To steal a title from my friend Charlie’s recent FB post, this is what would happen if hyperarchivalism had only advanced as far as the Nintendo Entertainment System (or something). Enjoy, enjoy.
Of Archival Interest
Two Small Bits of Hyperarchivalism
The first bit is an amazing adaptation of The Great Gatsby into a NES game! We are truly hyperarchival when a work of classic Am. lit. gets translated into a classic late-20th c. interactive medium–the 8-bit vid.–in 2011.
Also, my good friend Dave pointed me to a review of Repo Men that has a very different take on the film than my own–i.e. it isn’t as nearly gleefully celebratory, sadly.
Some Archival Metaphysics: Caprica and Digital Heaven
[Note: I’m not wholly satisfied w/ this post, but that has more to do w/ the fact I’m just beginning to formulate some of these questions/ideas, and they consequently are quite obviously not developed.]
The SyFy network’s recent attempt to capitalize on the success of Battlestar Galactica (Redux) ended fairly inauspiciously after only one season. Caprica was canceled in October, 2010, and was off the air until SyFy “burned” the last five episodes on January 4th, 2011. I only realized this a week later, and experienced the odd enjoyment that comes from watching five hours straight of a serial television show that ends coherently.
What I finally understood about Caprica in the end, something I was perhaps conscious of during its short run but didn’t really articulate to myself, was that I don’t really think the Caprica vs. BSG comparison is particularly interesting. Yes, they’re clearly in the same universe, and are a compelling example of what Pawel Frelick calls a “dispersed narrative”[1] when considered together, but in terms of the aesthetic unity of their very different projects, it was always clear that Caprica’s production strove to distance itself from BSG, not only to attract new viewers (of course), but to create something stand-alone. The various monetary reasons for such a goal aside, I not only appreciated this consistently, but it made the Caprica/BSG discussion slightly moot/obvious/metacritical/etc., because the show ultimately achieved being able to be considered on its own, and I think it did this primarily through having as its major point of intertextuality posthuman singularity narratives in general, rather than BSG specifically. Sadly, it also failed to draw enough viewers to underwrite its fairly large budget.
Which, if there is an assessment to be made of the last episode, was ultimately in the show’s interest. They were able to give a glimpse of “Things to Come” that was not only satisfying narratively, but implied more story. W/ the dismal failures of final episodes in epic SF series of late (you know who you are), Caprica was refreshing in many, many ways. (Which is also perhaps b/c it doesn’t have to end, but just give a glimpse of the future of the world the BSG franchise is building.) But of course all of this is to say that though there may be some compelling discussions involving many aspects of this show, most of them are underscored by a persistent self-consciousness of not only SF conventions, but more importantly posthuman SF conventions; so I think it would be safe to say Caprica is entering into a posthuman discussion tropically: i.e. certain aspects of posthuman SF have enough widespread use at this point that we could categorize/list how Caprica draws from the posthuman archive.[2] Perhaps just such a list:
1) Digital, simulated utopia/heaven. Caprica projects the possibility for a space of limitless potential where immortality is a “reality.” That this space is necessarily flawed is also part of the point.
2) AI. The emergence of AI, both in anthropomorphic terms and more machinic ones. (This should probably be #1. . . .)
3) Robots w/ guns. Self-explanatory.
4) Eerily contemporary in terms of dress/civilization, but of course aestheticized in some other historical time period, in this case the American 1950s. The mobster stuff was cool, but difficult to care about other than its twist on Adama’s origin story, which, well, rests on the kid’s eye color.
5) MMOs.
6) Digital terrorists.
7) A Media Mogul, in this case a protagonist.
8) And though there are surely many others, the most important one for me: a sense of hyperarchival realism.[3]
Part of how I’m imagining hyperarchival realism as a project is that it not only attempts to underscore the posthumanity it is tropically imagining, but to do so in a fashion that shows a thorough fidelity to contemporaneity. There is a seamless integration of technology and humans throughout Caprica (always of course blurring the distinction b/t the two), but, and this is the point, it achieves this integration mostly w/ technology we already have.[4] And the dominant technology is obviously information.
