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The 140-Character Limits and Storytelling

I very much agree with Micky’s point that as a twitter fiction, Egan’s “Black Box” makes good use of the update style of tweet and offers different layers of storytelling to readers. Each tweet in Egan’s work, as Micky points out, is meaningful, functioning as independent updates even when removed from the story. And though I agree that comparing to Egan, Cole doesn’t use much of the update style for his storytelling, I think we can still recognize this use of complete, independent tweets which make sense even outside of the story in “A Piece of the Wall”.

Some of the tweets in “A Piece of the Wall” are retweeted more than the others, which suggests that most of the retweeters retweeted not the story, but just particular sentences they wanted to share with others. I don’t know whether there are any comments added to the retweets (I have to admit that I am not very familiar with twitter, because it is banned in China and people use an alternative to it), but one thing is for certain: what appears to the retweeters’ followers would be, let me borrow Micky’s words, just average, everyday tweets outside of the storytelling. Here is one of the most retweeted tweets in Cole’s essay:

“This, too, is my America: people wandering in the desert in fear of their lives.”

Does this sentence conjure up the image of undocumented immigrants? Or, how would people undestand this argument? Here we are on the micro level of the storytelling, where the sentences are meaningful on their own. But it seems to me that those meanings, being irrelevant to the whole essay, can mask or even misrepresent the author’s intention. I am not saying that I am against it; actually I think the individual tweets’ openness to interpretation is an expansion of the storytelling.  But I wonder is this ambiguity caused by the disjunction between different parts of the essay what the author wants? As long as each tweet is complete in itself, the whole story will be inevitable disjunctive. If not, why not just leave a sentence incomplete and continue it in the next tweet? The incompleteness in sentences may enhance, in a way, the coherence of the storytelling as a whole.

Both Egan and Cole don’t let that happen, because, I guess, it’s too annoying for readers. But what I found interesting here is how Twitter as a medium shapes the way people write. A new principle is set, that is, writing sentences complete in not only grammar but also meanings within 140 characters, for the sake of aesthetics( or something els).  As a matter of fact, in the interview with Buzzfeed,  Cole says that since he decided to post the story on Twitter, he had to “tweak some sentences, break some of the longer ones, firm up some of the more fragmentary” (and cram them into 140 characters or less, I guess). And though Cole doesn’t seem to regard his writing as an innovation, and I didn’t find Cole or Egan’s writings very typical “twitter style”( there are no abbreviations, for example), the “each individual tweet must be complete and makes sense” principle plus the 140-character are enough to make twitter fictions very different from other kinds of writings.

I also found Cole’s use of addressed messages as role-playing in “A Piece of the Wall” very fascinating. It took me a while to realize that the Twitter accounts in interaction with Cole are, in fact, characters in the essay. And since to speak through an Twitter account can be regarded as a real act of speaking on one’s onw, it seems to me that the essay is like a play script that plays itself or, to put it in other words, a combination of both the script and the performance. Cole also uses the “A Piece of the Wall” account instead of his own account to tell the story, partly for convenience, which seems to me like the essay is speaking for itself.

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Updates as Storytelling

The concept of Twitter fiction is interesting to me because there are no real guidelines for what to do or how to do it, but we can still make a value judgment of good or bad use of the medium. Based on Ruth Page’s “Celebrity Practice” chapter, I think there are two distinct avenues authors can take, which is where we can split Cole and Egan. In her analysis, Page describes three different styles of tweets: the addressed message, the retweet, and the update. While the addressed message is “a public tweet that begins with an @username address” and retweets are “tweets that have been forwarded without amendment,” updates are, according to Page, “all other publicly available tweets that appear in a tweeter’s timeline” (93-4). Basically, the update is your average, everyday tweet.

