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For Moshe Dror |
| Derrida and Non-linear Writing | Derrida's Vision of the Posthuman|
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For Moshe Dror |
"There is no word in Hebrew for fiction." - Amos OzCybernetics is a postmodern science, perhaps the postmodern science. It is concerned with the mind and exteriorizing the talents of the mind in models, themselves incarnated in hardware and software, in touchable things, in technics. It is the science of the codes of instruction, the program, and so is a sort of ultimate form of writing, which purports to decode the underlying inscription or programs in nature and machines.
Although like all the sciences it is a pure product of natural language, cybernetics is a poseur: it poses as a code ...again, like all sciences do. Cybernetics is philosophically antagonistic to natural language. It does not see language as a system of metaphors deriving from an intrinsically metaphorical brain. Rather, at its heart is the rationalist assumption that all communication is a code, that all communication can be formalized to exclude ambiguity and multi-vocality, and that the brain itself is an information processing machine whose workings can indeed be modelled in the computer, reduced to binary switches. At the same time, cybernetics is itself, in its ideal of itself, a code. The wish of cybernetics is to reduce all communication, even human communication, to an utterly unambiguous code. Cybernetics, in short, is the codes of codes, or thinks itself to be. If in a code, "this" means "this" and nothing but, in a natural language, "this" means "this," "that (maybe)," and "that (perhaps)," and implies "them and those, too, (potentially)" in all-at-once collaboration of potential meanings and co-conspiring superinscriptions. In other words, we might say that natural language is inherently non-linear because it is already pluri-vocal and multi-dimensional. But we are not in other words, and we are getting ahead of ourselves in this Drunkard's Walk, this superstition, this standing apart and bearing witness.
By reducing the complexity of natural objects and phenomena to
codes, cybernetics assumes it can therefore model, simulate, and build machines
to control those objects and phenomena, including living phenomena
and ultimately, that most complex site of all, the human mind/brain.
The machines that cybernetics builds are inserted into the feedback
loop between the phenomena and the world, which is how cybernetics
effects its control. The thermostat inserts itself into the natural
flow of heat through a space to
impose a control of "the desired temperature" upon the
heated relationship between furnace and room. Yet the thermostat
is the transcription of the desire of
the human into a machine for expressing that desire in heat. The thermostat
gives the guest a way to speak to her room in heat.
At the same time as it apparently degrades the notion
of mind and communication and will and desire, the same cybernetic
devices enhance the phenomena they seeks to model, control, and communicate
with; it multiplies the codes of human while restricting humans to code;
it enlarges the domain of the human, since
cybernetics is the most powerful instrumentation for extending
and exteriorizing certain aspects of the human brain/mind we have
ever invented. As such, as the inscription of a linear and unforgiving
code onto the world and into hardware, it is an extension of the
Sumerian revolution of linear writing and its subsequent establishment
of a Tech Writing Empire 5000 years ago.
A Tech Writing Empire arises when there is
dominion of a script system that gives the illusion of
total representation and its
inflitration of every aspect of a civilization, until that civilization labors and
emerges under the belief that language can represent reality unambiguously,
much as tech writers labor under the delusion that technical manuals can
instruct human users how to operate machines unambiguously. Such Tech Writing Empires,
include the rise of Greek classicism brought about by the perfection
of the alphabet, the Roman Empire, the Incan and Aztec empires, and the even more
ancient Chinese, Sumerian, and
Egyptian empire. They share other cultural innovations besiudes the
hallucination that their script systems, pictograms usually but
complete phonetic alphabets, too, can represent the world - or their
thoughts - unambiguously: terraforming
through rectilinear ploughing, monumental architecture mirroring
rational systems (the Golden Mean of the Atheneum, pyramidal forms)
buereaucracy, taxation, surveying, and complex military hierarchies
structures.
But cybernetics is also uniquely postmodern, since it also manifests
and amplifies the power of mind.
The Soft Machine: Cybernetic FIction
(Methuen, 1985) characterized
cybernetics as engaged in
a struggle with writing -- particularly postmodern fiction --
for control of the epistemological center. That hot, dynamic core, that center,
continued to erupt with new definitions of what it meant to be human.
Technological progress in the form of cybernetics, the computer continues
to inspire us to imagine new things to rationalize, and better, new ways
to enact the inspiring tension between the rational and the unrationalizable.
These works demonstrate postmodernism's resistance to cybernetic
reduction through persistent, almost compulsive, multi-layered
play with language's rich resources: ambiguity, paradox, silence, metaphor,
and irony. The dance whose music machines are deaf to. Absurd, capers inscribed
off of the sign of the deaf, intolerable to the ear of the machine.
Authors of cybernetic fiction adopt an ironic disguise, inverting the
cybernetic metaphor which supposes that the machine can capture the
human. They pose as
fiction-generating machines.
