TechGnosis

by Erik Davis

  Though technology and engineering have historically been considered masculine provinces, Plant argues that digital networks, and the imbrication of those networks with culture, economy, and DNA, are undermining a patriarchal agenda she identifies with control, identity, and individual agency. Network technologies and computational devices breed multiplicities, not stable identities, although established structures of power constantly try to constrain and exploit this turbulence. All along, working women have been forced to engage the nitty-gritty labor of the network: telephone switches, typewriter keys, microprocessor assembly, the proto-algorithms of the loom, even the multitasking of domestic labor. Decades before men invented electronic brains, women who performed calculations for a living were known as “computers.” Nowadays, when the complexity of technologies designed to increase human control instead breeds an unpredictable chaos, digital women may find themselves strangely fit for the new environment.

  Plant’s exuberant vision can be seen as a futuristic retort to ecofeminists, who often embrace nonhierarchical systems thinking in the name of Romantic images of women, nature, and the Goddess. Plant too is a kind of pagan, but a technological pagan who recognizes that we cannot know what alliances the earth’s chthonic energies and alien intelligences may have already made with machines. Alchemy begins as a metallurgie art, after all, its later dreams of mystic redemption and transuranic elements forming atop an archaic engagement with animist matter. We still divide ancient times into ages of copper, bronze, and iron, as if human history itself was a froth given off by the intelligent evolution of metals, a process that today transcends metallic elements, as we pass into an age defined by silicon, bio-chips, crystalline lattices, and the bizarre substances leaking out of materials science. Teilhard may have been right to see technologies as part and parcel of Terran evolution, an artificial life striving toward complexity and even mind. But he may have grossly overestimated humanity’s role in the plan. Perhaps we are nothing more than meat-brained midwives, “sex organs,” as McLuhan said, “of the machine world.”8

  As below, so above: our cultural and psychic lives increasingly reflect the patterns and temporal signatures of this machine world and its expanding networks. Though Brian Eno was right to complain that computers still do not have enough Africa in them, the contraptions are definitely learning to pound out polyrhythms. Mainframes are mutating into networked workstations; robots learn to probe the world through decentralized neural nets; communication fragments into packet-switched data transfers; the centralized Von Neumann architecture of early computing begins to give way to massively parallel structures that distribute control and multiply connections. Our bodyminds are struggling to adapt to these new multiplicities. Just listen to the dance music that samplers and digital microprocessors churn out today. Electronic beats once characterized by their precise “mechanical” monotony have flowered into the chaotic, rhythmic swarms of breakbeat or dubstep, while mash-up experimentalists and DJs cut and splice sonic Frankensteins out of myriad strands of musical and aural code. This is the metal machine music for a liquid silicon world, whose inhabitants are learning to follow the beats of many different drummers at once.

  Multiplicity also rules the Internet, with its growing variety of media types, its lack of a controlling center, and the horizontal links it establishes among various people, networks, autonomous programs, institutions, and genres of expression. The Internet sets the cultural and psychic stage for a multitasking maelstrom of voices and machines, a meshwork of interchanges that undermines, to widely varying degrees, stable notions of knowledge, authority, and cultural production. Source code and shareware spread like dandelion tufts; facts and opinions float free of academia or the fourth estate; exploding populations of mathematical creatures compete and replicate; Hot Wheels fanzines and remote-control gardens lie a keystroke away from genealogical databases or the latest shots of stellar nebulae. On the surface, at least, it looks a lot like chaos.

  Or maybe it looks like the nihilistic free fall known as the postmodern condition. Long ago, postmodernists proclaimed that the “master narratives” that once organized the story of modern civilization into stable categories of knowledge and identity had spent their force without achieving their goals. Language was no longer a field for truth and expression but a labyrinthine network of referential ambiguities and structural codes that can never be resolved or mastered. As such, the West’s canons of cultural authority and its “logocentric” discourses of truth and knowledge were little more than strategies of power, provisional and problematic, if not actually tyrannical. In their place, postmodernists offered up a decentered world of endless fragmentation, a field where human identity becomes a moving target and history dissolves into a pandemoniac play of signs and simulacra.

  In the 1980s, writers and artists influenced by poststructuralist philosophy started wrestling with electronic text, computer networks, and digital culture, and many found that these “discursive objects” absorbed the new monster slang like a sponge. Obsessed with technologies of power and violently allergic to humanism, poststructuralists felt at home amid symbionts and abstract machines; deconstruction in particular seemed like a virus specifically designed to infect the Borgesian library of hypertext. A subgenre of cybertheory arose, with Donna Haraway finishing off an enormously influential manifesto proclaiming she’d rather be a cyborg than a goddess. But one of the most compelling poststructuralist images to wend its way into digital culture was sampled from the old book of nature. In contrast to the tree, whose rooted and vertical unity has long made it a favorite map for the hierarchical organization of knowledge and patriarchal authority, cyberculture embraced the rhizome. As Sadie Plant explains, “Grasses, orchids, lilies, and bamboos have no roots, but rhizomes, creeping underground stems which spread sideways on dispersed, horizontal networks of swollen or slender filaments and produce aerial shoots along their length and surface as distribution of plants. They defy categorization as individuated entities.”9 And so do the myriad networks that make up the Internet, that wild digital weed whose very name underscores the interruptions and interbreeding that give postmodernists such interminable delight.