Egan’s “Black Box” operates using the update style of tweet so well that, for the most part, you wouldn’t necessarily know that you are reading a segment of a complete short story unless you knew that you were reading a part of a short story. Most of the tweets that create “Black Box” are quips, observations, adages, and aphorisms that actually sound like tweets you could read if you were to look at your average Twitter feed. For example, “The first thirty seconds in a person’s presence are the most important” (1), “Never look for hidden cameras: the fact that you’re looking will give you away” (12), and “Knowing your latitude and longitude is not the same as knowing where you are” (22) all make complete sense when isolated and removed from the story. And, I can almost guarantee that similar tweets have been composed by “average” Twitter users outside of any storytelling context because they all have the observational quality present in many tweets, Facebook status updates, or Instagram captions—what Page refers to as “tellability” (104).

While reading “Black Box,” I went through the painstaking process of marking tweets that can function independently of the story and still make sense as well as the tweets that only work if you read the larger story. The former category outnumbers the latter. I think this is part of what makes Egan’s story a “successful” piece of Twitter fiction; “Black Box” is able to capture the essence of the social media site and re-channel it into a means for telling a story.

When it comes to looking at individual tweets, Egan’s choice of diction—beauty, Designated Mate, Hotspot, etc.—allows tweets that would normally make sense solely in the storytelling context to function as independent updates as well. Chapter 12 has a solid example of this in the tweet “The concerns of your Designated Mate are your concerns.” I think the most interesting part about this aspect of the text is the duality it creates. In the context of the story, this tweet means one thing—chiefly that the citizen agent must surrender herself so completely to the mission at hand that she must become one with this violent and dangerous man—and it means another thing entirely if taken out of the story context and looked at on an individual basis. In this later case it seems much more heartwarming and loving because “Designated Mate” does not carry an inherent dangerous and violent quality; it only gains those implications from the story.

When Egan uses linked tweets (tweets that cannot be fully understood independently and require knowledge of previous tweets to make sense) she often marks them with repetition, specifically demonstrating their connectedness, such as the repetition of “You will be tempted” in chapter 7 or “Only then” in chapter 9. The significance of these linked tweets, especially those marked with repetition, is that we are given another layer of understanding. On the macro level, we have an entire story unit. On the most micro level, we have individual tweets that are meaningful on their own. By linking certain tweets, there is also a middle ground where several consecutive tweets can be taken out of the larger story as a grouped unit and make sense that way. Therefore, “Black Box” offers several different levels of storytelling depending on how you orient yourself as the reader.

For my money (or lack thereof), I think Egan uses Twitter as a storytelling medium more effectively than Cole. Cole clearly does not use the update style of tweet for his storytelling. Instead, he plays with Twitter’s sense of community and interaction in “Hafiz” and “A Piece of the Wall.” While we do not necessarily need to frame these different approaches as a “who did it better?” throwdown, I do think there is something we can talk about when it comes to making effective use of Twitter as a storytelling medium that actually does something for the text rather than simply being a different way to deliver it.

