the ways that Hollywood industry was dominating the culture industry and inscribing a unidirectional narrative to the general public.

162 technicity itself. Thus the configuration of technicity has to be taken into account in the analogical-digital practices. The development of the image-object from the nineteenth century to the contemporary period is categorized into three stages, respectively analog image (photography and cinema), digital image (computer- generated image), and analogico-digital image. Analogico-digital apparatus bears the risks of short-circuiting and the possibility of long-circuiting social and cultural synapses through ways in which this apparatus configures the mental image of the collective citizen. The increasing possibility of manipulation comes with improved calculation and precision as well as the malleability of our reality in relation to the formation of knowledge in the analogico-digital image. Stiegler states: “The image in general does not exist. What is called the mental image and what I shall call the image-object (which is always inscribed in a history, and in a technical history) are two faces of a single phenomenon” (147; emphasis original). In other words, the new knowledge inscribed in the analogico-digital image, as opposed to the normative knowledge inscribed in the analog image, will also change the culture that we interact with and live at the moment.

The difference between the analog image and the analogico-digital image lies in three areas: techniques of manipulation, social impacts, and the degree of discretization and continuity. Even though the analog image to a certain degree can be manipulated in terms of framing, editing, and orchestrated to present a reality effect, the digital image can install a reality that has never happened in the past.

“Manipulation,” remarks Stiegler, “is on the contrary the essence, that is to say, the rule of the digital photo. And this possibility, which is essential to the digital photographic image, of not having been, inspires fear…” (150; emphasis original).

The examples are numerous, for instance, the fake interview with Fidel Castro, and the mediated false news broadcasted by CNN during the war in Persian Gulf (150).

163

The duplicity that comes with the digital image is dreadful not only on an individual level, but also poses great impact on social spheres. The digital image can be employed to beguile civilians in order to gain election victories, establish a regime, and create riots.

On the one hand, Stiegler is skeptical of the impact and dissimulation of the digital image; on the other hand, he considers that the analogico-digital image harbors possibility of producing new knowledge. “The digitization of the analog destabilizes our knowledge of this was, and we are afraid of this. But we were afraid of the analog, too: in the first photographs, we saw phantoms” (152; emphasis original). The fear of seeing phantoms has to do with the anxiety of representing the moment that no longer exists. The spectator is not capable of grasping entirely the thing that existed in front of his/her eyes, only the “luminances” (152) of the past. However, the same anxiety arises whenever a new technology is invented. If we consider the change from analog image to digital image as a change of a form of the writing of light to that of the electronic light, then this change resembles the intersection between speech and writing. The digital image is coded with binary language, which depends on calculation and pixels instead of luminances and photons.

The analogico-digital image, however, is malleable in both analogical and digital ways. In the production of this kind of image, “the artist’s job is to assemble the analytic elements such that the synthesis will be made more effective. The assembling is a logos. The spectatorial synthesis will be made as much by the play of retinal persistence as by that of expectations of sequential connections (these dreams we mentioned, shared by artist and spectator alike) which efface the discontinuity of a montage all the more effectively the more cleverly it is orchestrated” (156; emphasis original). The fear and anxiety that are produced by the digital image can be alleviated by the possibility of destabilizing the normative knowledge as well as the

164 deconstruction of the language and the culture. Quintessentially, the making of analogico-digital image takes two forms of syntheses, which come from the machine synthesis and the spectatorial synthesis. It is also stressed in Stiegler’s argument that both syntheses are equally important in the shaping of the new knowledge encoded in the analogico-digital image, as they interact with what Simondon calls a “transductive relation (a relation which constitutes its terms, in which one term cannot precede the other because they exist only in the relation)” (161). The difference between Hayles’s concept of feedback loop and Simondon’s transductive relation is that human agents are not over-determined by the network of informatics. The network does not overweigh human agents. Both have to be beneficial in order to sustain a symbiosis.

This transductive relation implies that cybernetic network system cannot thrive without having human agents benefit from its reproduction and circulation. The decadence of human agents will directly affect cybernetic network that serves as the backbone of the global economics, cybernetic wars, and various industries. Thus, the destruction of human agents will also destroy the capitalistic-cybernetic network that sustains current economic system. The economic crisis will not be solved without suspending the exploitation of human agents by means of acceleration and disorientation.

A Discourse of Care Through the Eyes and Speed of the Machines

The first suspension of short-circuited synapses takes place in a video clip that combines video recording and computing algorithm. Forster’s “A Written Perspective” translates discourse of care into industrialized tertiary network system through analogico-digital apparatus. His work is exhibited in An Online Exhibition of the

ACMSIGGRAPH: Digital Arts Community curated by Kathy Rae Huffman who claims that these videos engage with critical social perspectives through the digital

165 technology, which not only captures what humans cannot see with the naked eye, but also what cameras cannot capture. In this 15-minute video footage Forster presents

Sydney’s Joondalup Shopping City that is seen through the layer of computing algorithm, a perspective that customers do not otherwise see. He records this commodified place and uses programming language C++ to filter any written word that is not included in the variance and erases it. As the programmer computes

“anglophone” as the variance, the result is a black and white animated-image written with anglophone signs whereas other languages are being edited out from the scene.

“This custom algorithm,” as Forster puts it, “does not look for known letters, but rather in an attempt to avoid anglocentrism checks for properties common to the written word across all cultures.” In other words, by showing a space that is being erased by the anglocentric signifier, Forster wants to make a sarcastic comment on this anglocentric-commercialized place. At around one minute of the video, a female underwear brand Triumph is seen on the screen (see fig.4.).