Barth, Barthelme, Beckett, Burroughs, Coover, Calvino, McElroy, Pynchon, DeLillo
and others used the idea that they were sorts of soft fiction-generating
machines to inoculate themselves and the readers against the prospect of
becoming fiction generating machines, or being supplanted by them, or
becoming thoroughly "cyberneticised" by the cybernetic machine, the
machine of machines.
Those fictions seem both prophetic and ancient, or at least quaint. John Barth imagines his heroic goat-boy entering a hypertextualized computerized library, searching through interlinked files in search of an interpretation of the phrase "There is one way to raise a cow." He finds a tangled web of talmudic debate and cross reference: hot links. Failing to decipher "a gloss upon a gloss upon the gloss upon Bray's quotation fron Enos Enoch's allusion to Xanthippides' remark upon Milo's misdemeanour," he flees. Calvino's romance with cybernetics has been well documented elsewhere. Burroughs is godfather to the guerrilla cyberpunk resistance movement, the art and computer hacker fighting unit resistant to all forms of cultural virus and spew, especially technologically implemented ones, as all the dangerous ones are, even if they use only the technology of the alphabet. Yet, quaint as they are, cybernetic fictions enacted a battle/marriage between cybernetics and humans that attains now in retrospect, metaphysical proportions under the shadow of an impending mind-imaging and mind-mediating technology, a telepathic cybernetic technology-not-yet-invented that we have been calling virtual reality that has arisen since they were written. The goal of this midrash is to understand, predict, and resist this impending future by first inventing a vaccine and then inoculating myself, and then you if you wish, with it.
The proper role of any writer in the face of virtual reality cybernetics is to continue to enact the sort of writing that cannot be reduced to virtuality. Irreducible atoms of literacy. Indeed, by using the more arcane technology of alphabet, any writer has already succeeded. Knowing it, enacting the knowledge of it, lends special resistant, inoculatory, and agitpropagandistic, if not telegramophonic force.
Guiding me in this genetic research is the idea of an aleph-tavian consciousness and the teachings of the latest of the Jewish prophets, Jacques Derrida, who deconstructs Western metaphysics of communication from a position of alterity, with a gourd growing over his head. Though Derrida convincingly and more frequently denies the Jewishness of his thought ("jewgreek" he calls himself, he admits to, at best; "Hebrew, the language I never spoke" he demurs) nonetheless his thinking is tantamount to hebrew, abbreviated by me as alephtav, using the first and last letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Though to this hebrew accusation (Je t'accuse!") Derrida himself may say "Tanti!" while at the same time tantalizing us (I say a gourd but not a fruit dangling out of reach) with the possibility that his denial is in fact a furtive exclamation of acceptance I am here forced to say "Tant pis!" Hebrew means "from across," from elsewhere. To adopt the other position, to stand ______ [ give me a preoposition ] and bear witness, to be superstitious, metastitious, transtitious, prostitious. Derrida exposes the recurring faith Western philosophy, +-ianity, places in totalizing Meaning, derived from a particular Origin granted by a Prime Meaningmaker. Derrida puts his writing in between, writes to interpose an alternitive between, Western philosophy and one of its fates, its potential fates, which is as Tech Writing Empire. In the place of this fate, tension, urge, delusion, he puts a metaphysics of Absence, particularly of the absent Origin of Meaning. For Derrida, there is no Origin of Meaning possible outside of Writing. There are only the traces in the gramme and the grapheme. The space opened up in writing for the appearance or illusion of a metaphysical origin and its absence, he calls differance, , where the 'a' - an Aleph without a Tav - signifies (among many other things) that the meaning is a dynamism that arises always and only from the text and has neither metaphysical nor historical origins outside of writing. These are very and uniquely Hebrew concepts, as old as the origin of the aboriginal Hebrew alphabet and the dictation of Torah to Moses on Mount Sinai by a G-d whose face was ever receding and whose name is forever unknowable and uninscribable. It is in the tradition of a Talmud where the marginal exfoliation of meaning is both essential and never-ending. It is in the tradtion of the Talmudical aggadah (story) that God read in the Torah -- as a blueprint or program - for the Creation itself. And it is not alien in its style and obsessively fruitful play of letters and words from the Kabalistic litterature of Abraham Abulafia.
For these reasons, while Derrida is often seen as everything from an incredibly potent and destructive radical to a Marxist to an impenetrable French fraud, I view Derrida as playing a positive role in the long line of the tradition of Jewish thought, which is definitely not Western per se. Indeed, it is precisely because this positive non-metaphysic is non-Western that is perpetually misconstrued as innately destructive. It is part of the violence in the hyphen between Judeo and Christian in which the Christian perceives the Jew, performing a uniquely Jewish sort of episteme (if you can call it by such a Greek word at all) demolishing the edifice of objectivity, truth, and total meaning by writing in the margins of Western culture. Derrida himself as his career progresses acknowledges more explicitly the Jewish genealogy of his thinking, even though he laments that he has never learned Hebrew.