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The Mediated Gaze

(Apologies for the lack of paragraph breaks. I have been trying and failing to figure out why they’re not appearing).
Thanks, Hannah and Abigail for thoughtful posts. I, too, am interested in Oryx.
I tend to think that Oryx, at least when she’s first introduced as something more than a spectral voice in Snowman’s head, encourages us to think about the relationship between virtual and material existence, between an infinitely reproducible image (competing for attention amid a sea of similar images) and a singular body. Digitally rendered Oryx, staring at the camera, causes Jimmy to consider the act of spectatorship, and, further, a process of digital production that relies on the labor of real people in real places. “Then she looked over her shoulder and right into the eyes of the viewer — right into Jimmy’s eyes, into the secret person inside him. I see you, that look said” (91).
This scene stages, in some sense, a reversal of the male gaze, which, like Sartre’s experience looking through a keyhole and realizing he too is being watched, interpellates the gazer not just as an agent of patriarchal objectification and commodification, but also as a self-conscious human subject. I think this humanizing power of Oryx’s mediated gaze supports Abigail’s suggestion that, following Sandoval, we might see Oryx as a model of resistance to a commodified neocolonial world. And to Hannah’s point about cash value, I think this resistance points to the essential ambivalence of labor exploitation: the transformation of labor into a commodity is a source of both alienation and power for the worker. The conference of cash value onto the movements of one’s body makes the body both ripe for exploitation and a source of anti-capitalist resistance.
But what is it  exactly about Oryx’s gaze that unnerves Jimmy, causes him to start? What gives an image power to confirm its own authenticity, to insist on a material reality, a backstory that matters and humanizes? What breaks the spell of the image and the erasure of exploitative, sexualized labor on which it depends? What is the significance that, as Abigail points out, this power is conferred to a woman and the only character marked as non-white?
I think these questions get more complicated when we consider the media world of the Crakers, who communicate (or think they communicate) with really-existing gods (Oryx and Crake) through the medium of Snowman. Jimmy and the Crakers interact two very different types of media: one that is essentially mythological and which derives its authenticity from “internal consistency,” and another that cannot maintain its mythological status (its ability to absorb the viewer in a pleasant or compelling fiction) because of its essentially indexical relationship to the world. Can we say that it is these different types of media existence that account for the relative inferiority (in Crake’s eyes) of humans and relative perfection of the Crakers? The humans in Atwood’s corporatized world produce fictions that are always undermined by their inability to fully excise the brutal realities they both depend on and erase. The Crakers, whom we might call premodern, don’t have to worry about this kind of rupture because their fictions derive authority not from any sort of correspondence to reality but divine provenance.
This also has me thinking about Oryx and Snowman as media. Both mediate between the crackers and others. But what does it mean for humans to be media?
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Oryx as Oppressed, Oppositional Consiousness

Thank you, Hannah, for your thoughtful post about Oryx and obsolescence. I, too, was taken by her as a character, and wondered about her place in the narrative. I focused on her role as the interpreter between the Children of Crake and the neocapitalist system that created them.

I want to bring in a text that we have not read for this class (apologies!), but one that is in direct conversations with readings like Mark Goble’s “Obsolescence,” and to an even greater extent, Walter Benn Michael’s “Posthistoricism” from last week. The text I’m referring to is Chela Sandoval’s Methodologies of the Oppressed. To briefly—and, I’m sure, reductively—summarize it here, Sandoval argues that Benn Michaels, Jameson, and others have persuasively diagnosed the issues of the contemporary late-capital age, but where Benn Michaels sees diffuse, neocolonial, identity-instead-of-ideology postmodernism as intractable, and “difference” as exchangeable and flattened, Sandoval reads against and under this movement, arguing that oppressed peoples (and she writes specifically of Third World Feminists), have been living under these neocolonial conditions for much longer than “First World” peoples, and that oppressed groups have developed effective strategies for manipulating and understanding these neocolonial conditions. She sees believes that by taking up strategies of oppressed groups—“oppositional conciousnesses”—we can find positions both inside and outside the postmodern neocolonial state, and thus find a position from which we can critique the system that encompasses us.

I bring this up because this gave me a possible answer about Oryx’s role in the text and her importance as a go-between from the scientists and the Crakers. To me, it was crucial that she was the only character we see from “outside” the system of labs and Compounds. While there are certainly Pleebs and others in the book, they are not individually described, and their backstories and conciousnesses are not explored; they are simply the lowest rung of this Compound-ing, engineering society. The fact that she is the only central character marked as non-White is also of note to me, and her backstory, as Hannah elaborates, clearly places her as part of the oppressed peoples that Sandoval focuses on; through flashbacks and Jimmy/Snowman’s prying, we see that she has lived and been conscious of a system in which humanity is always already viewed as excess, and she knows that the system has no care for her as a Subject. For me, this explains why she is so uninterested in Jimmy/Snowman’s questions about her past; on page 117, Jimmy insists to her, “Why won’t you tell me?” and she responds, “Why do you care.?…I don’t care. I never think about it. It’s long ago now.” She—because of her terrible history of abuse, rape, and commodification—sees the neocolonial age they are part of for what it is, and realizes her position within it.