Fig. 4. A critique on anglocentrism from Benjamin Forster; “A Written Perspective”;

An Online Exhibition of the ACMSIGGRAPH: Digital Arts Community;Web; 16 July

2015

166

The writing of computing algorithm does not manipulate our vision to feed the hunger of capitalism but provides a critical lens to distance consumers away from the immersed shopping experience. The digital apparatus calculates the data that is recorded in the video and translates the commodified space into a critical space which highlights how capitalism and the logic of the marketplace is primarily anglocentric and has been “written” all over our lived space with signs of triumph, even though consumers do not consciously perceive it this way. Thus the discretization of the image produces a knowledge that transgresses the normative frame of knowledge and makes us ponder how ubiquitous anglocentrism is at play in our everyday life. The grammar of computing is capable of accumulating the data and then translates it into the result that the programmer encoded. This translation of discourse of care into the production of knowledge is vital as the viewing experience enacts a transductive experience between the computers and the viewers in which programming language opens a critical perspective for viewers to speculate on the world that cannot be seen by the naked eye. The process can be seen as a reverse-engineering the mnemotechnological discourse as a computer does not only serve as a device that saves and outsources tertiary memories, but as a critical instrument to enhance our intelligence and expend our understanding of the world. “A Written Perspective” touches upon the idea of pharmakon where anglocentrism is writing a system of domination on top of urban space. By contrasting the world seen by the naked eye and the world represented by analogico-digital apparatus, its difference gives us a critical distance to ponder if capitalism and anglocentrism are the only way of describing the world and the only way of making sense of our existence. The short-circuited synapses will be temporarily suspended by the lure of an alternative knowledge generated by the invisible signs hidden by anglocentric ones. In this case, the

167 analogico-digital apparatus serves as our visual and mental prostheses, makes what is invisible visible to us, and abstract ideas into concrete representations. The digital apparatus allows us to analyze the image critically, with the amenities of computing algorithm. By programming the discourse of care through the analogico-digital apparatus into our knowledge system, the digital being’s DNA is encoded with the heterogenetic knowledge that contests with the homogenous knowledge of the analogical production of meanings. Kroker’s concept of code drift best describes the embodiment of digital beings in cybernetic networks:

Neither global nor local

Today we are mobile

We are Code Drift

We remix/mutate/disseminate/jailbreak

Code Drift is the once and future

nervous system -- the genetic drift

of all augmented data bodies.

We are AR

We are Data Flesh

We are Code Drift (“Code Drift”)

His mental imagery of the future is a symbiosis of digital beings with the data they generated and codes they program. The digital being is constantly coding and being encoded by big data. The chain of signification is forming in constant flux.

“Hologram for Freedom” is a project that shows how an analogico-digital apparatus can encode discourse of care into the reified and normative production of knowledge (see fig. 5).

168

Fig. 5. The virtual presence from No Somos Delito; “Holograms for

Freedom”;Online Video Clip; Youtube; Youtube; 24 Apr. 2015; Web; 28 Dec. 2015.

On April 10, 2015 a group of activists demonstrated their civil disobedience in the form of a hologram against the Spanish government’s Citizen Safety Law, also called the Gag Law that forbids any physical protest in front of the congress building. In resistance to the government’s decision to normalize knowledge and confine freedom of speech, No Somos Delito (We Are Not Crime) tried to defend their civil right by using Augmented Reality technology that enabled them to demonstrate in their virtual presence as demonstrating physically will risk paying a fine up to € 600,000.24 The digital being’s double presences allow them to break the chain of signification of

State Machine that confines and silences heterogeneous knowledge and translates skepticism into a state controlled “Utopia”. This holographic presence of digital beings translates a discourse of care into a state that systemically removes citizen’s rights to participate in civil affairs.

24 http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/20/spain-protests-security-law-parliament

169

The Position of Literature

Forster and No Somos Delito exemplify how the analogico-digital apparatus is capable of translating critical knowledge through synaptogenesis into viewers as a transductive relationship between the individual and the collective technoculture.

Thus a techno-capital culture can be oriented towards a noetic noosphere. The position of literature serves to suspend short-circuited capitalism and initiate a transductive discourse of care that reverses mnemotechnological grammatization.

Vernor Vinge’s Rainbows End embodies the position of literature to speculate mnemotechnological grammatization of Augmented Reality. Although the cultural significance of AR remains minimal in 2015, big data and fast internet speed makes the near future ready for AR to become the next phase of User Interface after command line and Graphic User Interface (GUI).25 In 2011 the European Union has invested roughly € 9 billion on boosting “super-fast broadband” 26 internet speed. In their Augmented Reality: An Emerging Technologies Guide to AR, Gregory Kipper and Joseph Rampolla introduce one of the early innovators of AR technology, Chris

Grayon. He directs our attention to the fact that: “Through technology with digital memory, which went beyond our human capacity, it would give us the ability to recall a vast database of memory at a moment’s notice” (120; emphasis mine). In line with

Grayon, Tish Shute adds that “the future of AR is data-driven….[and] the augmented experience is all about situational awareness…” (118). It is crucial to note that the

25 Kipper and Rampolla show statistics of the trend and prediction of the growing usage of AR. In their account, “As of late 2011 mobile phone usage has reached 5.9 billion subscribers worldwide, that’s 87% of the current world population, and this trend shows no sign of slowing” (53). They prophesize that just as the other two dimensions of computing—command line and Graphic User Interface (GUI)—AR will become the third dimension computing because of the prevalent usage of mobile phone. 26 http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-15320628

170 ability to enlarge human capacity is to “recall” or access digital memory from a database that can be easily edited to the narrative of those in power and through which the long-termism can be curtailed. On the other hand, the digital being as code drift also benefits from the capability of humans to reposition themselves in the transductive network. Clearly, situational awareness is the important factor here.

There is relatively little discussion on the mutual impact between AR and literature.

However, medicine, military, entertainment, commerce, and art, among other disciplines and industries, have been incorporating this new technics into their future development. The position of literature in the digital area can be examined through the issues that emerge between literature and AR.