How information tech. plays in Caprica: Zoe, the AI “ghost” daughter of the Media Mogul father, has composed an informational-search-algorithm that convincingly passes the Turing test (in short), creating a digital “copy” of herself. The original Zoe dies, the copy lives on (becoming a goddess in the virtual realm). This copy of Zoe is achieved through pure information. Original Zoe’s brain is not downloaded, inserted, copied, or in any other way invaded. Copy Zoe emerges through a conglomeration of info. In other words, she is a hyperarchival consciousness, emerging out of the gathering and interpretation of info.[5]
The major conflict of the show, esp. in terms of the historical and political past the BSG universe is trying to articulate, is finding and accessing this algorithm, this program, this info. The Media Mogul father needs it to run his killer robots(/apps) more efficiently, and the terrorist monotheists need it to achieve what they call “Apotheosis”—which is a kind of digital rapture: you die in reality and then you immediately reappear as a copy of yourself in digital heaven—a landscape and program that is endlessly manipulable.[6]
And this is where the show I think really achieves something, it asks (and doesn’t answer the question), is this as good as a heaven we’ll ever get? This space, the space of Apotheosis, is composed by the fringe monotheists in the polytheistic world of Caprica. But the real question of the show should perhaps be, wouldn’t it precisely be the atheists who built such a place? Those who didn’t participate in belief and faith, and just built an afterlife? Would this not be better in some way?
The show says unequivocally no, but I think it does so for the wrong reasons. Digital simulation is everywhere a part of the world of Caprica, something we never get a sense of in BSG. The original was so steeped in a kind of posthuman steampunk (i.e. 1950s tech.), that to imagine a future world not more dominated by artificial landscapes seems slightly curious even these few years after BSG.
But what Caprica does do is ask the historically major metaphysical questions, and places them firmly upon a ground of information tech., upon the archive. In this sense, in Caprica and other posthuman objects like it, metaphysics is now “archival metaphysics,” and this to me seems important, for though Caprica may not be doing anything terribly novel in the genre, b/c it is/was such a part of a major franchise, it is codifying the genre in a specific type of fashion, realizing that the old questions have to get asked all over again when the archive becomes a space in which to “live” an afterlife. And really, hasn’t the archive always been such a place?
[1] Sorry, couldn’t find a link for this one. He was the keynote speaker at the Science Fiction Research Association Conference in 2010, and delivered a talk called “Gained in Translation: Dispersed Narratives in Contemporary Culture,” where he outlined this term in great detail. Perhaps the best example of what he is calling a dispersed narrative is Southland Tales, which tells its entire tale over a graphic novel and a film. I’ve also thought that perhaps a better term for this would be “distributed narrative.”
[2] Of course I’m sure this has been done, and better than myself, but it should be noted that much of my thinking here is very larval at the moment.
[3] Note: I’m working on this term right now, so I do not quite have a coherent definition, but I am getting very close.
[4] This has been where William Gibson has been so strong as of late (w/ perhaps the exception of Zero History). (Also, b/c I read it awhile ago and didn’t post anything, perhaps a lengthy archival quote chosen somewhat at random from ZH: “‘The holy grail of the surveillance industry is facial recognition. Of course, they say it’s not. It’s already here, to a degree. Not operational. Larval. Can’t read you if you’re black, say, and might mistake you for me, but the hardware and software have potentials, awaiting later upgrade. Though what you need to understand, to understand forgetting, is that nobody’s actually eyeballing much of what a given camera sees. They’re digital, after all. Stored data sits there, stored. Not images, then, just ones and zeros. Something happens that requires official scrutiny, the ones and zeros are converted to images. But’—and he reached up to touch the edge of the bottom of the birdcage library—‘say there’s a gentleman’s agreement” [302] [Also, how cool would a bar called The Birdcage Library be?].) (Also, it is not wholly the case that Caprica uses tech. we already have.)
[6] A minor plot question—if the tech. exists for this type of multiplicitous AI, why are there only 13 brands of human-looking Cylon in the original BSG?
Taylor Baldwin: Post-Apocalyptic Studio Practice
Check out my bud Taylor Baldwin talking about his studio practice as a kind of ethical pre-figuration of post-apocalyptic artistic production, and, of course, as an entry into the archive that can never be destroyed (i.e. biodegrade):
English Grad Students in Love Part I
So, the following looks like it’s gonna be a series I’m engaged in creating with Racheal:
DFW Archive: Deleted Sections of Infinite Jest
Newsweek (of all publications. . . ) has just made available many pages from the David Foster Wallace Archive at the University of Texas available. Check out a bunch of stuff that didn’t make the cut for the final draft of Infinite Jest here.