Jimmy finally realizes the obsolescent quality of the lists of words he repeats, thinking, “There was no longer any comfort in the words. There was nothing in them” (261). Immediately after realizing this, a procession of naked young girls like Oryx parades before him, and he thinks, “There was something—a threatening presence—behind the trees. Or perhaps the danger was in him. Perhaps he was the danger…,” noting that “the girls,” unlike himself, “had a ruthless wisdom” (261). Oryx is the mediator between the Crakers and the humans, and her eye is the portal through which Crake enters the Maddaddam Internet world, because she can see her “Humanness” for what it is—oppressive. While Jimmy/Snowman (“Whiteman”?) clings to his obsolete words and ideals, Oryx existing on the “bleeding edge,” showing the reader connections “within a global ecology,” revealing “the extreme disposability of the recently outmoded,” as she sheds her pasts and communes with possible futures (Goble 162).

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Oryx, Oblivion, Obsolescence?

Hannah Borenstein

As a non-literary scholar I take this opportunity of starting the conversation by orienting, at least the beginning of the discussion, around Oryx. I do this, mainly, because her general construction as a character and purpose in the text, especially in relationship to the supplementary material, has been really perplexing for me. I could conjure up a post about Extinctathon, database narratives, or the various binaries at play – human/non-human, nature/synthetic, sciences/humanities, etc., most of which actually pit Jimmy/Snowman up against Crake.

Broadly speaking, what is Oryx doing here? Why does Atwood make her such a vulnerable, delicate, and detached female character? And why does she have this long, drawn out, traumatic past?

In Chapter 6 when we’re taken through the vague cloudiness of her history – being sold in a rural village, forced to sell flowers, then her body, then pornographic videos, and so on, through Jimmy, we experience the telling of an essentially disembodied tale. Oryx seems so removed from her own experiences she gets confused, not even simply irritated, by Jimmy’s questions and frustrations to really make her feel something.

The notion of love is completely absent for Oryx:

“Also, said Oryx, they had no more love, supposing they’d had some in the first place. But they had a money value: they represented a cash profit to others. They must have sensed that – sensed they were worth something” (126).

However, embodied money-value, a trend we certainly saw in Snow Crash, seems to be something she must fully embrace.

I turn to Mark Goble’s chapter “Obsolescence” for some guidance here, because (once again, not a literary scholar with a poor understanding of the paradigm of modernism in literature) I found the notion of “planned obsolescence” intriguing and potentially useful. If industrial modernity invented obsolescence as technological development that would invariably render previous technologies obsolete, Marx’s notion of productive consumption, in which the commodity’s obsolescence reinforces capitalism’s drives, how is Oryx circumventing, if she is, this form of obsolescence.

Is her desirability, aesthetically driven but also predicated on the absence of any resistance to being commodity, what makes her one of the last figures to be obsolete? Jimmy’s mother, one of the few other female characters in the text takes a different route, unable to adapt to this worker-driven world, and ends up leaving her fmaily .

Does Atwood use Oryx, give her such an extreme an unrelenting past, as a means of demonstrating just how little we’ll have to care about love, to remain important to capitalism’s logic? To resist obsolescence? Someone that doesn’t care about her origins, histories, exploitations? Or does her extreme vulnerability serve to mold Jimmy and Crake (which could also be a meta-narrative) and force them to interact (Jimmy, overwhelmed with pity, but driven by desire) and Crake (re-making her into an object of desire and utility) act and respond? I hope these genuine questions of mine are not too basic and trivial, but would be curious to hear others’ thoughts/opinions.

