techonologoy blah

To what extent does Jennifer Egan collapse the distinction between human and machine? Discuss in light of Kittler's "Gramophone, Film, Typewriter".

“Late twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines. Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert.”
--Donna J. Haraway, The Cyborg Manifesto

Egan illustrates, in a manner both literal (“Black Box”) and abstract (“A Visit From the Goon Squad”) a question that grows ever-more pressing as we move into a future which threatens - on a more immediate level than ever before - complete synchronicity between the artificial and the biological. This binary is not, however, quite as dichotomous as one might suppose. Technologies that are founded on automacity and designed to respond to our most primal instincts, not to mention new developments in the field of cybernetics and artificial neural networks, have muddied it. In response, the forms of media that question what it really is to be human have experienced a grand resurgence, necessitating a reprisal of old questions, old dilemmas. Instead of asking what it means to be human, one might instead ask: were we ever human in the first place? Or has technology been present in our society, integrated into our daily lives and even our bodies, from the very first? This is a notion handled with commendable lightness of touch in Egan's body of work, and elaborated upon in greater depth in Kittler's essay collection "Gramophone, Film, Typewriter". By uniting these (admittedly disparate) works, it may be possible to gain a more complete idea of how Egan collapses the arbitrary distinction between man and machine.
Both of Egan’s works rely heavily on the conflicting theories of immediacy versus hypermediacy. Hypermediacy is defined by its acknowledgment of the medium through which an idea is conveyed. For example, an image on a computer screen that requires the viewer to zoom in or adjust the colour is an example of hypermediacy. We do not connect directly to the image; instead it is separated from us, filtered through a technological lens. Immediacy, also known as transparent immediacy, refers to an instant connection with the medium without any barrier between subject and viewer. Seeing the aforementioned painting in real life is therefore an example of immediacy, as our interaction with it is instantaneous; we both exist, in short, on the same physical plane. In the context of Egan’s “A Visit From the Goon Squad”, hypermediacy is employed as a method of playing with the popular idea of what a novel ought to be. One chapter is formatted entirely as a PowerPoint presentation; time skips and changes in perspective steer the novel away from realism and linearity, emphasising the notion that this is a fictional work which does not abide by the rules of real-time; and Kindle releases of the book contain hyperlinks that allow readers to move from section to section, character to character, dismantling the narrative into its multiplicity of components. Immediacy is conversely present in the resonance this format holds with our daily lives, which are characterised by a complex web of human relationships, constantly altering, constantly in flux.
In a broader sense, though, “A Visit From the Goon Squad” shares its paradoxical combination of immediacy and hypermediacy with all other forms of technology – and it is here that the debate of what, if anything, truly separates the twin disciplines of “man” and “machine”. Bolter and Grusin argued that contemporary society strives for a coexistence of both hypermediacy and immediacy, frequently characterised through intuitive technology. The way in which we interact with computers is designed to feel natural, instinctive – to efface, as much as is possible, the boundary between our bodies and the machines that are controlled by them. A computer desktop is made more "immediate” by its similarity to a physical desktop, complete with folders, a trash bin, and sheets of blank paper which we can type on. Even the act of typing is engineered to feel like an extension of our fingers, with more frequently-used letters placed within easy access to facilitate automatic typing (“touch-typing”). A computer mouse even allows us the physical contact of picking things up and dragging them around, placing pressure on the button to “lift” something and releasing pressure to put it down again. In recent years developers have voiced the possibility of a three-dimensional “virtual reality” desktop, wherein users interact directly with their chosen tools without the need for icons or scroll bars (colloquially known as a transparent interface). This device has been evident as a potential technological step forward for decades, and is often seen in sci-fi cinema in the form of holograms that can be physically touched and manipulated by the user.
Friedrich Kittler argues that the crossing of this particular frontier is not as revolutionary as we might initially believe – that people have, in fact, been interacting with the world around them through some form of interface throughout the genealogy of the human race. He is of the opinion that “media are not pseudopods for extending the human body…They follow the logic of escalation that leaves us and written history behind it.” This is a theory entirely at odds with Marshall McLuhan’s deterministic view of technology as something beyond human control, something which is not merely a part of society but actively shapes it. Kittler, conversely, subscribes to the notion of social constructionism. Rather than collapsing the boundary between man and machine, he argues, intuitive technology is merely a logical progression of the various ways we have historically interacted with the world around us. From writings on a cave wall, to manual typesetting, to 4D headsets – all of these are simply methods of communication, and of distribution. “Our systems of connected media can only distribute words, sounds, and images as they are sent and received by people,” he wrote in “Gramophone, Film, Typewriter”. “Above all, the systems do not compute data. They do not produce an output which, under computer control, would transform any algorithm into any interface effect, to the point at which people will no longer be able to make sense of their senses."