Vernor Vinge’s novel is one of the few cyberpunk novels that draw our attention to the speculative dimension of digital technologies, particularly to AR displays. AR means to the digital being a disruption of reality not in a symbolical sense, but literally because its embodiment of a three-dimensional hologram conveys higher degrees of verisimilitude than a two-dimensional image. In her “The Limited Capacity

Model of Mediated Message Processing,” Annie Lang examines how our attention and brain capacity is allocated to a certain piece of information. According to Lang,

“The initial step in the encoding process is the determination of which bits of information will be transformed into mental representations. This selection process is driven by both automatic (unintentional) and controlled (intentional) processes” (48).

Considering that one is critical, one will consciously select the mediated reality that matches one’s goal. Under the condition that speed culture prompts digital beings to be less mindful, automatic selection replaces controlled selection. Orientating

Response (OR) is instrumental in directing viewer’s attention to commercial products.

She discovers that when a person is exposed to novelty or signal stimuli, the brain creates OR that automatically redirects its attention to the source of information (52).

171

The implication of this research is that when one is confronted by reality and AR, one cannot always tell reality apart from AR. How the mental-representation is encoded into one’s brain is based on consciously and diplomatically selecting the mediated reality related to one’s goal and unconsciously and automatically tuning in to novel stimuli. This research suggests that by editing related cuts and edits, media producers can trigger viewer’s attention and OR to the mediated information and make viewers see it as reality. The digital being as flickering subject is constantly being elicited to trigger OR unconsciously as well as succumbed to the lure of the pleasure that speed brings. With the appropriate cues, AR is a mind candy that not only brings entertainment but also tricks viewers’ mind to recognize it as reality. If the digital being’s synapses are in synchronization with the transmission of the digital blood vessels, situational awareness is more easily to be switched on to distance the subject away from novel stimuli.

In the near future represented in Rainbows End, luddites are considered obsolete who are falling behind the cultural evolution. Vinge draws on the complex issues of

AR technology, including a political critique on cybernetic wars between China and the USA,27 an observation on people performing back-channeling frequently through

Short Message Service (SMS), surveillance,28 and speed-driven Just-In-Time-

Technology.29 The novel starts with a typical sci-fi motif where Alfred wants to save the world from being destroyed in the cybernetic war by installing a virus in the bio

27 The Great Powers are Euro-Indo and Sino-American. 28 Surveillance through big data on the internet is countered by Friends of Privacy that spread disinformation. 29 JITT, just in time technology is the shortest-circuit in the synapses that speed culture creates. The cognitive destruction of frequent short-circuited synapses results in a damage on human’s brain. This damage is exemplified in Alice Gu who is stuck under layers of JITT, “a prisoner in her own mind” (340).

172 laboratory. As the story unfolds, a dialogue is carried out between technology and literature, AR and reality, short-circuited and long-circuited synapses, and how tertiary memories carry the responsibility of taking care of the next generation. In

Vinge’s vision of the future, reality is a scarcity because every place is tagged by or layered with AR technologies. Ubiquitous mediation makes Glocalization possible as users are situated physically at home while juxtaposing hybrid geographic layers in a cybernetic network. Those who cannot master the wearable technologies will need to be re-educated in school. Vinge explores problems of a world that puts emphasis more on technology and less on the humanities. Juan Orozco and Robert Gu are two main characters who represent the generation gap between a teenager who is tech savvy but a “paraliterate” (148) and an old man who is a poet laureate. The term paraliterate is conjured up by Robert to describe people of Generation C30 who need keywords to access a broader set of knowledge or information. They have the skills to access the bank of tertiary memories with just a click, but lack of long-circuited synapses that trigger contemplation. Before Robert was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, he was a world-renowned poet who was as famous as William Shakespeare. He represents a generation that tends to depend on primary memories and savors long-circuited thought as a luxury. After he receives the Venn-Kurasawa treatment, he recovers from

30 Since there is enough bandwidth for us to connect to the internet and Internet of Things all the time, we are called Generation C. According to Gregory Kipper and Johseph Rampolla, “This generation was born after 1990 and has lived their adolescent years after 2000 have been labeled “The Connected Generation” or Generation C because they are continuously connecting, communicating, social networking, searching, and clicking. They all have mobile phones but tend to prefer sending text messages rather than talking with people on the phone. Many of their social interactions take place on the internet where they feel free to express their opinions and attitudes” (131). Generation C also has the mindset to embrace AR technologies. Kipper also mentions that video gaming can actually make learning more immersive and effect, in various realms, such as analyzing information and concentration.

173

Alzheimer’s disease but he has to re-remember everything. Advanced technology also makes the seventy-year-old Robert looks seventeen physically. Even though he looks like a teenager, he has to keep up with the advanced technology that has evolved during his big sleep and be re-educated in school to operate wearable or AR technologies.

When two generations clash, values from different cultural heritages are re- evaluated. This collision between long-circuited and short-circuited synapses, between luddites and digital natives, between slow culture and speed culture is encapsulated in a scene where Juan realizes for the first time that mere words can paint a magic world without fancy digital support. In the composition class Robert recites his poem and Juan is impressed and entrenched by the idea that simple words can convey more than the “touchy-feely” (42) AR displays that are installed in

Pyramid Hill, an interactive AR Disneyland. If AR is a design of experience, words simulate in the mind a better “experience.” The following scene describes Juan’s mental projection of a sublime moment evoked by Robert’s poem recitation:

Then he just ... talked. No special effects, no words scrolling through the

air. And it couldn’t really be a poem since his voice didn’t get all singsong.

Robert Gu just talked about the lawn that circled the school, the tiny

mowers that circled and circled across it. The smell of the grass, and how it

squeezed down moist in the morning. How the slope of the hills took

running feet to the creek brush that edged the property. It was what you saw

here every day -- at least when you weren’t using overlays to see

somewhere else.