So You Want to Get a PhD in the Humanities?
This has been far too ubiquitous on a specific social networking site, and is really just far too spot on for me to not post here. Getting a PhD in the humanities may not be apocalyptic, but it sure feels like it.
Can the Hyperarchive Make Our Choices for Us?
Well, according to chief executive of Google, Eric Schmidt, we at least want it to. Read William Gibson’s interesting op-ed piece on Schmidt’s statement and some of its implications here. Most of what he is talking about is old hat to most, but I esp. like the fact that he more-or-less says that google is a super-organism, and an Artificial Intelligence, even if it in no way resembles what we imagined AI to be. Furthermore, it means the archive is alive! It’s alive! Are we all royally screwed? or is the hyperarchive just going to have a really hard time choosing where it itself is going to eat dinner. Let’s hope so (so many choices. . .).
Prelude to Cataclysm (An Addendum): What ELSE Happens When Bartleby Inhabits the World of Warcraft
A few months ago I posted a lengthy entry on a small socio-political experiment I performed in the turgid world of MMORPGs, “Prelude to Cataclysm: What Happens When Bartleby Inhabits the World of Warcraft.” Needless to say, this writing marked a kind of terminus in my experience of Azeroth. I have been more-or-less entirely absent from WoW since then, but for whatever reason last night I got a burr in my nose and re-visited Thescrivener.[1] As before, I did nothing but hit the number 8, uttering “I would prefer not to.” (There were also a few variations of this general statement. What they might have been will become apparent.) The evening turned out to be disturbing, upsetting, vile, and depressing.
To put it as simply as possible: the political exigencies of a fictional character created by one of the most impressive American writers of the 19th C., when actually explored, turn out to have been perhaps over-stated by some of the very impressive thinkers of the late 20th C. (Again, see above link.)
To put it even more simply: when Bartleby inhabits the World of Warcraft she gets raped. Repeatedly.
Last night I made Thescrivener sit in the AH doorway, uttering “I would prefer not to” on occasion, and quite quickly another character came along and began dancing right on top of her. This would have been funny/fairly innocuous, if not for the fact that a) he was basically rubbing his crotch in her face, simulating fellatio, and b) that this character’s actions were picked up by some less savory folk. (He disappeared, and I regret, esp. considering what happened afterward, not paying more attention to who he was initially.) Taking a cue from this man, one Eroza,[2] a female toon (but clearly a male player), proceeded to rub her crotch in my face on and off for well over an hour. Following this, a whole group of players (see n.2 below), for a really obscenely extended period of time, took turns, well (there’s no easier/less-blunt way to put this), fucking Thescrivener’s face.
The following is some of the dialogue from these unsavory folks:
“I think she’s a keeper.”
“She’s not much of a talker. . . she’ll be too busy w/ this.” (“This” should of course be obvious.)
“Yes, not polite to talk w/ your mouth full.”
“kk.” (Slang for okay.)
“Who’s next?”[3]
I am in no way claiming I was raped, nor do I feel like I was raped, but Thescrivener was repeatedly. And statements like, “I would prefer not to be raped,” and “I would prefer not to give you fellatio,” were not only ignored but laughed at.
Sure, these acts were vile, obscene, wrong, disturbing, and ultimately depressing. And of course who could expect anything more from people playing WoW, probably teenagers getting their rocks off. But it does reveal something quite profound about “humanity,” I feel. Namely, that rape and other violations are assuredly a possible outcome of a Bartlebian stance. The fact that I was able to maintain the purity of this stance—i.e. I said/did nothing other than expressing my preference not to do what I was being forced to do—leads, quite logically, to horror. (One can easily extend this in all sorts of hyperbolic ways.) And though this is assuredly something I considered initially, I was blinded by the politico-theoretical questions posed by the Bartlebian stance to see how Thescrivener could actually be treated in “reality.” In other words, w/o many people mobilizing to enact Bartleby, a lone Bartleby will be submitted to tortures of whatever imaginable kind, simply b/c people can. The question then may very well be, how is Bartleby simply not a perfect object for unadulterated sadism?
And this is a question I’m frankly too unnerved to answer, as I woke up this morning profoundly doubting humanity capable of much else beyond rapacious horror. Kurtz was right. When you confront the hard kernel of the Real, there is nothing else to say then simply acknowledge it w/ the phrase: “The horror. The horror.”
