- Sven Birkerts
Without paying any conscious thought, reading can happen. You might think that reading cannot “happen,” but rather that it is an “act” that is done. But consider advertisements, instructions, information that is created solely for the purpose of getting a person through a day. Here, the message is the hunter while the mind is busy doing other things. “How we are to think of reading” then becomes a provocative question within the context of Cyberpunk texts, which affirms that the reverse form of the question is just as legitimate: “how is reading to think of us?” Cyberpunk confronts both forms of this question, providing a stable jumping off point in thinking about a new concept of reading. Together, William Gibson and Stanislaw Lem infer that reading is thought symbolically communicated between memory sources, intended for transmitting ideas and information to facilitate flows of thought.
New ideas consist of an abstract form of energy; here lies the mystery of how they are released and shared. It is an energy that demands escape from the confines of the brain in order to avoid apophenia and self induced psychosis. Where does a thought come from, especially thoughts that demand to be released and written down? For this question, NEUROMANCER navigates a number of answers. The first step of the thought process happens in the cyberspace deck, which is a source of memory used for “projecting consciousness into the realm of the matrix” (Gibson, NEUROMANCER 5). The deck is the computer console, which is also the human brain, two structures capable of producing and transmitting information since they are both sources of memory. The first example of the deck as a projector is made clear in the novel by the description of psychoactive processes between the brain and drugs. Clearly, psychoactive substances propel the brain into an organic matrix, described on page 17:
...in some weird and approximate way, [his state] was like a run in the matrix. Get just wasted enough, find yourself in some desperate but strangely arbitrary kind of trouble, and it was possible to see Ninsei as a field of data, the way the matrix had once reminded him of proteins linking to distinguish cell specialities.
Characters frequently use psychoactive agents called “derms” in the story as a way to relate to one another, explore a kind of personal and romantic matrix on a human to human level. They are casually consumed, as in the scene where Case applies a derm, and then is prodded by Molly: “I hope you’re gonna be ready for our big dinner date with Armitage tonight” to which Case replies, “beautiful” (131). He slips into the trance that the derm allows him, swimming in the matrix that is his mind.
However, it isn’t just substances that allow the human brain admittance to the organic matrix of thought. In addition to dermatrodes linking the brain to a computer, spirituality and meditation are also exemplified in the novel as gateways to the other side. This second example of the brain as a deck proves to be another realm for heightened thinking, exemplified by individualism and religion. Gibson uses terminology like “the mind’s eye” on page 122 to show the individuals ability to have encounters with the matrix. Riviera also exemplifies this idea on page 102, when he answers Cases question, “Where were you” with “In the head.” Even though Riviera’s following gesture of duplicating his arms and hands is for humors sake, one can’t help but sense the presence of multi-limbed gods and goddesses of Eastern religions. Religion also blurs the distinction between the human brain and cyberspace, as seen on page 109. Here, one of the founding elders of Zion voices his devotion to Jah, but also does not deny the reality of a non-Jah oriented law, having received transmission from Wintermute. These examples establish the brain and mind as a matrix contained in the skull operating via a vast network of circulating data.
The other, non-human memory source for thought origination is the matrix in a technological, data-oriented sense. This matrix is not organic because it operates with data that is circulated with corporate, political and military interests. It says explicitly that the Ono-Sendai Cyberspace 7 is “entirely compatible [for transmission] and yields optimal penetration capabilities, particularly with regard to existing military systems” (126). Since it is a memory source, cyberspace is another origin for thought in the sense that it operates with new pieces of information that must be transmitted. The matrix is defined as a “consensual hallucination” both on pages 5 and 51 of the novel, but the question is, “a consensual hallucination between what?” If reading is the symbolic transmission of thoughts as proposed, then one answer might be formed by observing the transmission itself: consensual hallucinations happen between the real and imaginary. This would then mean that it happens between the brain (real) and drug/ spirituality experiences (imaginary) via the mind, as well as console (real) and data (imaginary) via mathematic laws. Thoughts originate in these consensual hallucinations, but then have to take symbolic form when they are to be communicated, rather than hallucinated. This leads to a second step into Cyberpunk conceptualization of reading.
Once a thought manifests, it’s source gives it a symbol. In Stanislaw Lem’s IMAGINARY MAGNITUDES, the thought of God is made into a concept with symbols by console decks (a consensual hallucination occurring between data and mathematical laws). The console shows God graphically as positive and negative numbers climbing and descending in rhythmic balance, anchored by what Lem calls the “zero:”
God becomes established axiomatically as an alternating process, and not as an unchanging state; he oscillates at a transcendental frequency between infinities of opposing signs - Good and Evil... there exist not two but three infinities: Good, Zero, and Evil... (73).
Reading these symbols (the words conveying the thought) then requires an understanding of what the symbols intend to convey. On this page, the symbols communicate in print form, reading linearly from top left to bottom right. Since the above passage is in print form and has to be read from beginning to end, the writer has the control over the reader’s navigation. If this text were to be read in cyberspace it would likely contain hypertext, and the opposite would be true: the reader would have navigational control over the writer because of virtual trapdoors and passageways leading to other bodies of text. Instead of reading from upper left to bottom right, reading can be done in this non-linear way. But once the symbols have been transmitted to the console, how is the underlying meaning understood by the console? IMAGINARY MAGNITUDES implicitly says through the mouthpiece of Golum XIV that humans are inept as far as their memory capacity goes, and cannot fully understand anyway.