There is some plausibility in this theory; however, it does show warning signs of Kittler’s characteristic “all-or-nothing” approach, slanting towards the apocalyptic with regards to his claim that people “will no longer be able to make sense of their senses”. Surely, one might argue, systems such as these invite us to look at the way we interact with media, and thereby question what it is to really "sense" something. The breakdown between the physical and the virtual, resulting in said intuitive technology, is merely another form of art, and of world-making. The mere fact that something is comprised solely of algorithms does not lessen its impact or make it any less "real". Fundamentally, Kittler does not believe that technology functions as an extension of the body. His primary reasoning for this is that technology is autonomous, and that facilitating the idea of a link between man and machine places a disproportionate amount of focus on human intervention. This idea ignores the fact that one of the characterising elements of a human being, the feature that evolutionary scientists believe separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom, is our ability to use tools. If we assume that “technology” refers implicitly to anything which permits us to enact certain behaviours – recording, transmitting, creating, and interacting – then it becomes synonymous with our use of tools. This notion ties in to some of the ideas presented by media theorists Gumpert and Cathcart, who propose that media are an inherent part of the human communication process – and also draw parallels between biological and technological evolution. Similarly, Heidegger theorised that media came about as a way of capturing and “reframing” nature, claiming that man has always been linked to technology (even if the technology itself changes and evolves). However, he does not place either man or technology in a position of power over the other – leaving the question of which entity is truly in control unanswered.
In “Black Box” and “A Visit From the Goon Squad”, though, it is society that is depicted as being in control of media, rather than the individual. Capitalism, as a human construction, has produced these things; our world is not technology-driven, but rather driven by human conditions (political, social, economic, and so on). Whilst this depiction is not without its flaws – after all, there are problems with technology that exceed such conditions – it nonetheless emphasises the fact that technology is very much a part of us, ingrained in our methods of communication, societal structures, and overall ways of being. “By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras,” wrote Donna J. Haraway in her posthumanist essay “The Cyborg Manifesto”. “We are theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs.” Whilst this statement is largely a metaphorical one, intended to criticise the rigid binaries of modern life and the game of identity politics, Haraway’s perspective has very real (and tangible) overtones. As certain boundaries begin to blur, arbitrary categories such as gender, sexuality, artificiality, and physicality have grown less and less relevant, resulting in the strange hybridity that characterises modern life.
"'More human than human' is our motto.” Such is the slogan for the Tyrell Corporation (later renamed the Wallace Corporation) in Blade Runner, a company whose preliminary function is to manufacture humanoid robots, or “Replicants”, that are almost entirely indistinguishable from real people. It is almost a matter of instinct to draw parallels between this film – indeed the whole vast-ranging canon of “android films” – and Egan’s short story, “Black Box”. Published initially as a series of tweets and then later transcribed in the New York Times in a more traditional short-story format, “Black Box” is set in a seemingly imminent future in which human beings receive implants that allow them to carry out covert government missions: cameras in their retinas, recording devices in their ears, data ports in their feet, and so on. In science, computing, and engineering, a black box is “a device, system or object which can be viewed in terms of its inputs and outputs (or transfer characteristics), without any knowledge of its internal workings”. On the whole, this is how the narrator of “Black Box” is perceived – by the government for which she works, by the terrorists whose home she infiltrates, and even in part by herself. The question at hand, then, is this: does “Black Box” emphasise an erosion of the divide between humanity and technology, or does it set them at odds with each other? There is evidence for both perspectives. The narrator of the story (implicitly Dolly’s daughter Lulu, first seen briefly in “A Visit From the Goon Squad”) is a hybrid – a cyborg. This is one of the most common ways in which an author may literalise the merging of man and machine; and throughout the story it is made clear that the narrator’s implanted technology is a core part of her, as much so as her nerves and skin.