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Codes and Substrates, Languages and Bodies

The conviction that Language expresses “truth” is a mystical position. That’s not necessarily to say it’s unjustified, just that on our side of the rupture in Language/language—the side of semiosis—it is conceptually impossible to prove or disprove that idea. Note that the most ardent supporter of Language-as-truth, Scile, must disappear from the book at precisely the moment the mystical position becomes untenable, and that he can only return in a death throe of mystical fervor, with the passage explaining his motivations (339) littered with religious language. Is it the case that prelapsarian Language directly expresses “truth”? On our side of the lapse, that’s beside the point.

The final break in which semiosis enters Language, ambivalently hailed by Avice as “transcendence or fall” (325), leads to a previously-impossible externalization of the means of communication, as the Ariekei scratch ideogrammatic signs into the dust. Avice imagines the development of durable media for the storage of this writing (330). Likewise, semiosis cannot help but spread, as all domains of life become signifying: the new Ariekene architecture proliferates spires and fashionable buttresses (340): buildings too become coded.

Which brings me to code.

I’ll suggest another way into thinking through the language-code nexus than by worrying about truth or executability: let’s think about the interdependence of physiology and language and the manner in which they co-determine what the novel calls ‘thought.’ If we extend Snow Crash’s central metaphor to Embassytown, Embassytown offers significantly more nuance

In Snow Crash, the human brain is merely a material substrate for informational processes: it’s simply the hardware to pure informational software. Software is infinitely reproducible and perfectly communicable: snow crash is the same whether afflicting computer hardware or a human body, the same whether entering the human via tainted blood or visual bitmap: the code is independent of the substrate.

If we extend the metaphor to Embassytown, a different picture obtains. An individual human is physiologically unable to speak Language, and even purpose-bred doppels, humanity’s best crack at reverse-engineering Ariekene hardware, can merely imitate Language, not speak it: their hardware is fundamentally different from that of the Hosts, and therefore the same code instantiated in an Ambassador is not the same as that code instantiated in a Host. In Embassytown, to use Chun’s phrase, code does not “obfuscate the machine” (19). The code and its substrate are mutually irreducible.

This material-informational interdepedence is handily evidenced in Embassytown in the figure of the untranslatable, an omnipresent specter in the book. Against Galloway’s assertion of the identity of different instantiations of code, the untranslatable shows that an instance of ‘thought’ is neither purely informational nor purely physiological: it is always and irreducibly both, and to think of the so-called ‘content’ of it as isolatable is an absurdity that leads to a mystification of code. That which can exist in Language but not Anglo-Ubiq (and vice versa) reminds us there’s no perfect equivalence between (instantiated) codes. These code systems have developed irreducibly with their material substrates, the body. It would be a confused question to ask whether the Arekei developed two mouths to speak a double-voiced code or whether they developed a double-voiced code because they have two mouths.

Perhaps the conceptual tool needed here would be a compound like those of Language: ‘body’ in the turn line and ‘mind’ in the cut, or ‘code’ and ‘substrate.’ But here, in WordPress, I can’t render it, and, possibly, here in my mind/body, I can’t think it.

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What’s true about language?

As Kevin’s post astutely points out, it seems like the reading material for this week orientate us towards a discussion of Language and language. That being said, I’d like to take up Kevin’s point about the relation between Language and truth. Does an entirely different relation occur between Language and truth if we substitute an understanding of ‘Truth as an immutable and transcendental series of facts’ with ‘truth as the processes of selection and evaluation that provide the conditions for truth claims to occur in the first place’? That’s to say, what happens to the relation between Language (and language) and truth if we understand this connection in constructive terms (i.e., language plays a part in constructing truth) rather than mimetic ones (i.e., language represents an already given truth out there)?