  In the long run, I suspect that some of the most valuable and productive aspects of postmodern thought may lie in its confrontation with digital technology, whose alien cunning it helped to articulate and whose posthuman possibilities it helped to unfold. The symbiotic relationship between French-fried discourse and the new machines cuts both ways, of course: much of cyberculture also embodies the channel-surfing decadence, depthless fragmentation, and smug obsession with self-referential codes and jargon that characterize postmodern culture at its worst. But postmodernism is a phase to pass through, culturally and intellectually, not to reject in the name of corroded certainties or feeble moral plaints. Already the infectious memes of postmodern thought are losing their virulence, as the cultural bloodstream begins to absorb and adapt to their biting half-truths, becoming cannier and more robust in the process. The fact that Parisian intellectuals and the new machines were unknowingly moving in tandem is itself evidence of the larger choreographies of history that such theorists deny.

  Peering into the haze ahead, the postmodern interpretation of the Internet as a transgendered interzone of cyborgs and ruptures seems no more definitive than the middle-of-the-road vision embodied by Wikipedia, PayPal, and cable attacks on net neutrality. We have only begun to explore the creative forms of knowledge and experience that cross-pollinated virtual multimedia data-structures like the Internet will birth. These omnivorous systems can render almost any conceivable object into a shared language of bits: images, text, voice, architecture, real-time data feeds, video, animation, sound, VR, artificial life, interactive maps, autonomous algorithms and codes. As more and more dimensions of the real are translated into the Boolean Esperanto of binary code, we open up the possibility for utterly unexpected modes of synthesis to arise, patterns of connection and integration that for now seem barely con
ceivable. But how could we know them in advance? If they come, they will emerge from a vibrating matrix of information, image, and mathematical mutation whose processing powers and universal scale have simply never existed before. Of course they will arise as an imagination. Of course they will take the form of surprise.

  Pierre Lévy calls one possible representational matrix the “cosmopedia”: a dynamic and kaleidoscopic space of knowledge that provides new ways of understanding the world and of being in the world. In this cosmic and cinematic encyclopedia, the collective knowledge of the thinking community, a category that must include machines as well, becomes materialized “in an immense multidimensional electronic image, perpetually metamorphosing, bustling with the rhythm of quasi-animate inventions and discoveries.”10 In contrast to the fragmented hypertext that defines what Lévy calls “commodity space,” the cosmopedia will provide “a new kind of simplicity,” a simplicity that arises from the principles of organization native to knowledge space: the fold, the pattern, the resonating crystal. The chaos may unfold a cosmos after all.

  Herman Hesse provided a literary and mystic glimpse of Lévy’s cosmopedia in The Glass Bead Game, whose publication in 1943 helped win Hesse a Nobel Prize. Set in a distant future devoid of the usual science-fiction trappings, Hesse’s novel presents itself as a biography of Joseph Knecht, a master of the Glass Bead Game and a leader of Castalia, a utopian community of scholar-monks and contemplative aesthetes. But perhaps the most interesting “character” in the book is the eponymous Game itself, whose spiritual roots, we are told, can be traced back to ancient China, the Hellenistic Gnostics, and the golden age of Islamic-Moorish culture. First appearing as an abacus-like rack of glass beads used by students of music to represent and recombine various themes and contrapuntal structures, the Game eventually developed into an interdisciplinary device whose hieroglyphic language of “symbols and formula” enabled aficionados to play with elements drawn from the entire range of thought and expression.

  All the insights, noble thoughts, and works of art that the human race has produced, in its creative eras, all that subsequent periods of scholarly study have reduced to concepts and converted into intellectual property—on all this immense body of intellectual values the Glass Bead Game player plays like an organist on an organ. And this organ has attained an almost unimaginable perfection; its manuals and pedals range over the entire intellectual cosmos; its stops are almost beyond number. Theoretically this instrument is capable of reproducing in the Game the entire intellectual content of the universe.11

  We are told that an individual game might begin with an astronomical configuration, or the theme of a Bach fugue, or a sentence out of Leibniz or the Upanishads. Players would then use allusions, intuitive leaps, and formal correspondences in order to develop their chosen theme through kindred concepts, while also juxtaposing themes with contrary images or equations in order to weave a kind of cognitive counterpoint. One could imagine playing links between Indra’s net and the monadology, for example, and then introducing the Borg as an ironic twist.