“Since beauties carry neither pocketbooks nor timepieces, you cannot credibly transport recording devices. A microphone has been implanted just beyond the first turn of your right ear canal. Activate the microphone by pressing the triangle of cartilage across your ear opening. You will hear a faint whine as recording begins.” It is impossible to overlook the relationship between passages like this one and Kittler’s introduction to “Gramophone, Film, Typewriter”: “Total media link on a digital base will erase the very concept of medium. Instead of wiring people and technologies, absolute knowledge will run on an endless loop." (Kittler, 2.) One might also note that the narrator’s operation of her internal technology is something visceral and immediate. She does not push a button or flick a switch; she presses her cartilage, a part of her physical body that has presumably not been tampered with. The aforementioned contemporary melding of immediacy and hypermediacy is thus played out on a tangible level: whilst there is an undeniable separation between the narrator’s body and her implanted microphone (hypermediacy), the way in which she uses it is physical, natural, and instinctive (immediacy). Moreover, she is the one controlling it, a nod towards the idea of social constructivism, and a clear antithesis to Kittler’s belief that “in computers everything becomes number: imageless, soundless, and wordless quantity." The narrator’s humanity, clearly evident in spite of her mechanical add-ons, makes this stance appear somewhat reductive. After all, everything that is can be condensed to the sum of its components; what matters is not how the thing is created (that is, the interface), but how we perceive it.
“Reach between your right fourth and pinky toes (if right-handed) and remove the Data Plug from your Universal Port.…Spread apart your toes and gently reinsert the plug, now fused to your subject’s handset, into your Universal Port. You will feel the surge as the data flood your body. The surge may contain feeling, memory, heat, cold, longing, pain, even joy. Although the data are alien, the memories dislodged will be your own.” There are echoes of this passage in the newly released Blade Runner: 2049, which centres around the unreliability of memory and the presence of the human within the nonhuman. “I have memories, but I can’t tell if they’re real,” the protagonist confesses, referring to the Tyrell Corporation’s method of implanting false memories within the brains of their Replicants in order to imbue them with a kind of pseudo-humanity. Memory and communication: two elements which we might see as intrinsically human, but are in fact equally likely to have been manufactured, digitised. In “Memory”, Bernard Stiegler commented on the recent trend of exteriorising one’s memories using mnemotechnics (devices designed to facilitate artificial retention, such as smartphones or data drives). As hypomnesia – the giving of our knowledge over to non-human artefacts – grows ever-more prevalent, so does the boundary between man and machine become more nebulous, less easy to define.
It is perhaps this which has given rise to the relatively recent fictional trend of quasi-human entities questioning their own sense of personhood: Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Spike Jonze’s Her, Alex Garland’s Ex Machina, Alex Proyas’ I, Robot, and countless more. Communication and memory are inextricably tangled together in works such as these – and so it is in Egan’s novels, most prominently in “Black Box” but similarly evident in “A Visit From the Goon Squad”. Here, Egan moves into a kind of speculative future, examining what it means for the supposedly human instinct of communication to become digitised. In the last chapter the characters use handsets to communicate with one another, employing a form of exaggerated text-speak which seems to focus around eliminating as many unnecessary letters as possible. This introduction of a new form of media makes it seem as though this segment takes place in the distant future, in an unrecognisable society based around bizarre linguistic abbreviations – although we can infer from the presence of Benny and Scotty, children of the late sixties, that it cannot be that far away from our current time. The physicalist mode of thought sees technology as an extension of the body, an idea that is in line with the aforementioned link between biological and technological evolution. This can be seen in instances where the human body is literally extended by technology: pacemakers, artificial limbs, motion sensors, iris scanners, and so on. In this sense, both “Black Box” and “A Visit From the Goon Squad” mirror our own society, taking a logical step forwards to show us the ways in which technology can function both as a part of us and as something we utilise in order to live our lives to their maximum potential. In “The Goon Squad”, Lulu’s method of communication shows us how text has begun to take the place of speech, whilst Allison’s slideshow presentation skews reality in accordance with the medium used. However, this method of narration does not necessarily devalue Allison and Lulu’s humanity. One can look at “The Goon Squad” either as a dystopian vision of an over-technologized society, or as an unbiased depiction of the potential for cultural change – but always as a work that emphasises our connection with the machine, and its status as an extension of our most primal human instincts.