And then Juan wasn’t really aware of the words anymore. He was seeing,

as intense as anything that ever came from his wearable. His mind floated

above the little valley, scooted up the creek bed, had almost reached the

174

foot of Pyramid Hill ... when suddenly Robert Gu stopped talking, and Juan

was dumped back into the reality of his place at the rear end of Ms.

Chumlig’s composition class. He sat for a few seconds, dazed. Words.

That’s all they were. But what they did was more than visuals. It was more

than haptics. There had even been the smell of the dry reeds along the

creekbed. (64; emphasis mine)

His recitation of the poem astonishes Juan as Generation C has considered the use of ubiquitous mediation a common practice and demeans those without wearables (AR) as second class citizens who need to be educated back to the social norm. Robert’s poem suspends the accelerated speed of Juan’s short-circuited synapses habitually intensified by wearable technologies. Even though the computing speed of wearable technologies is capable of calibrating AR scenery and transmitting VR senses through haptic technologies, literature has a magic power of intensifying experience and creates a moment of transcendental uplifting that is beyond the augmentation of reality. Juan does not have any idea of how words convey reality more powerfully than visual displays or any AR layers. “He was a little dazed by the strange form of virtual virtual reality that Robert Gu had created…., Juan Orozco had felt the awed silence. And he did that with words alone....” (65; emphasis original). Juan’s reaction indicates that he cannot help but being encapsulated by the allurement of long- circuited imagination that he experienced through Robert’s poem.

Robert is an emblem of a culture that still values the long-termism which is considered obsolete by a culture that feeds on acceleration and mediation. He embodies a heterogeneous knowledge in a society that deems acceleration a production of normative knowledge. Robert’s encounter with the world of ubiquitous computing serves as a critical perspective to our near future. In a society built upon ubiquitous computing and mediation, literature is a subversive critique of the fast

175 streamlining culture. It suspends speed writing and contests with industrial programming in a broader social scope. The library, in which the technology that propels long-circuited thought is stored, serves as a site of suspension to speed culture.

A project called Librareome is represented as a counter-discourse to fast digitization of printed books. Although Robert’s literary virtuality is a culture “shock” to Juan,

Robert himself is also confronted with speed shock. A bridge between these two cultures is initiated by Sharif the literature major who wants Robert’s opinion on his thesis. He alleviates Robert’s anxiety with technology by walking him through the

University of California, San Diego (UCSD) library where they bump into a demonstration. It is a conflict between Hacek and Sccoochi, the pro-digitization that supports fast-speed digitization and the anti-digitization of the library that wants to save the books from being shredded. Sharif considers Robert’s cooperation with

Librareome instead of taking sides with Hacek as a reflection on the position of literature and art in the technocratic society. He says to Robert: “ultimately what you do at UCSD seems to be very much a statement about the position of art and literature in the modern world” (196).

In the novel, the position of digitized and physical library is presented respectively by two belief systems. After the upheaval between Sccoochi and Hacek, the library is temporarily saved from book-shredding and the positive side-effect is that the conflict generates free publicity. The question is not whether digitization should be allowed but how digitization is executed and the speed of digitization.

Shredding and burning books is what Emperor Qing did in the Qing Dynasty to censor dangerous knowledge that posed a threat to the State. In the novel, the Chinese were considered to be experienced in digitization. Tommie told Robert that “the

Chinese were chewing up the British Museum and Library faster than we ever guessed. And the Chinese have years of experience in semi-nondestructive

176 digitization” (356). Digitization of tertiary memories pertains to the possibility of micro-editing of history and truth. As a farewell gift, Tommie gives Robert a flash disk that stores information of the entire collection of British Museum and Library, which is digitized by the Chinese Informagical Coalition. Tommie discloses to Robert:

“The data is all on-line, along with a lot of cross-analysis that the Chinese will be charging you extra for ….Leaving aside things that never got into a library, that’s essentially the record of humanity up through 2000. The whole pre-modern world”

(357). If Emperor Qing burned books to control the production of knowledge, the digital library as a mnemotechnology might be the modern way of changing the production of knowledge. Thomas leaves an ironic note on how digitization of tertiary memories would change the system of research and how industrialized programming can be used as a system of redacting knowledge involves political agendas: “So

Huertas is out of the shredding business, and the Chinese promise their followups [sic] will be even gentler than what they did to the British Library. Imagine soft pinky robot hands, patiently picking over all the libraries and museums of the world. They’ll be cross checking, scanning for annotations -- giving whole new generations of academic types like Zulfi Sharif something to hang their degrees on” (358). The cybernetic network that used to be amenities and augmentation of the digital being’s experience slowly takes charge of the production of knowledge. If academic knowledge production is going to be assimilated into the maneuver of Academic

Machine, then what is at stake is not only the issues of short-circuited knowledge, but also of quantification and calculation of knowledge production.

Hypertexts: Combining Hyperattention and Deep Attention

Print literature and electronic literature unfold stories distinctly. The position of electronic and digital literature incorporates both short-circuited synapses that shift

177 the reader’s attention when the reader clicks on a hyperlink and long-circuited synapses that contemplate on the overall motif of a piece of electronic literature.

Extending Hayles’s view on combining hyperattention with deep attention, electronic literature embodies the third mode of analogico-digital apparatus. I would like to close this chapter with an electronic literary work, “” (2003/4) created by Reiner

Strasser in collaboration with M.D. Coverley (see fig. 6). The work draws on the theme of Alzheimer’s disease, and deals with issues related to forms of literature, loss of memory, and history.

Fig. 6. A reflection on memories from Reiner Strasser and M.D. Coverley;

Eliterature.org; Web; 16 July 2015.

