Posting on Behalf of Andrew

A speech with magical force. Nowadays, people don’t believe in these kinds of things. Except in the Metaverse, that is, where magic is possible. The Metaverse is a fictional structure made out of code. And code is just a form of speech – the form that computers understand. The Metaverse in its entirety could be considered a single vast nam-shub, enacting itself on L. Bob Rife’s fiber-optic network.” (Ch. 27)

 

This quote echoes Galloway’s statement that “code is the only language that is executable” (165). Executable speech – speech that does what it says – can be likened to incantations, which form a “meta-layer” (a Metaverse) around the purely written language. Castells’ concept of “real virtuality” similarly emphasizes code’s uniqueness in the scheme of human communication systems. People’s “symbolic existence” – what Peirce would call the function of written language – is not communicated as experience but becomes the experience itself (373). We may also recall Guillory’s definition of code (writ large) as the “cheat of words,” where only the medium is visible (339) – in other words, where the message disappears into the medium, and the medium becomes the only thing experienced.

But the novel, in comparing Metaverse code to Sumerian “nam-shub,” seems to emphasize the continuity between code and “real” historical languages over their difference. Like the “Infocalypse” of Babel, the Metaverse falls prey to a “neurolinguistic” virus that crashes the central nervous systems of users. Through the “real virtuality” of code, the virus affects both the computer and the human body (as seen with Da5id), both of which are implicated in a ‘magical’ world where written code (i.e. on the Brandy’s scroll) is executed as real speech acts. The speech of code takes on the physical aspect of contact and contagion.

Importantly, the novel does not portray the pre-infected Metaverse as a utopia where code unifies all agents with a common comprehensible tongue. The Metaverse operates on a fiber-optic network run by L. Bob Rife, who is interested primarily in privatizing and monopolizing telecommunication information flows. Rife is a religious charlatan, upholding the “miracle of [common] tongues” in order to sanitize his exploitation of cheap labor. Religion seems to occupy a place of ambivalence in the novel: it can be both a “virus” of incomprehensibility (the Pentecost in Acts) and a cleansing force (the medically-minded theodicy of the Essenes). Accounting for Galloway’s portrait of the hacker as anti-commercial, pro-protocalist “freedom fighter,” it is unclear to me at this point who the “enemy” is, and whether that enemy is the Snow Crash virus itself (decentralized and distributed) or a centralized entity that controls it.

One Reply to “Posting on Behalf of Andrew”

  1. First off, I’d like to thank Andrew for getting us all started this semester. Your reading of the Metaverse as an instantiation of Guillory’s idea that the message can collapse into the medium, leaving us less with content and more with experience is a really great way, I think, to start bringing the readings together, especially by letting us think of the Metaverse (and language), in novels and otherwise, as technologies themselves, not just objects of study (both media and message). You also provide us a great way to start thinking theoretically about language itself as a protocol, and as anyone who’s spent any time working with Novels in and around Duke, or Russell, will tell you, Galloway’s thinking through of protocol in lots of different forms is very much in the air. I agree with your assessment that if we are to take hackers as a sort of “freedom fighter,” the people or entities they’re fighting against do seem pretty fuzzy. A perfunctory response here that I would posit is that there really isn’t a nameable “enemy;” rather that the hacker ethos that emerges within protocol just sort of implies that there is an enemy, but it’s diffuse and fictionalized to such a point that it’s almost entirely impossible to pin down, even if we can gesture angrily at things like “global neoliberal capitalism” and “fascism” and the “Deep State,” depending on what corner or the internet you’re on. Protocol doesn’t care so much for what is “true” as “what we’ve been trained to intuitively think and do,” so maybe that’s an angle that could be useful if we’re looking for ways to move past protocological thinking.

    But we see the same fuzziness and fictionality introduced into the system by protocol reflected in the fuzziness in generic definitions in whatever we’re calling “contemporary literary fiction.” The first 3 pages of Castells’s prologue gives a neat summary of why nothing makes any sense at all anymore, arguing that individual identity is basically all that’s left: “[I[dentity is becoming the main, and sometimes the only, source or meaning in a historical period characterized by widespread destructuring of organizations, delegitimation of institutions, fading away of major social movements, and ephemeral expressions.” If nothing makes sense, then all we can rely on is the self, leaving us in the position of being forced to admit that “Our societies are increasingly structured around a bipolar opposition between the Net and the Self.” (3)

    Castells is documenting a massive epistemological shift on a global scale, but we can see some smaller, specific ramifications of the Net Society that are playing out on the level of genre in literary fiction. If we can think of language itself as a series of interrelated protocols, surely we can think of traditional definitions of genre the same way. This is a huge debate, and I’m not trying to reignite the Canon Wars here, but I think this notion is brought into keen relief by pairing [i]Snow Crash[/i] with Galloway, but also with Castells. The world that has been destroyed en route to the net society resembles, we’re supposed to assume, the inside of a Balzac novel, where social and cultural reproduction clip along at a nice, leisurely Althusserian pace. But instead of that, within the net society, we are forced into the back of a heavily armed technofuturist pizza delivery car which has samurai swords in it for some reason and nothing makes sense and everything is blowing up. But, while this is insane, it also seems, in a paradoxical way, to be staging a social and cultural reproduction of the idea that society and culture no longer function in the way we traditionally defined them. Technofuturist sci-fi, with its protocological structures and indebtedness to understandings of networks as ways of thinking and existing rather than as objects of study, is perhaps even closer to the way readers experience the world now than Balzac’s Paris. Attuning ourselves to the protocol logic inherent in literary studies and in generic definitions will hopefully help us stay focused on our project of a “historical approach to the digital,” rather than a digital approach to the literary (no offense to our inestimable Digital Humanist colleagues, of course).

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