One might, in addition to these points, look at how Egan’s works are structured. Neither follows a traditional literary format. “A Visit From the Good Squad” remediates vinyl, text messages and PowerPoint; “Black Box” remediates social media (namely Twitter) and digital communication. Discussing her writing process, Egan explicitly referenced LPs as an inspiration for “A Visit From the Goon Squad”. The basis for this comparison is easy enough to see: the narrative unfolds in segments that compare and contrast with one another, tell different stories, use different styles, employ evolution and interconnection, and heavily rely upon music as a thematic device. The organisation of chapters is also a feature that must be taken into consideration. There is a side A, and side B; journalists function as guest singers; the PowerPoint presentation is a pause before the climactic finale; and the release of the chapters as short stories prior to the novel’s publication mirror the distribution of tracks as singles. At the utmost level, Egan acts as a sound artist, distributing her novels as audiobooks, running a website with a character map, creating stories through tweets, and so on. This peculiar form of intermediality brings to mind some of Kittler’s comments in “Gramophone, Film, Typewriter” – most notably his analysis of the interrelation between literature and music. Reading, he opines, is like hallucinating a meaning between letters and lines, whereas noise (and music) delivers the meaning directly into the cerebral cortex, collapsing the dividing line between the existence of a thing and our subsequent comprehension of it. With recorded sound, hallucinations “become real”, as if there were “no distance between the recorded voice and the listening ears”. “In order to store the sound sequences of speech, literature has to arrest them in the system of twenty-six letters and thereby exclude noise sequences from the beginning,” Kittler writes. “It is no coincidence that this system includes, as a subsystem, the seven tones, the diatonic system from A to H that forms the foundation of occidental music.”
If noise sequences are excluded, one might ask, then what is the implication for people who are born blind, and who can only understand Braille letters by linking them to sound? Or even for those who mentally sound out the letters of the alphabet when reading it? It may, of course, be the case that Kittler is simply referring to the filtration of meaning that takes place in literature – the subconscious association between the sign, the signifier, and the signified. We associate the shape of a letter with a sound, and the shape of a word with a concept. This filtration is arguably erased by recording software (which unites the twin disciplines of visual comprehension and auditory comprehension, erasing the "signifier" and streaming the sign itself directly to our ears). This is merely another aspect of Kittler’s stance against the integration of man and machine, but the obvious counter-argument must be that the act of listening is an act of filtration, just like the act of reading. We hear sounds, sounds that have no meaning outside of the significance we assign them; we translate those sounds; we link them to a common concept, one that is part of the shared cultural space we inhabit. We do this automatically, with no conscious acknowledgment of the filtration process that is taking place. There is a clear link here between how our brains process information and how computers process data – it is an immediate and instinctual process, centred around converting information from a medium that we cannot comprehend to one that we can.
Egan’s perspective on technology thus seems to be fundamentally at odds with Kittler’s theories. Communication in “The Goon Squad” is reliant upon technology, but this reliance is not reductive, nor is it deterministic. The characters’ use of it is a conscious choice; they are the ones in control, the ones sending information (the narrator in “Black Box”) or filtering their own internal narratives through the lens of music, computer programs, text-speak, and online magazine articles (“The Goon Squad”). In this way, technology can be seen as an extension of their thoughts, actions, and even bodies. The narrator of “Black Box” is at once a technological marvel and a human being; the two are not mutually exclusive. Her body is so intimately connected with its implanted machinery that the twin disciplines of biology and technology become intertwined, synergetic. Immediacy, something which might be defined as an instant human connection, is likewise inseparable here from the more technologically-centred hypermediacy. Kittler wrote, “The historical synchronicity of cinema, phonography, and typewriting separated optical, acoustic, and written data flows, thereby rendering them autonomous. That electric or electronic media can recombine them does not change the fact of their differentiation.” Phonography – or music – is so deeply integrated into the structure of “A Visit From the Goon Squad” that the two cannot be separated, or “differentiated”. Visual input, which for the sake of argument we will correlate with “cinema”, also plays a key role (most notably in Alison’s PowerPoint chapter) – and is again a vital element of the overall narrative.
It is therefore evident, at least within Egan’s works, that humanity and technology are not separate, but symbiotic. Memory that has been digitised is still memory; a human being with a bionic limb or a pacemaker is still a human being; communication through text-speak is still communication; stories that take the form of audiobooks, hyperlinks, or Twitter feeds are still stories. In fact, there is no way to describe human essence that is not, in some sense, media-dependent. Mediation is where life happens; it is the condition of being at one with the technological world. Through her use of different literary formats, Egan breaks down the oppositions between artificial ways of looking and human ways of looking, and in doing so emphasises the digitisation of media (and our intimate relationship with it) as the ultimate defining point of our current generation.