I think that the Ariekei’s system of Language explicitly participates in such acts of construction. Take for example Avice’s explanation early in the novel of the role of Language for the Ariekei:

‘For Hosts, speech was thought. It was as nonsensical to them that a speaker could say, could claim, something it knew to be untrue as, to me, that I could believe something I knew to be untrue. Without Language for things that didn’t exist, they could hardly think them; they were vaguer by far than dreams. What imaginaries any of them could conjure at all must be misty and trapped in their heads.’ (83)

This shows that, rather than there being no distinction between Language and Truth, the latter entirely depends upon the former to come into existence (or to manifest as anything other than ‘misty’ pre-thoughts). If the Ariekei are Hosts, then truth is a sort of parasite that feeds from their Language system. We might also look to the Ariekei’s construction of similes by manufacturing situations for (post?)human bodies and inanimate objects. This construction could be understood as a sort of truth-making: for something to be true, it must be said; if it cannot be said, then new forms of expression must be constructed to produce this information as truth.

This, then, begs the relationship of language to Language to code. Perhaps the mimetic understanding of the relation between language and truth (i.e., language as representing an external truth) is the same relation that Chun describes with the fetish of code: when the ‘outcome’ or ‘end’ of code obscures the coding process that enabled this object’s construction. In other words: can we draw equivalencies between, on the one hand, the situation in which representation through language masks the role of language in constructing this representation and, on the other (posthuman bionic) hand, the situation in which the outcome of code (e.g., an application or a game, etc.) distracts us from thinking about the underlying code that produced this outcome in the first place?

I think Kevin’s question about the defamiliarizing of language is a pertinent one here. And, so as to not to disappoint his expectations for theoretical conceptions of language, it might be interesting to think not about Hegel but Friedrich Kittler, and especially his idea of language as a sort of code. For Kittler, there was a time (which he calls Discourse Network 1800, which approximately correlates to the Romantic period) in which writing was a way of storing a transcendental meaning: trained to read for this meaning, audiences were able to bypass the material codes used to communicate and ‘hallucinate’ a meaning from the alphanumeric symbols arranged on a surface. With the development of new technologies, however, writing lost its monopoly as the primary material storage system. Reduced to but one mode of communication among many, the material conditions through which data was transmitted became apparent: audio playback is accompanied by the hiss of a gramophone needle; writing is exposed as a sort of code used to create a representation, rather than some sort of lossless transmission system for transcendental meaning or ‘Truth’. As Kevin noted, the lie makes truth conceivable: this is not to say truth was never there, but only that it becomes apparent through its opposite.

It’s certainly interesting to see a text like Mièville’s novel defamiliarize its own raw materials (i.e., language); I’m out of space here, but I wonder if such acts of defamiliarization could be trying to get us to think about the relationship between ‘fiction’ and ‘reality’, between representation and lived experience? On a different note, I think it would be helpful to scrutinize further the relationship between linguistic or natural languages and coding or ‘computer’ ‘languages’. Is it useful to associate natural and coding languages? What if we didn’t think of coding as a language at all, would that change our understanding of digital media? (By the way, these are genuine questions I don’t really have an answer to – but, especially given how most of the reading we’ve had so far has drawn a relationship between language and code in some way, I think it’s something it’d be worth thinking about!)

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Maybe Code Isn’t All It’s Cracked Up to Be

I’ll get my usual histrionics out of the way early. Embassytown is imaginative and wild and creative and I think it’s great because I’m a tremendous nerd and give me some good ole’ fashioned high sci-fi any day of the week and twice on Sundays and I’ll be happy. I love me some world-building, and even if I eventually get past the generic tropes of imagined future-slang, technobabble, and pseudo-science to the real story, I still get an Ariekei-style word-high just tying to figure it all out.

But we’re here to talk about Language. After last week, and especially coupled with the Chun article, it seemed natural to try to cram Language into a box about how language is code, and the addicted Hosts are a corrupted operating system, or something. When Avice describes a “negotiation” between the Hosts and the Ambassadors, she says, “This wasn’t an aspiration: the Hosts could only envisage that this was how it would be” (174). This seems be staging exactly what Galloway wants us to believe about code – that it is “the only language that is executable,” that it’s the only language that enacts its own truth. But this runs utterly counter to how we are to understand Language.[1]  The relationship between Language and truth is no relationship at all – they are one in the same, because there is no collapsing of terms.  Here, the medium is not the message; the message is the message, and that message is reality. In Language, there is no referent-reference dichotomy, at least until surh / tesh-echer figures out how to lie.[2] Language isn’t code cum language, it’s Language, and there’s no need to compile it in order for it to run.