Electronic literature is an appropriate example of analyzing the possibility of analogical-digital devices and the development of literature. Just like Rainbows End in which Robert Gu loses his memory due to Alzheimer’s disease, this electronic literary work too demonstrates how the retrieval of sporadic, fragmented, and difficult-to-grab-hold-of memories might work. Strasser and Coverley’s work though,

178 other than Vinge’s, is designed with graphic interfaces and audio recordings, reminiscent of Stiegler’s remark that the digital being suffers from a mass memory loss due to overdependence on digital memories. Thus, digital beings are portrayed as paraliterate, with memories that can only be triggered and recollected after accessing tertiary memory banks in the forms of electronic note-taking applications. A discourse of care is demonstrated through this analogocial-digital work that points the attention to the crisis of short-termism.

It is a visual poem that poses the question of memory loss both personally and culturally. If this clicking on the webpage is analogical to the act of retrieving information from the brain, each click illustrates how digital beings with an oblivious tendency, short-circuited synapses, and hyperattention cope with the process of retrieving memories and history. The further digital beings are heading for a mass oblivion, the more they need to cultivate a discourse of slowness, to suspend the acceleration, and hit pause for a humanist vibe. The current cognitive science accelerates the culture of obsolescence by strengthening the short-circuited synapses, which then leads to short-termism of production, and ultimately results in mass production of waste and disregard of ecological system. A culture of amnesia has to be countered through a suspension and a discourse of care that diverts the short attention to deep meditation. This artwork demonstrates how memories work and what patients with Alzeheimer’s disease, amnesia, and dementia experience. The artwork also traces back to the quintessential issue of collective memory: “We build our history thru the experience of our life. Do we loose [sic] our history when we loose [sic] our memory?” Digital beings document tertiary memories to prove that they were there, but paradoxically it is the act of repetitively saving a vast amount of tertiary memories that produces cultural amnesia and render them not being there.

179

Conclusion

The skeptical comments on the impact of vision and speed generated by digital technologies do not aspire to create fear or prevent humans from using technologies that are more or less attached to or supplementing our beings. On the contrary, pointing out the problematic dimensions of using technologies and the current development of digital technologies will not only clarify the advantages and disadvantages but also filter out unnecessary concerns in operating technological gadgets. Specifically, this dissertation yearns to understand what we have lost in pursuing accelerated speed and to reflect upon the transductive and transformative aspects of speed in improving our life.

If Utopia projects quietude and a sense of happiness in our mind, the way to utopia in our contemporary society is to achieve it by means of switching on the motor of being. The motor, without affinity to productivity, an accomplice of progress, is appropriated to activate inert beings to yearn for happiness. In a hyper- industrialized society, happiness is less a matter of having the leisure of choosing from options than of narrowing down choices and concentrating on the one choice. A late capitalist society has provided us with ostensible possibilities while leaving us no will to decide what to do. A new paradigm of vision and speed generated out of analogico-digital practices based on care must go beyond corporate constraints, open up not only new ways of surviving, but also of inhabiting late capitalist society in ease.

Spectacular visuals and accelerated speed are alluring and seductive, coded as they are in our biological genes, yet we are capable of cultivating and encoding a discourse of care into our cybernetic genes that fix and debug the damages made by ourselves. The spectacle of the society inquires into the mechanism of vision machine in the cyber society. The politics of real-time aims to divert people’s attention from

180 the presence to the tele-presence. Vision and speed seem to project and produce a conceptual space where our nuclear waste of psychological issues is buried.

Cyberspace is a space of phantoms where a collective fantasy lives. The flight of flesh is represented in the fantasy, which ultimately is about the escape of mortality.

Transcendence in a digital society is at work with a shift of consciousness through a change of attitude. This attitude, however, needs to be constantly and systematically reinforced in order to form a grammatical force that encodes into the global cybernetic network. The ontological shift of the digital being then needs to begin from reverse-engineering of an industrialized programming. This is the first step of making the poison of machine vision and speed into the cure of humanity.

The discourse of care is to bring awareness into people who do “not give a damn,” as Stiegler mentions in his Taking Care of the Youth and the Generation. Admittedly, there is more worry than hope in the discourse and the intensity of care might not be equal to that of the destruction. However, the intention to re-orient the public’s direction to the crisis where the short-termism of techno-capitalism has been taking over the long-termism of humanities is a first step to a more powerful, pervasive, and sustainable care. The transductive discourse of care in my dissertation largely focuses on a structural criticism and especially on the infrastructure of industrialized programming. Other than the digital practices and discourse of care that are mentioned in the dissertation, currently there emerge many more programs of care in the form of computer software and smartphone applications. Based in France, the

“Institute for Research and Innovation” (IRI) in cooperation with academic institutions, research facilities, and media companies in Barcelona, London, Tokyo and Brazil, has developed software that encourages the public to participate in and comment on current social affairs. The civilians are capable of inspecting the centralized narrative of mediatization and transforming the perspective of the

181 mediated source through Lignes de temps, eGonomy, CoMent, and MétaData player that engage the public to comment on films, videos, photos, and texts that normally do not include alternative train of thoughts. By means of using the speculative software, digital citizens become part of the socio-political transductive discourse. The vision can be shifted outwardly by the visual images human beings perceive as well as transformed by synapses of the brain that are configured by the software that they use daily. Vision not only pertains to the images we perceive, but also what we envision in the mind for the future. Therefore, vision carries the means of telling the story of the present and gives birth to the brain child of our mind. Due to the scope of the dissertation, the transductive discourse did not encompass the dimension of software applications. Vision and speed of the cyberpunk literature and cyberculture practices are the center of this dissertation; in the immediate future, they will be a stronghold of my centrifugal criticism on software and applications of care.

182

Works Cited

Ames, Roger T. “Nietzsche’s ‘Will to Power and Chinese ‘Virtuality.’” Nietzsche and

Asian Thought. Ed. Graham Parkes. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991. 130-50.