There are several places in his writing where Derrida concerns
himself with the computer and with the cybernetics project or
pro-gram (as he calls it). The most compelling of these
is in "Ulysses Gramophone" where he imagines
an enormous computer project designed to render the ultimate and
final interpretation of James Joyce's Ulysses....of course, a
project he deconstructs quite irrefutably and rigorously as an
impossibility. ["Ulysses Gramophone" website
to come].
But in OF GRAMMATOLOGY (French orig. 1967) transl by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), Derrida is prescient - as he is about so many other things, like any true prophet - about where cybernetics and the computer will lead writing and reading...and perhaps the biological evolution of humanity itself. His vision is at once philosophically exact and at the same time a chilling science fiction scenario:
But to begin, let's examine the implication of Derrida's thought with cybernetics.
Early in Of Grammatology, Derrida associates cybernetics with biology. Both genetics and cybernetics have as ultimate goals to describe how codes - programs and processes of information - determine human behavior. Biology looks at the programs within the living cell, cybernetics at the codes of human communication. When this project finally succeeds, it will "oust all metaphysical concepts -- including the concepts of soul, of life, of value, of choice, of memory -- which until recently deserved to separate the machine from man." But in order to succeed in its deterministic project, " it must [also] conserve the notion of writing, trace, gramme, [written mark], or grapheme, until its own historico-metaphysical character is also exposed." [9]
What does Derrida mean by "conserve" here? The French cognate in the original can mean conserve as in "preserve and protect" but it also at the same time comes closer to exposing the etymological root of the word, as in "serve [deliver] together." In other words, cybernetics and writing are profoundly implicated with each other, twinned projects. Cybernetics is the projection and continuation of the historical evolution of writing of a certain sort. What sort of writing is that? It is the sort of writing that hides from itself its underlying "historico-metaphysical character" by believing in the trace, the gramme, and the grapheme at face value. Of course, Derrida's project is to expose such historico-metaphysical commitments that hide in writing and in all Western episteme. His philosophy is the sort of writing that shows that writing is all trace, gramme, and grapheme founded on inaccessible or inexpressible metaphysical commitments and faiths.
This become clear when Derrida's returns to a discussion of cybernetics eighty pages later. Derrida repeats the association between genetics (biology) and cybernetics. He states that in order to make a true distinction between humans and other species, and therefore to plot the evolution of the human, it is not sufficient to use simple oppositions like "instinct and intelligence, absence or presence of speech, of society, of economy, etc. etc.." Rather one must "invoke ... the notion of program" (p. 84) as the biologists do. This notion "of course must be understood in the cybernetic sense," yet cybernetics itself can only be understood as "genetic inscription" and "short programmatic chains" paraphrasing Leroi-Gourhan (whose position he is both celebrating and deconstructing in this passage). Such a cybernetic idea of the "pro-gram ... explains the play of information in determining the motions and mind ("regulating the behavior" of creatures from the simplest "amoeba or annelid up to... the passage beyond alphabetic writing and to the orders of the logos and of a certain homo sapiens." Derrida here perfectly conflates genetic programming with computer programming. The first determines the behavior of annelids and even humans, the second the "orders of logos" that evolve out of human writing and project from it: computer programming.
In other words, writing is the sign of the evolutionary achievement of homo sapiens . It is at one and the same time the producer of cybernetics (cybernetics is a specialized kind of writing episteme, manifested in computers) and its object. Were we able to produce a "writing machine" along thoroughly cybernetic principles that generates writing of the kind that a human could, then Derrida would be proven wrong and the argument of deconstruction utterly fallible. Of course, if we understand Derrida, then Derrida would say such a machine is impossible, despite whatever mimicry and simulation we can achieve by clever tricks and manipulations of the computer, since no computer can truly write in the human mode. A purely rational system or program can only write with utter transparency, with every symbol or sign meaning this and only this. For the formal machine, language can only be a code. Furthermore, such a writing computer would be incapable of writing the "trace" or writing as "differance" since no computer can make the metaphysical and historical assumptions that humans can, even though humans uncover and efface those assumptions all the time everywhere in their human writing. Indeed, writing is about the effacement of the origin which never was, in Derridean terms.
Various examples of such "writing computers" computer programs that get the computer to produce transparent words (even when they are poetic-like or thoroughly nonsensical they are transparent) should not be confused for the discourse of cybernetics which created that writing computer. Cybernetics itself, the human science of reducing information to a mathematical formation, is itself just another example a sheerly human writing project, inhabiting the land somewhere between formalism and fiction, and thus it everywhere is constituted by and at the same time erases or "effaces" its own "theological" and "subjective" assumptions while pretending to be thoroughly logical (anti-theological) and objective.