The Hosts, then, are somehow both the perfect manifestation of code-as-language, but without the intermediate step of inventing code as somehow separate from language. This elision works to sidestep the historical development of this understanding that Chun brings us. Chun’s article does a sophisticated job of nuancing and historicizing the developing ways in which we, in the net society, have come to understand code in definitional and affective terms; how the person is erased, how the code itself becomes libidinal and Freudian. However, Embassytown avoids this higher level historical analysis (with the exception of a throwaway evolutionary-biological theory of it on 129). The novel, for all it’s high sci-fi tropes (include, in a postmodern-wink, “trope-ware,”), seems to put its essential preoccupation with the sociopolitics of interpersonal relationships into relief with Language, rather than focusing especially on it. While the Hosts are fascinating, and all the characters are fascinated with them, the narrative voice is laser-focused on Avice’s perspective. We get her memories of her relationship with Scile, the intimate moments with CalVin, her observations of the not-quite-uncanny nature of Ehrsul. Clothes and “augmentations” come up over and over. For a book about aliens that literally can only speak truth, we get a lot of unspoken truths about life on Ariekei.

Here’s my question, then. We will no doubt spend a lot of time unpacking the particulars of Language – how it supposedly works, why exactly it breaks down. We’ll obliquely cite some Hegel as Mièville does to talk about the soul of language in the era of digital information. All of this is extremely interesting and productive to talk about, especially after a few weeks of trying to dis- and re-entangle technology with lower-case language. And I hope my fellow posters this week bring us in those directions, and I look forward to it. But, that said, what position does it put us in if we use Language, and the Hosts and Ambassadors who speak it, as a mirror against which to assess the deep defamiliarization of the ways we use language – spoken and unspoken – every day right here on this side of the Immer?

 

[1] This whole paragraph is a mess of “Language” and “language” in series, but it’s tough to avoid, even if it frustrates clarity. Nothing else to be done, except spend a little time in class discussing the friction and frisson of the two terms.

[2] Someone better at manipulating the html protocols of WordPress than I am might be able to figure out how to “properly” represent their name here. That problem itself is another manifestation of the same interesting quirk of medium-message collapse that my failed attempts at italicization in my last post raised. No more intentional now than then, but at least we can point at it.

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What exactly is the status of embodiment?