  Allowing the Game’s own magic of intuitive leaps to infect our minds, it is not so hard to see why Hesse’s fabulous instrument has inspired a number of computer visionaries and network minds. Today we are faced with the enormous challenge of how to sort, index, search, link, and navigate through multidimensional fields of data that crisscross a variety of different formal genres: text, sound, image, algorithm. Indeed, the creative design of interactive hypermedia databases has become one of the key arts of the age. This emerging craft is more than a matter of library science; it is a work redolent of profound psychological, cultural, and even philosophical implications. Charles Cameron, one of a host of game designers who have constructed playable versions of the Glass Bead Game, argues that Hesse’s “virtual music of ideas” adds a distinctly aesthetic dimension to this task, suggesting an open-ended and fluid structure for associative thought and learning. Pattern recognition has always drawn some of its power from the imagination and its dreamlike interface to art and archetype. Though reasoning by analogy has been a major bugaboo of upright minds since Western science began, it makes sense for hunter-gatherers attempting to survive the postmodern forest of symbols and data. We must learn to think like DJs, sampling beats and voices from a vast cornucopia of records while staying true to the organic demands of the dance.

  For Hesse, this dance was ultimately cosmic, Shiva’s jig of perpetual creation and destruction. In his novel, the residents of Castalia treat the contemplation of individual bead games as a meditative practice, one that ultimately leads “to the interior of the cosmic mystery, where in the alternation between inhaling and exhaling, between heaven and earth, between Yin and Yang, holiness is forever being created.”12 In this sense, the Glass Bead Game can be seen as a musical counterpoint to the hermetic dreams that have popped up throughout this book: the cosmic memory palace, the noosphere, the apocalyptic tome. The fact that the Game so strongly anticipates the World Wide Web only shows how much these transcendent (and psychedelic) aspirations continue to magnetize cyberspace. Blending together mind and techne, image and code, the Internet arises as the Great Work of engineering, a computational matrix that forms the potential framework for a new phase of cultural evolution, an alchemical beaker within which we toss anything and everything that can be reduced to binary code. Because it is composed of concept and imagination as much as logic machines and electromagnetic pulses, cyberspace sidesteps Einsteinean space-time, giving birth to a kind of digital metaphysics—or, perhaps more properly, “netaphysics.”

  Those drawn to the uncharted waters of netaphysics should proceed as wary experimentalists, playful and ironic rather than apocalyptic, and ever mindful of the dark dragons of technopolitics that lurk below the waves they surf. No one can claim to speak in the name of cosmic evolution or the Gaian mind; we can only draw new networks and judge the results by criteria both aesthetic and pragmatic, criteria that will themselves inevitably mutate. Information is more like a jungle than an infinite library, and we cultivate as we navigate, forever divorced from a god’s-eye view. We are back to pacts, and lore, and guiding intuitions. A kind of madness lurks this way as well, an excess of meaning that can send thought hurtling into a black hole. Networks are systems of organization, after all, and when they start feeding off the deep and amorphous forces of the human psyche, paranoia and paralysis await. Even Hesse saw the dark side of his infinite game, and in the end Joseph Knecht quits Castalia’s contemplative utopia, abandoning its rarefied and disembodied pursuit of Mind for an offline life in the gritty world outside.

  Netaphysicians cannot expect anything like salvation or final knowledge from their encyclopedic Overmind, because to do so is to make the same visionary error we have been tracking throughout this book: mistaking technological possibilities for social or spiritual ones. Nonetheless, for all its bankrupt absurdities, technomysticism arises because humans remain, in some mercurial sense, spiritual beings, and this curious twist of human nature will express itself wherever it can. The self has always been something of an engineering project, after all, a virtual reality molded by the myriad conditions that compose its becoming. Some of these conditions are hardwired genetic instructions; others are echoes of past decisions and experience; still others take the form of vast social and cultural systems that cultivate, map, and discipline the bodymind. But the self is also a spark crackling with being, with intuition and dream, and with the activity of perception that Leibniz could nowhere find as he wandered through the reductive mill of a thinking machine. The self is the alchemical vessel, and it is shaped by the practices our bodyminds engage in: art, diet, sex, dance, learning, sport, contemplation, friendship, ethics. Such technologies of the self are often largely automatic, but when the practices themselves begin to awaken and integrate, they become spiritual, in the broadest sense of the term. The postmodern avatars of fragmented identity ultimately lose the thread: the self has many avenues and powers, but this
multiplicity is raw material that allows creative modes of integration to emerge. Not mutation, but transmutation.

  As the high-tech juggernaut careens into the third millennium, I suspect we may need to open to such possible transmutations: to fire up the alembics of the imagination, to tune in to the pagan pulse of planetary life, to wire up the diamond matrix within. For many earthlings, there is simply not much choice in the matter: a turning is in the air. Slowly, tentatively, a “network path” arises from the midst of yearning and confusion, a multifaceted but integral mode of spirit that might humanely and sensibly navigate the technological house of mirrors without losing the resonance of ancient ways or the ability to slice through the greed, hate, and delusion that human life courts. Against the specter of new and renewed fundamentalism, people both inside and outside the world’s religious traditions are trying to cut and paste a flood of teachings, techniques, images, and rites into a path grounded enough to walk upon. Who knows what virtualities will arise along the way? This path is a matrix of paths, with no map provided at the onset, and no obvious goal beyond the open engagement with whatever arises. “A path is always between two points,” Deleuze and Guattari write, “but the in-between … enjoys both an autonomy and direction of its own.”13