Don’t get me wrong, I realize WoW is virtual, a simulation, and that one of its attractions is that people can enact all sorts of fantasmatic desires they can’t in “real” life (like killing hordes of goblins/trolls/zombies/etc.). But at the end of the day, there are still humans on the other side of the screen doing things to other humans. The simple fact that these acts have no consequences (legal or otherwise) should in no manner lessen the brutality of the experience. If anything, it should make it worse. For if we take the famous Assassin at his word, “nothing is true, everything is permitted,” then WoW is the hyper-extension of this truth. It doesn’t, however, mean that we should take the Assassin at his word. If Azeroth is a world where “nothing is true, everything is permitted,” then I truly wish there were far more Bartlebys there.
[1] Seriously, if you don’t know what I’m talking about, read the first post. Link above in the first sentence.
[2] I have no desire to really research the perpetrators of what could be called nothing less than a heinous crime if it occurred in a(nother) World, but I did find these comments by Eroza online. The other toons involved, if anyone cares (and I urge you to, if at all possible), were the following members of the Galakrond community: Arcangle, Gabrius, Edanna, Galistin (esp. bad), Gonthorean, Malgant, Orhide, and Pathagarus. Most of them were b/t lvls 60-70.
[3] Thescrivener was also turned into a bunny rabbit for a period of time, and the violation continued. Why it was necessary to make an already passive creature into an even more passive object for the purposes of degradation were, it seems to me, unnecessary. But then how necessary is any of this anyway?
A (Little) Bit of DFW Archival Nonsense
(Note: for many the following may not come as news whatsoever, as the important events occurred in 2004 and 2009 respectively. For the rest, enjoy.)
Just read Jay Murray Siskind’s review of Boswell’s Understanding DFW and DFW’s Oblivion, “An Undeniably Controversial and Perhaps Even Repulsive Talent,” from a 2004 issue of Modernism/modernity. And the thing is, it took me all of, oh, four seconds to realize that this review was “written” by the same Jay Murray Siskind who so famously described the Most Photographed Barn in America in Don DeLillo’s White Noise. What is so incredible about this very small “hoax,” is that it took almost 5 years–and many serious citations of the review by graduate students, mind you–for anyone to notice it, namely Mark Sample over at Sample Reality. (Also read about it here and here and here.) Even more surprising w/r/t this “hoax” is the clear fact that Hal Incandenza is referenced as an author in the first footnote! For anyone working on DFW to not notice this, nor, perhaps even more criminally, to not read footnotes in an article on DFW (!), well. . . .
Sample and others are clear to point out that this “Littlest Literary Hoax” suggests some fairly dark things about academic publishing and scholarship–i.e. did anyone actually read the article in the first place (or does anyone even read literary scholarship much at all, for that matter); that more people have responded in the electronic realm (i.e. no published self-account in Modernism/modernity); and that a whole army of grads and undergrads referenced the article w/o any awareness whatsoever of White Noise (seriously, isn’t White Noise, like, as close to required pomo reading as it gets [w/ the exception, say, of Beloved]? Like Cont. Am. Lit.’s version of Relativity for Physicists?). But, then again, I wonder how many people, like myself, quickly caught the hoax, laughed a bit to themselves, found it clever, and immediately suggestive of a whole host of interesting pomo/popomo(/not to mention mo) debates that DFW is so clearly involved in, and then simply moved on, for it was essentially nothing more than a (fairly good and funny) book review–these various (fictional) readers not feeling the need, unlike my current self, to comment much further on it in any other forum.
Either way, though, the archival implications of this are fairly interesting, if for no other reason than DFW’s clear affinity for DeLillo; my own sense is that the very explosive archival nature of DFW’s work almost calls forth or demands that Hal Incandenza enter into the real world of ideas through a footnote to some obscure and (clearly) overlooked academic article. Hyperachivization indeed. (Also, Incandenza’s title is telling: How I Conquered Analysis: Ten Ways to Dupe Your Therapist [Elisingborg: Yorick Press, 1998], or perhaps a better title would be: Ten Ways to Dupe Literary Scholars Who Clearly Haven’t Read Enough (of What They’re Supposed to be Getting Paid to Read) and Didn’t Even Get the Hamlet! References in the Footnote.)
Anyway, just thought I’d (re-)share. And now, (back) to the archive, and step on it!
The Hyperarchival Parallax 