I’ll pick up where Jessica’s provocative questions leave off: Do we need to draw firm distinctions between embodiment and data flows? Is there a third way that can route us around the body/code binary? I’m not totally sure. However, I’m not entirely convinced Hayles wants us to think of embodiment as mutually exclusive with informational flows, since it seems to be the interaction of the two that, for her, constitutes human subjectivity.
Hayles’s critique is, I think, simply that Snow Crash leaves no room for non-machinic forms of human existence. For Stephenson, according to Hayles, “there must exist in humans a basic programming level, comparable to machine code in computers, at which free will and autonomy are no more in play than they are for core memory running a program” (258). The problem with Stephenson’s model is it presumes humans work like computers, and that there is a code capable of operating at the most foundational level of human consciousness, thereby fusing “inscription” and “incorporation.” In other words, executable code, a nam-shub, etc. Hayles considers this vision of humanity nightmarish, since it leaves questions of the human body — the finite body, the gendered and raced body — entirely out of the question. While I think Hayles’s insistence on embodiment is useful, I also think we should ask whether we think Hayles’s reading makes sense. Is Snow Crash’s central metaphor in fact that “humans are computers”? Do Y.T.’s resistance to the Falabala’s brainwashing or Hiro’s ingenious hacking offer possible points of resistance?
Either way, for Hayles, the stakes seem really to be about the status of the liberal subject in post-humanist discourse. “I see the deconstruction of the liberal humanist subject as an opportunity to put back into the picture the flesh that continues to be erased in contemporary discussions about cybernetic subjects” (266). Hayles’s concern is not so much with the inaccuracy of Stephenson’s human/computer conflation, but with the tendency of some post-humanist discourse (exemplified by Snow Crash) to reproduce the fantasy of a disembodied liberal subject (one who can shed its body behind a Rawlsian veil of ignorance).
On the subject of embodiment, I also think it’s worth noting again the “racist overtones” Hayles observes in her reading of the novel. I’ve found myself particularly interested in how the novel’s xenophobic imaginary (a) reflects anxieties around the AIDS crisis, especially the fear that otherness will not destroy those in power but infect and change them, making them other as well, and (b) seems to shore up Michael’s suggestion that identity, as opposed to ideology, has become the primary political concept in the post-historical era. In a post-ideological world (where there is no longer disagreement, only differences in identity) the only way to exert total control — the only way to collect people under the same identity category — is to change who they are. It’s no longer a question of either coercion or hegemony but bioengineering. In this sense, the miscegenation proposals outlined by liberal identitarians resemble the virus  L. Bob Rife seeks to propagate through the population. Only physical transformation can ensure a change in belief, because belief is simply an embodied “point of view.” Scary stuff.
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An Insistence on the Body

In “The Posthuman Body,” N. Katherine Hayles focuses our attention on the cybernetic construction of the posthuman, critiquing its tendency to erase embodiment and seeking another approach (still rooted in cybernetics) that would instead insist on the body itself.

Hayles writes, “Thus the contest to define the posthuman is deeply bound up in the debate over whether humans are more aptly viewed as inscriptions or incorporations…At stake in my reading of [Galatea 2.2 and Snow Crash] is not so much a decision to side with either the human or the posthuman, as a search for versions of the posthuman that do not erase embodiment and do not consider human beings as inscriptions that can be frictionlessly transferred into another medium” (247-248).

This privileging of the body finds resonance in the chapter “Posthistoricism,” in which Walter Benn Michaels offers analyses of Snow Crash and American Psycho that are concerned with measuring the force of a text by the effects it has on the body. By pain or by sickness, the body reacts to a “text” that is either forcibly carved onto the skin or channeled directly through the brain stem.

Turning to Snow Crash, Michaels writes, “But when some people catch the virus and some people don’t, we don’t think of the sick people as disagreeing with the healthy ones. Indeed, this is precisely what it means to begin to conceive the text on the model of the virus; it means to understand differing responses to the text as different effects produced on different bodies by the same cause” (73).

Michaels later uses this argument as an analogy for text vs. interpretation, which I won’t delve into here. What draws Hayles’ and Michaels’ arguments together is an emphasis on the presence and relevance of the (post)human as body as opposed to code. Hayles resists a definition of the human as DNA, written and transferrable. Michaels similarly draws a distinction between the body and text by imagining the latter as something that attacks, infects, inspires, or otherwise exerts force on the body—but remains separate from it. The body is still something that reacts to, rather than becomes, code/text.

However, while Hayes powerfully argues for the materiality of the body as something to embrace in the face of lifeless automation, Michaels’ offers a much bleaker outlook by only emphasizing the body as something that is helplessly overcome by something else; whether injured or inspired, the body is not really the hero of subjectivity that we might hope it to be, but the mere site where feelings emerge (but from whom?) and where differences occur (i.e., you are not sick/inspired but I am, thus we are different).

What I find myself searching for in both of these readings is something more than yet another dichotomy—which is in this case a dichotomy between the human as body or the human as code. Where does such an analysis leave us? What about the soul? What about emotion, experience, heritage, and so forth, which so much of human art is founded on and in preservation of?

In defining/describing the human, any dichotomy is futile. And arguing for the body as opposed to text is to have already decided that the human is one or the other, and nothing in between.

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