Print.

Apter, Emily. “On Oneworldedness: Or Paranoia as a World System.” American

Literary History 18.2 (2006): 365-89.

Arendt, Hannath. Crises of the Republic. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,

1972. Print.

Asekhauno, Afe. Anthony and Valentine Ananafe. Inagbor. “Magic, Witchcraft, and

Sorcery in Warfare: The Experience of the Etsako of Nigeria.” Focus on

Nigeria: Literature and Culture. Ed. Gorden Collier. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012.

245-56. Print.

Ash, James. “Attention, Videogames and the Retentional Economies of Affective

Amplification.” Theory, Culture, & Society 29.6 (2012): 3-26.

Berlant, Lauren. “Intuitionists: History and the Affective Event.” American Literary

History 20.4 (2008): 845-60.

Black Belt. “systema.” blackbeltmag.com. Web 7 January 2016

Borges, Jorg Luis. “An Invitation.” Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Stories.

By William Gibson. Ed. Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby. New York: New

Directions, 2007. 3-18. ix-xxiii. Print.

Chaliand, Gérard, and Arnaud Blin. The History of Terrorism from Antiquity to Al

Qaeda. Trans. Edward Schneider, Kathryn Pulver, and Jesse Browner. Berkeley:

U of California P, 2007. Print.

Collinson, Diané, Kathryn Plant, and Robert Willinson. “Indian Philosophy.” Fifty

183

Eastern Thinkers. London: Routledge, 2000. 63-177. Print.

Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. New

York: Zone, 1994. Print.

Derrida, Jacques. “This Strange Institution Called Literature.” Acts of Literature. New

York: Routledge, 1992. 33-75. Print.

Dyens, Ollivier. “The Emotion of Cyberspace: Art and Cyber-Ecology.” Leonardo

27.4 (1997): 327-33. Print.

“escape velocity, n.1.” OED Online. September 2013. Oxford UP. 29 October 2013

Economist Intelligence Unit. “The Challenge of Speed: Driving Slow in the Fast

Lane.” The Economist. Web 22 October 2015

speed-0/fullreport>.

Fink, Bruce. A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Theory and

Technique. New York: Harvard UP, 1999. Print.

Forster, Benjamin. “A Written Perspective.” An Online Exhibition of the

ACMSIGGRAPH: Digital Arts Community. Web. 16 July 2015

Frankfort, H., and H. A. “Myth and Reality.” The Intellectual Speculative Thought in

the Ancient Near East. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1964. 3-27. Print.

Gardiner, Michael E. Critiques of Everyday Life. New York: Rutledge, 2000. Print.

Gane, Nicolas. “When We Have Never Been Human, What Is To Be Done?” Theory,

Culture & Society 23 (2006): 135-58.

Gibson, William. Pattern Recognition. New York: Berkley, 2003. Print.

---. Neuromancer. New York: Ace Science Fiction, 1984. Print.

---. Spook Country. New York: Berkley, 2007. Print.

184

---. Zero History. New York: Berkley, 2011. Print.

Goodstein, S. Elizabeth. “Martin Heidegger’s Existential Grammar of Boredom.”

Experience Without Qualities: Boredom and Modernity. Stanford: Stanford UP,

2005. 281-333. Print.

Hayles, Katherine. “Hyper and Deep Attention: The Generational Divide in Cognitive

Modes.” Profession (2007): 187–99.

Jackson, Rosemary. Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion. London: Methuen, 1981.

Print.

Jameson, Fredric. “On Interpretation: Literature as a Socially Symbolic Act.” The

Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. New York:

Cornell UP, 1981. 17-102. Print.

---. “Varieties of the Utopian.” Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called

Utopia and Other Science Fictions. New York: Verso, 2005.1-9. Print.

Johnston, John. “The Intuitionist and Pattern Recognition: A Response to Lauren

Berlant.” American Literary History 20.4 (2008): 861-69.

Kipper, Gregory and Joseph Rampolla. Augmented Reality: An Emerging

Technologies Guide to AR. New York, Syngress, 2013.Print.

Knorr, Alexander. “Writing Culture and Cyberpunk.” Xirdalium. Web. 22 October

2015 .

Kroker, Arthur. “Code Drift.” Code Drift: Essays in Critical Digital Studies. Ed.

Arthur and Marilouise Kroker. CTheory.net. Web. 16 July

2015.

---. The Will to Technology and the Culture of Nihilism: Heidegger, Marx, and

Nietzsche. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2004. Print.

Lang, Annie. “The Limited Capacity Model of Mediated Message Processing.”

Journal of Communication 56 (2006): 57-80.

185

Link, Alex. “Global War, Global Capital, and the Work of Art in William Gibson’s

Pattern Recognition.” Contemporary Literature 49.2 (2008): 209-31.

Marin, Louis. Utopics: The Semiological Play of Textual Spaces. Trans. Robert A.

Vollrath. New York: Humanity, 1984. Print.

Matrix, Sidneyeve. “Rewind, Remix, Rewrite: Digital and Virtual Memory in

Cyberpunk Cinema.” Save As…Digital Memories. Ed Joanne Garde-Hansen,

Andrew Hoskins and Anna Reading. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. 60-

76.

McCaffery, Larry. “An Interview with William Gibson.” Storming the Reality Studios.

Ed. Larry McCaffery. London: Duke UP, 1991. 263-85. Print.

Ngai, Sianne. “Stuplimity: Shock and Boredom in Twentieth-Century Aesthetics.”

Postmodern Culture 10.2 (2000): n.pag. Web. 22 June 2015.

Nosomos Delito. “Holograms for Freedom.” Online Video Clip. Youtube. Youtube,

24 Apr. 2015. Web. 28 Dec. 2015.

O’Gorman, Marcel. “Bernard Stiegler’s Pharmacy: A Conversation.” Configurations

18.3 (2010): 459-76.