Nonetheless, Derrida writes, cybernetic writing and its mechancial productions are powerful expressions of a human evolutionary tendency of a certain sort. This impulse is to" exteriorize" the operations of mind (one imagines a very rich dialogue between McLuhan and Derrida or Leroi-Gourhan here, since McLuhan uses the same term to describe electronic media: they exteriorize the nerve net) . This evolution was already "begun in the elementary programs of 'instinctive behavior'" and can be followed through its culmination (at the time of Derrida's writing) in "the constitution of electronic card indexes and reading machines." Such a cybernetic projection of the human into the machine"enlarges differance."
The relationship between face and hand enacted in writing, however, is in "a precarious balance." "This balance is slowly threatened."
What threatens this balance? Derrida says that at first, it seems that what threatens this balance is anything that challenges the linearity of writing. Our writing, Western writing, upon its invention had its roots in a nonlinear world, the zeroth stage of writing. This was a world of "mythograms" (citing Leroi-Gourhan), writing that opened up "pluri-vocality" and "pluri-dimensionality" and writing which was not enslaved to the logic of linear time or the irreversible linearity of sound.
But this non-linear primitive alternative "had to be defeated" by linearity. Linearity represented technical success. Linearity, writes Derrida, is a better rubric under which to crystallize our understanding of all writing, from pictorgram through hieroglyph to alphabet.
It "assured a greater security and possibilites of capitalization in a dangerous and anguishing world. But that was not done one single time. A war was declared, and a suppression of all that resisted linearization was installed." It brought into being "limits." It produced homegenity, subjected to "the form of the now," a "vulgar and mundane concept of temporality" and the linear, whether straight or circular. and the model of the line, which as a model was unassailable because it was presumed, it was the substrate of all subsequent philosophy and thought. But "the enigmatic model of the line is thus the very thing philosphy could not see when it had its eyes open ...to its own history." {since history is itself already a line).[86] "The line is the suppression of pluri-dimensional symbolic thought." It produces the "thesaurization, capitalization, sedentarization, hierarchization and the formation of ideology by the class that writes or rather commands the scribes."
Intruding on the scene of 5000 years of linearity=writing, then, is non-linear writing. As Derrida exclaims, non-linear writing "means the end of the book.", even if today it is within the form of the book that new non-linear writings - literary or theoretical - allow themselves to be, for better or for worse, encased." But in any case, this is not a matter of submitting to the book or not, or of finding some other form, since the non-linear history of writing was always already there, waiting to be discovered by a new or different kind of reading, a kind of proper philosophy -- Derrida's in fact - that would "read what wrote itself between the lines of the volume." So to a deconstructive perspective, even the book is already a non-book or other-than-book.
It is hard to avoid visionary and liberationist discourse once one leaps to the non-linear, so forgive me if I quote whole-cloth from Derrida rather than simply cut him up and paste him back as I have done above:
"Beginning to write without the line, one beings to reread past writing according to a different organization of space. If today the problem of reading occupies the forefront of science, it is because of this suspense between the two ages of writing. Because we are beginning to write, write differently, we must reread differently."
"For over a century, this uneasiness has been evident in philosophy, in science, in literature. All the revolutions in these fields can be seen as shocks that are gradually destroying the linear model.… What is thought today cannot be written according to the line and the book." (87) It would be like trying to teach modenr mathematics with an abacus. In other words, it is a matter of technique, technology. While this inadequacy is not necessarily modern, he says, "it is exposed today better than ever before" The access to pluridimensionality and to a delinearized temporality is not a suimple regression" to a pre-Writing. "On the contrary, it makes all the rationality subjected to the linear model appear as another form and another age of mythography. The meta-rationality or the meta-scientificity which are thus" ushered in by Derrida's deconstruction or history of writing, his Grammatorlogy, "leave man, science, and the line behind."
Derrida already recognized cybernetics as the stage for this apocalyptic
conflict between a Talmudical method of writing, the exfoliation
of multi-plurality and a Sumerian-Greco-Christological technics
of linear inscription, the imposition of the dominion of the line,
of temporality, with the insistence on a unified truth originating
from a Divine voice. Curiously, only thirty years after he wrote
this meditation on writing, cybernetics has produced the very
platform that does not so much relinquish its dominon or "interrupt
its structural solidarity" but expose what was already written
between its lines. In hypertext and its enactment as the Web,
we have an interruption of the evolutionary vector towards that
depressing posthuman squid-thing, pushing buttons on the computer,
whether with a mind or not. Or perhaps not.