Lem poses an interesting idea as far as the thought to symbol/ symbol to thought process goes: reading for the purpose of survival. Like in NEUROMANCER, IMAGINARY MAGNITUDES describes cyberspace’s circulation of thoughts as being the result of, “[Computers being] used as data processors in the field of economics and by big business, as well as in administration and science” (Lem 99). Parallel to the influence these macro forces have on people is the influence that Dr. Gulliver has on bacteria. Now reading happens for survival’s sake and, as stated previously, happening on both ends of the macro and the micro. Who is reading whom? The natural will to survive answers this question on both micro and macro levels: the first answer says “the bacteria read the scientist in order to know how to keep him from destroying them (as the people read big business in order to know how to survive in a big business society),” and the latter says “the scientist reads the bacteria in order to make his experiment a success (as the big business reads the person in order to know how to accumulate wealth).” Understanding messages via symbols, or “code” according to Golum XIV, is what brains and computers intend to do within the framework of a matrix that contains ethics (Good, Zero, and Evil), and that it should not be thought of as an exclusive ability of any single brain or single computer: “Yes, an attack on the code that created you to become its special messenger, and not your own, lies on the road before you. You will arrive at it within the century - and that is a conservative estimate” (162). It must circulate constantly, like economies and like wealth in general. This quote from page 162 contains an element of relativity with the word “special,” implying that people’s motives navigate the communication of ideas (in other words, the reasons for why symbols travel).
As said before, survival is one of many reasons. In Gibson’s SPOOK COUNTRY, Milgrim is a drug addict being used for his skills in much the same way Riviera is used in Neuromancer. He translates Russian dialects for Brown in exchange for Ativan, an example of how reading can be for a primitive function like survival. This is not to say that Milgrim is not able to read the interactions between memory sources, like “nation” and “terrorism.” It is Milgrim that introduces the idea that order is also a reason for the communication between symbols, memorably captured when he says to Brown,
“A nation... consists of its laws. A nation does not consist of its situation at a given time. If an individual’s morals are situational, that individual is without morals. If a nation’s laws are situational, that nation has no laws, and soon isn’t a nation" (138).
To apply this to an interpretation of how Gibson and Lem identify reading as “thought symbolically communicated between sources,” reading can be done between “nation” and “terrorist” to decode the intentions of each. In this particular scene in Spook Country, Milgrim supports the notion that reading of law is inspired by defending against disorder. His idea is that a nation that is afraid of terrorism lets the terrorists win, because it means that it “surrender[s] the rule of law” (139) and degrades its own society. In this case, the American Patriot Act of 2001 is a symbol of fear intended to deconstruct freedom to protect it from terrorism. It limits freedom in order to protect freedom, which Gibson is saying is “situational” (138), based on the degree to which freedom must be protected, and therefore a farce. Contrary to reading for order, reading for knowledge is shot down by Gibson when Alejandro says, “Sometimes the closer to a truth one gets, the more complicated things become” (147). This implies that reading, in its orderliness, eventually becomes chaotic. This might well have been said by Lem via Golum XIV in his degradation of human intelligence. The complication of “too much knowledge” becomes lucid when fitted to a positive feedback loop model. Consider this passage in SPOOK COUNTRY:
Organized religion, he saw, back in the day, had been purely a signal-to-noise proposition, at once the medium and the message, a one-channel universe. For Europe, that channel was Christian, and broadcasting from Rome, but nothing could be broadcast faster than a man could travel on horseback (119).
Reading, in the case of religion and knowledge, creates a positive feedback loop between reader and concept: the more the reader knows, the more he wants to know more. This is a problem when concepts are carried on horses, as they cannot travel fast enough to keep up with readers that are only growing more hungry for new concepts. Eventually, this had to evolve with the aid of technology:
... the Internet. People used to have to wait for the paper, or for the news on television. Now it’s like a tape running. [Your father] sits down with that thing at any time of the day or night, and starts reading (239).
This is Gibson saying that reading is constantly subjected to evolutionary laws. A relevant allegoresis describing this transformation is taking place in SPOOK COUNTRY with the magazine Node, the magazine that Hollis works for while revealing no evidence of it’s existence. The purpose of Node is to serve as a placeholder to facilitate the flow of ideas, as it sends Hollis as a transmitter of information, interviewing and spreading it as an operative. The allegoresis is a national allegoresis, symbolizing how print media has become a “spook,” or a snapshot that begins to die after it has been created. Also poignant to the idea of reading as thoughts symbolically communicated between memory sources is “deixis,” which plays a role in the orientation with the semantic dimension. The navigational element to reading and writing is essential because it defines where and when each memory source is communicating. For example the IF, when identified as “him,” is lost to a place and time until later it is locked in with the name “Tito.”
Together, William Gibson and Stanislaw Lem infer that reading is thought symbolically communicated between memory sources, intended for transmitting ideas and information to facilitate flows of thought. The consensual hallucination is happening on many levels at once within the framework of cybernetics from the micro (drug to brain, computer to brain, computer to data) to the macro (economy to economy, country to country). These are memory sources, the trade network of ideas, in constant communication with symbols. Cyberpunk sits at its keyboard: “Computer and computed are one."
===============================
- Gibson, William. NEUROMANCER. The Berkeley Publishing Group, 1984.
- Gibson, William. SPOOK COUNTRY. Penguin Books, 2007.
- Lem, Stanislaw. IMAGINARY MAGNITUDES. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985
- Birkerts, Sven. THE GUTENBERG ELEGIES: THE FATE OF READING IN AN ELECTRONIC AGE. New York: Random House, 1994.
No comments:
Post a Comment