Piper, Arthur and Katherine Hayles. “How We Became Posthuman: Ten Years On.”

Paragraph 33.3 (2010): 318-323.

Pronin, Emily, Elana Jacobs, and Daniel M. Wegner. “Psychological Effects of

Thought Acceleration.” Emotion 8 (2008): 597-612.

Roesner, Franziska, Tadayoshi Kohno, and David Molnar. “Security and Privacy for

Augmented Reality Systems.” Communications of the ACM 57.4 (2014): 88-96.

Sanchez, Justin. “Restoring Active Memory.” Defense Advanced Research Projects

Agency. Web. 12 August 2015 < http://www.darpa.mil/program/restoring-

active-memory>.

Stephenson, Neal. Snow Crash. New York: Bantam Spectra, 1992. Print.

186

Stiegler, Bernard. Technics and Time I: The Fault of Epimetheus. Trans. Richard

Beardsworth and George Collins. New York: Stanford UP, 1998. Print.

---. Technics and Time II: Disorientation. Trans. Stephen Barker. New York: Stanford

UP, 2009. Print.

---. Taking Care of Youth and the Generations. Trans. The Board of Trustees of the

Leland Stanford Junior University. New York: Stanford UP, 2010. Print.

---. “Interobjectivity and Transindividuation.” Onlineopen.org. Web. 16 July 2015

Strasser, Reiner, and M.D. Coverley. “ii -- in the white darkness: about [the fragility

of] memory.” Eliterature.org. Web. 16 July 2015

rkness/ii03.html>. Townshend, Charles. Terrorism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002.

Print.

Vanderbilt, Tom. “The Pleasure and Pain of Speed.” Nautilus 9 (2013). Web. 8

January 2016 .

Vaccari, Andrés, and Belinda Barnet. “Prolegomena to a Future Robot History:

Stiegler, Epiphylogenesis and Technical Evolution.” 17 (2009) Transformations:

n.pag. Web. 22 June 2015.

Vinge, Vernor. Rainbows End. New York: Tor, 2006. Print.

---. “The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era.”

The Vision 21 Symposium on Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering in the

Era of Cyberspace.Ohio, U.S., 30-31 March 1993. Web. 19 Jan. 2016.

Virilio, Paul. The Art of the Motor. Trans. Julie Rose. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P,

187

1998. Print.

---. The Information Bomb. Trans. Chris Turner. London: Verso, 2000. Print.

---. The Politics of the Very Worst. New York: Semiotext(e), 1999. Print.

---. The Aesthetics of Disappearance. Trans. Phil Beitchman. New York:

Semiotext(e), 2009. Print.

Wahl, Wendy. “Bodies and Technologies: Dora, Neuromancer, and Strategies of

Resistance.” Postmodern Culture 3.2(1993): n. pag. Web. 25 May 2015.

Wallace-Wells, David . “William Gibson.” Paris Review 197 (2011): n. pag. Web.

28 Oct. 2013.

fiction-no-211-william-gibson>. Wegner, Phillip E. “Recognizing the Patterns.” New Literary History 38.1 (2007):

183-200.

“Wikipedia: Weltschmerz.” Wikipedia.com. Wikipedia. 15 Dec. 2015. Web. 7 Jan.

2016.

Žižek, Slavoj. The Plague of Fantasies. New York: Verso, 1997. Print.

---. “The Interpassive Subject.” The Symptom 3 (2002). Lacan.com.Web. 5 January

2011. .

---. “Che Vuoi?”Jacques Lacan :Critical Evaluations of Cultural Theory . London:

Routledge, 2003. 338-75. Print.

---. “The Real of Sexual Difference.” Interrogating the Real. Ed. Rex Butler and Scott

Stephens. New York: Continuum, 2006. 304-27. Print.

---. “Between Symbolic and Fantasmatic Spectre.” Interrogating the Real. Ed. Rex

Butler and Scott Stephens. New York: Continuum, 2006. 249-70. Print.

---. “The Interpassive Subject: Lacan Turns a Prayer Wheel.” How to Read Lacan.

New York: Norton, 2007. 22-39. Print.

188

Index

102, 103, 106, 107, 111, 112, 113, 115, 116, A 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 127, analogico-digital, iii, iv, 1, 2, 3, 6, 7, 13, 15, 129, 131, 132, 134, 135, 137, 138, 139, 140, 155, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 167, 169, 170, 144, 145, 146, 148, 149, 151, 153, 155, 156, 178, 181 157, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 167, 168, AR, 12, 67, 69, 70, 73, 74, 76, 78, 83, 87, 89, 169, 170, 171, 174, 177, 178, 179, 181, 182 92, 93, 94, 96, 97, 98, 103, 105, 111, 160, dromosphere, 27, 32, 33, 37, 39, 41, 42, 43, 44 168, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 186 F Augmented Reality, 10, 12, 13, 67, 76, 93, 94, 96, 108, 111, 124, 155, 160, 169, 170, 186, fantasy, iii, 1, 2, 9, 49, 51, 52, 53, 54, 59, 60, 187 61, 62, 63, 65, 80, 93, 97, 182 fatigue, 13, 148, 155 B G boredom, iii, 1, 3, 6, 10, 37, 99, 100, 101, 103, 104, 105, 111, 114, 118, 130, 131, 134, 148 Gibson, William, iii, iv, 1, 2, 5, 6, 9, 10, 16, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 32, 33, 38, 40, 42, 43, 46, 47, C 48, 51, 59, 63, 64, 65, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 75, capitalism, 4, 11, 12, 14, 20, 24, 30, 44, 47, 49, 102, 104, 105, 112, 114, 118, 124, 127, 128, 50, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 62, 63, 65, 104, 129, 147, 184, 185, 186, 187, 189 105, 107, 112, 114, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, H 128, 129, 133, 134, 135, 141, 146, 150, 155, 156, 159, 162, 167, 170, 182 Hayles, Katherine, 5, 46, 135, 136, 142, 165, care, 3, 7, 12, 13, 15, 83, 118, 135, 137, 138, 178, 186, 187 140, 144, 153, 155, 157, 158, 160, 162, 165, Heidegger, Martin, 11, 101, 103, 105, 106, 114, 167, 169, 170, 173, 179, 181, 182 115, 116, 118, 131, 161, 185, 186 commodity fetish, 9, 47, 56, 57, 61 I cyberculture, iii, iv, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 10, 11, interpassive, 9, 10, 47, 48, 50, 53, 54, 55, 56, 13, 14, 80, 100, 103, 104, 131, 137, 143, 57, 61, 68, 69, 70, 79, 80, 96, 98, 99, 100, 155, 156, 183 108 cyberpunk, iii, iv, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 14, 27, 29, 32, 33, 100, 109, 112, 113, 127, 128, J 129, 138, 140, 171, 183, 186 Jackson, Rosemary, 8, 17, 18, 19, 21, 186 D K Debord, Guy, iii, 5, 6, 8, 17, 18, 19, 22, 23, 25, Kroker, Arthur, 6, 10, 100, 103, 105, 106, 112, 26, 51, 56, 57, 184 113, 114, 115, 117, 118, 119, 120, 122, 123, digital, iii, iv, 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 124, 126, 127, 131, 133, 161, 168, 186 13, 15, 16, 27, 69, 71, 72, 74, 80, 100, 101,

