Fractal Realism: the Folding Together of Literature, Technical Media, and Cognition in the Twentieth Century

UCLA UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Fractal Realism: The Folding Together of Literature, Technical Media, and Cognition in the Twentieth Century Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7sg5n5rp Author Pulizzi, James Publication Date 2012 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Fractal Realism The Folding Together of Literature, Technical Media, and Cognition in the Twentieth Century A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in English by James John Pulizzi 2012 © Copyright by James J. Pulizzi 2012 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Fractal Realism • The Folding Together of Literature, Technical Media, and Cognition in the Twentieth Century by James John Pulizzi Doctor of Philosophy in English Literature University of California, Los Angeles 2012 Professor N. Katherine Hayles (co-chair) Professor Kenneth Reinhard (co-chair) Media theorists as far back as Marshall McLuhan and as recent as Friedrich Kittler and Jonathan Crary have asserted that since the photograph’s and gramo- phone’s invention in the nineteenth century, technical apparatuses have increas- ingly come to extend and simulate the humans senses. My dissertation argues that the convergence of these technical media with automated technical apparatuses begins a recursive cycle. The technical apparatus encodes itself through various technical media, and as a result, produces new technical media. This cycle iii of encoding and re-encoding is cognitive, and constitutes what I call a nonhuman cognitive system. I trace this evolution of this nonhuman cognition from early cybernetic devices like Vannevar Bush’s Differential Analyzer to the contemporary digital computer. This evolution of technical bodies is still closely intertwined with human ones, because the technical media enabling the nonhuman cognition’s evolution also encode images, sounds, and narratives for human cognitions. The so-called realism that technical media enable (i.e., a greater degree of verisimilitude to what humans actually see, hear, feel, etc.) is actually what I call fractal realism. It is fractal because humans and nonhumans use different cognitive schemes for mediating or encoding their reality, and so fracture their world as both cognitions work on it. It is fractal as well, because the nonhuman cognitions rely on statistical measures rather than narrative chains of cause-and-effect to order their encod- ings, just as fractal sets are defined by their statistical self-similarity. Under fractal realism, mediation is not a means of conveying information between parties but rather the conversion of one medium into the pattern of another medium. I argue that we understand mediation as, what Gilbert Simondon calls, a transductive process. Given the tight link of cognition and mediation, I parallel the account of the nonhuman cognition’s evolution with an examination of how its statistical mode infiltrates and affects media as humans understand them. We can then seefrac- tal realism as a new genre that cuts across realism and postmodernist literature and cinema. Some of the works considered include Joseph McElroy’s Plus (1977), Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up iv (1966), and Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000). v The dissertation of James John Pulizzi is approved. Rita Raley Mark Seltzer Kenneth Reinhard, Committee Co-Chair N. Katherine Hayles, Committee Co-Chair University of California, Los Angeles 2012 vi Contents Contents vii 1 Introduction 1 1.1 Narrating and Mediating the Nonhuman Cognition . 10 2 Nonhuman Signals 16 2.1 World as Signal . 25 2.2 Transductive Media Theory . 35 3 Bio-Technical Cognition 56 3.1 Escape Velocity . 61 3.2 Media Matter . 76 3.3 Rewiring the Brain . 83 4 The Nonhuman Cognitive Mode 97 4.1 Narrative as a Transductive Process . 101 4.2 The Grand Illusion . 113 4.3 Flimic Space and Time . 127 vii 5 The Media of Self Modiﬁcation 135 5.1 From Space to Surface to Dust . 143 5.2 The Invisible Film . 151 5.3 Recursions of Text and Image . 163 6 Conclusion 181 A Hello World Code 190 A.1 Python . 190 A.2 Java . 190 A.3 C++ . 191 A.4 x86_64 Assembly code . 191 A.5 Hexdump . 192 A.6 A Word on CPU Operation . 193 A.7 Processor Registers . 