gcraighobbs /201 /1114

11/14 - Virtuality

• N. Katharine Hayles Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers
• Brain Massumi Parables for the Virtual

N. Katharine Hayles essay Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers addresses aspects of embodiment, codes of representation, and the morphological nature of the text and the body in the last decade of the twentieth century. For Hayles, information circulates as a pattern, rather than a presence. The pattern of information, coupled with noise (or randomness) allows for system reorganization with increased complexity, as we recently learned in studies of systems theory. For Hayles, "Pattern and noise are bound together in a complex dialectic."

Hayles creates a parallel between the emergent systems of pattern/ noise relationships in technological society, and presence/absence historically aligned with its analogue in psychoanalysis. She asserts, "The displacement of presence/absence hints at how central pattern/ randomness may be in informing contemporary ideas of language, narrative, and subjectivity."

Hayles thesis converges with her analysis of virtual reality and motion capture technology. As a precursor, Hayles preserves a space for the resistant materiality which, "has marked the experience of living as embodied creatures." She then turns to Haraway's concept of informatics to site a theoretical proposition -

"The contemporary pressure toward dematerialization, understood as an epistemic shift toward pattern/randomess and away from presence/ absence, affects human and textual bodies on two levels at once, as a change in the body (the material substrate) and a change in the message (the codes of representation)."

Hayles generates a term - flickering signifiers - which addresses fundamental changes in the relationship of signified to signifier in the age of rapid development of information technologies. Her fireflys then bounce about in the textual ether of Lacanian critique we all know and love. Hayles trips merrily through castration and mutation, causality and probability, "human" and "posthuman"; rendering a compelling analysis of transformational readings of the text of the body, and the textual body. For Hayles, "flickering signification is the progeny of the fascinating and troubling coupling of language and the machine."

With a sense of embodied self, Hayles makes the narrative leap to cyber-culture via the fictional works of William Gibson, particularly his seminal 1984 novel Neuromancer. She grants Gibson two discreet innovations in the course of generating his mutagenic style of cybercult literary hippness. These are, a) POV (point of view) as a positional marker substituting for the absent body, and b) The transformation of a data matrix into a landscape where narratives can happen within space/time.

Within Gibson's bag of tricks, space is given a temporal dimension asynchronous to, yet bound within the absent bodies pov movement through it. "The pov is located in space, but exists in time."

Narratives serve as encoded sites within which information is substituted for durable goods (as we witness in the shift from a Fordist regime to a regime of flexible accumulation a la David Harvey), the encoded knowledge determines authorship, readership, and access privileges. Much like the top-down hierarchical nature of power in UNIX system administration, a type of hacker culture pervades cyberculture encoding, knowledge production, transmission, access, and control.

Systems of engagement are invented and granted authority. Access is a matter of patterns, not presence and therefore opens the door for mutable subjectivity, disembodiment, de-personalization. And millions walk willingly, or reluctantly, through this door in everyday technological experiences of private and public, science and fiction, knowledge and privilege, life and death.

In matters of knowledge production, Hayles summons Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition (funny, I did the same thing last week : )). Professionalization serves to provide a locus "in which the authority to tell the story is constituted by possessing credentials that qualify one as a member of a physically dispersed, electronically bound professional community." Thus rendering indigenous campfire stories effectively mute.

In conclusion, Hayles is certain this might not necessarily be a "good thing". She states, and I concur, "In my view, one of the most serious of these implications for the present cultural moment is a systemic devaluation of materiality and embodiment."

And in a coup de grace, Hayles calls up my all time favorite - Paul Virilio - who is certain that this matter of dematerialization and embodied virtualities is not going to slow down, but rather accelerate. For Hayles, human autonomy combined with agency suggests, "embodiment is always instantiated, local, and specific." Hayles rails, "Embodiment can be destroyed, but it can not be replicated."

In conclusion, a conscious call for environmental awareness is tempered by its hard theoretical precursor. Hayles warns with compassion and common sense -

"As we rush to explore the new vistas that cyberspace has made available for colonization, let us remember the fragility of of a material world that cannot be replaced."

Such matters of the body, materiality, compassion, and common sense are refeshingly alive in N. Katharine Hayles theoretical treatment of 80's cyberculture. Long live the 80's.