189

M R

Marx, Karl, 11, 103, 105, 109, 119, 120, 186 Rainbows End, 2, 12, 14, 155, 170, 172, 178, mediatization, iii, 1, 2, 3, 17, 22, 26, 50, 62, 65, 188 100, 182 real time, 31, 39, 96 memories, 9, 13, 14, 25, 26, 32, 37, 38, 39, 40, reverse engineer, 117 42, 44, 45, 47, 50, 51, 53, 59, 60, 66, 70, 80, S 82, 87, 91, 92, 95, 96, 100, 111, 112, 117, slow, 11, 130, 138, 148, 174 128, 138, 139, 141, 143, 144, 145, 146, 149, speed, iii, iv, 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 11, 13, 14, 150, 152, 153, 155, 158, 162, 167, 173, 177, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 179 40, 41, 44, 46, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 72, 76, 80, metaphysics, iv, 2, 10, 103, 105, 115, 117, 118, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 120, 151 95, 96, 99, 100, 103, 111, 112, 118, 128, military, 3, 10, 12, 32, 42, 44, 68, 89, 93, 94, 129, 135, 138, 139, 141, 142, 143, 144, 147, 105, 113, 129, 143, 144, 151, 171 148, 151, 152, 153, 155, 156, 157, 160, 170, N 171, 172, 174, 175, 176, 181, 183, 185, 188 Nagarjuna, 11, 104, 105, 130, 132, 134, 161 Spook Country, 2, 10, 66, 67, 69, 70, 71, 74, Neuromancer, 2, 27, 30, 34, 36, 37, 41, 44, 76, 79, 89, 97, 102, 104, 105, 109, 114, 128, 124, 185, 189 185 Nietzsche, Friedrich11, 103, 105, 106, 115, Stiegler, Bernard, iii, 5, 6, 7, 135, 137, 139, 124, 125, 126, 127, 133, 184, 186 149, 150, 152, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, nihilism, 11, 101, 103, 105, 115, 127, 131, 132, 162, 163, 164, 165, 179, 182, 187, 188 133, 134 surveillance, iii, 1, 3, 9, 43, 66, 67, 68, 70, 71, 73, 74, 76, 78, 79, 83, 89, 93, 98, 99, 112, O 123, 125, 151, 172 obsolescence, 14, 135, 143, 146, 152, 155, 159, synapses, iii, iv, 1, 3, 11, 13, 135, 137, 138, 179 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 146, 147, 149, 150, P 152, 153, 155, 157, 160, 163, 165, 167, 172, 173, 174, 175, 178, 179, 183 Pattern Recognition, 2, 10, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 22, 24, 26, 46, 48, 49, 50, 52, 54, 55, 56, 57, T 58, 59, 60, 63, 69, 70, 121, 185, 186 transcendence, iii, 1, 9, 10, 100, 103, 104, 105, picnoleptic, 9, 10, 30, 31, 68, 69, 70, 73, 79, 80, 115, 116, 125, 131 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 89, 93, 95, 97, transductive, 7, 12, 165, 167, 170, 181, 182 103, 108 U programming, iv, 3, 4, 7, 11, 13, 132, 135, 138, 139, 140, 141, 145, 147, 149, 150, 155, 158, ubiquitous computing, iv, 3, 9, 10, 69, 72, 135, 166, 167, 176, 177, 182 175 utopia, 9, 14, 17, 19, 27, 28, 31, 32, 51, 123,

190

181 123, 149, 151, 188 utopian, 4, 9, 26, 47, 49, 51, 61, 64, 68, 71, 92, vision, iii, iv, 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 13, 14, 23, 62, 96, 124, 131, 132, 136, 158, 161 100, 123, 135, 147, 155, 157, 167, 173, 181, 183, 185 V Z Vinge, Vernor, iii, iv, 1, 2, 6, 12, 14, 155, 170, 171, 172, 179, 188 Zero History, 2, 102, 104, 105, 118, 121, 129, Virilio, Paul, iii, 1, 5, 6, 7, 9, 22, 30, 31, 33, 41, 185 62, 68, 69, 72, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, Žižek, Slavoj, 48, 50, 52, 54, 56, 57, 60, 61, 68, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 96, 98, 99, 111, 117, 69, 80, 85, 99, 189

191