195 Bibliography 196 viii Acknowledgements This project—before I was ever aware of its full scope and implications—began as an independent study I undertook with N. Katherine Hayles on artificial intelligence and narrative. My readings introduced me to a world of philosophical and scientific inquiry that combined my computational and philosophical interests in ways I might not have discovered otherwise. I must thank Kate and Ken Reinhard for being so generous intellectually and personally throughout this project. Their mutual desire to use daunting intellectual questions as an opportunity to expand rather than curtail the scope of their work has been an inspiration for me. They have been exemplary advisors and friends. I have also benefited immensely from Rita Raley’s careful and incisive reading of these chapters. Despite her distance up the California coast, she has been a constant, telematic presence, and a reminder of the exciting work that remains to be done in media theory. Mark Seltzer’s attention and invigorating skepticism have shaped this work in more way than he knows—it was during his seminar on observation and modernity that I first encountered systems theory and anew way of reading literature. Michael North has always been generous with his time and thoughts on all matters cybernetic, technological, and literary. ix Gianpiero Doebler, Kate Marshall, Brendan O’Kelly, Donal Harris, and Sam See have left their mark on every chapter and made Los Angeles a wonderful place to live. Despite being a scholar of Italian poetry of the 1200s, Gianpiero has endured my preoccupation with nonhumans, technology, and cybernetics. Kate Marshall has been a particularly helpful reader and critic, given our mutual interest in systems theory, strange things, and the novel. My thanks to those colleagues who participated in the Americanist Research Colloquium at which I presented a chapter of this work. Their diverse perspectives reminded me of the world beyond the philosophical and technological. Participants in the slsa, acla, and Nonhuman Turn conferences have also helped shape this project. To Mark Mentovai, software engineer extraordinaire, my family, and friends. x VITA Education 2010 cphil, English University of California, Los Angeles 2009 ma, English University of California, Los Angeles 2003 ba, summa cum laude Columbia University (Columbia College) Publications with N. Katherine Hayles, “Narrating Consciousness,” History of the Human Sci- ences 23.3 (2010): 131–148. “Liquid Ontology,” American Book Review 31.6 (2010): 9–10. “Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Fiction,” Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary <http://newhorizons.eliterature.org>, 2007. Presentations “Non-Narrative for Nonhumans,” The Nonhuman Turn, Milwaukee, May 3–5, 2012. “Statistical Aesthetics: Art Objects from Digital Code,” Post 45, Cleveland, April 29 – May 1, 2011. “Posthuman Things/Objects,” American Comparative Literature Association, “World Literature, Comparative Literature,” Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, March 31 – April 3, 2011. xi “Posthumanism or Postmodernism,” Modernist Studies Association 12, “Net- works,” Victo- ria, British Columbia, Canada, November 11–14, 2010. “Catch(Phrase),” E-Criticism Poster Session, Modern Language Association, San Francisco, December 27–30, 2008. “Narrating Consciousness,” 22nd Annual Meeting of the Society for Literature, Science and the Arts, “Reiteration,” Charlotte, North Carolina, November 13–16, 2008. xii Chapter 1 Introduction [A] new consciousness is coming into being. To express and transmit itself, it has developed codes that are not alphanumeric and has rec- ognized the gesture of writing as an absurd act and something from which to be free. Flusser, Does Writing Have a Future? 95 Software engineers start their education by learning to make the computer print the exclamation “Hello World!” to the terminal (usually a screen). This greeting, however, is an empty phrase, because as Flusser notices in the above quotation, the nonhuman cognition that produces the letters operates via codes that are not alphanumeric, that do not belong to the spoken language humans have transformed into written marks, or ciphers. This nonhuman cognition’s defining characteristic is then how it enciphers and encodes other materials—a process that implies, as we will see, a specific circuit of bodies and technologies 1 James J. Pulizzi (or technological bodies, if we prefer to continue thinking of bodies as only biolog- ical). The enciphering and encoding circuit specific to human cognition has been (at least for several thousand years) the transformation of speech into marks on a surface, which requires a system of techniques and bodies that we group under the general heading writing. Writing techniques as humans know and use them supposedly transform spoken language into patterns on a medium, which for the phonetic alphabet in Europe would be letters on a flat surface (either stone or processed plant matter). The word writing like its Greek counterpart γράφω originally meant to scratch, incise, and figuratively to draw or paint.1 The cavities on the inscriptional

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