Fun Passage from The Fuller Memorandum
One of my favorite passages from Lovecraft is the first paragraph of his short story “The Call of Cthulhu“:
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
As I’ve argued here before, while Lovecraft is most often classified as a horror, dark fantasy, or weird tale writer—he might classify himself as a writer of supernatural horror—much of his Mythos stories can classified as a science fiction as it is a response to contemporary scientific thought.
All this is simply to preface my favorite passage from Charles Stross’ The Fuller Memorandum:
Magic is a branch of applied mathematics, after all, and when you process information, you set up waves in the platonic ultrastructure of reality that can amplify and reinforce—
To put bluntly, there are too many humans on this planet. Six-billion-plus primates. And we think too loudly. Our brains are neurocomputers, incredibly complex. THe more observers there are, the more quantum weirdness is observed, and the more inconsistencies creep into our reality. The weirdness is already going macroscopic—has been, for decades, as any disciple of Forteana could tell you. Sometime really soon, we’re going to cross a critical threshold which, in combination with our solar system’s ongoing drift through a stellar neighborhood where space itself is stretched thin, is going to make it likely that certain sleeping agencies will stir in their aeons-long slumber, and notice us.
No, we can’t make CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN go away by smashing all our computers and going back to pencils and paper—if we did that, our amazingly efficient just-in-time food delivery logistics would go down the pan and we’d all starve. No, we can’t make CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN go away by holding a brisk nuclear war and frying the guys with the biggest dicks—induced megadeaths have consequences that can be exploited for much the same ends, as the Ahnenerbe-SS discovered to their cost.
CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN is the demonological equivalent of an atomic chain reaction. Human minds equal plutonium nuclei. Put too many of them together in too small a place, and they begin to get a wee bit hot. Cross the threshold and suddenly and emphatically and they get a lot hot. And the elder gods wake up, smell the buffet, and prepare to tuck in. (61)
Just a bit of Stross’ science fictional thinking of which I think Lovecraft would have approved mightily.
The Fuller Memorandum and “Overtime”
The Fuller Memorandum is the third novel in Charles Stross’ Laundry series best described as Lovecraftian spy thrillers, and “Overtime” is the most recent Laundry short story (available for free from Tor). Playing with Lovecraft’s conceit that magic is applied mathematics and the horror of the Mythos are aliens and beings from other dimensions, the books imagine a Lovecraftian world in which modern intelligence agencies established sections to protect from the occultic and eldritch horrors. The Laundry series center around the adventures of Bob Howard, a computational demonologist who was pressed into service in the British occultic agency—The Laundry—after he accidentally almost unleashed some unnamed horror while conducting graduate research. As long-time readers of this blog know, I am a great fan of Stross’ work and it was his first Bob Howard book, The Atrocity Archives, that brought him to my attention. As I expected I would, I greatly enjoyed this latest installment.
As I’m trying to more regularly blog my reading, here are some thoughts/comments on The Fuller Memorandum and “Overtime” à la Brendan.
- While The Atrocity Archives consciously draws its spy thriller elements from Len Deighton and The Jennifer Morgue draws from Ian Fleming, The Fuller Memorandum doesn’t seem to be an homage to a particular spy thriller author. I’m not widely read in spy thriller fiction, so I’d be happy to be corrected on this one.
- The absurdest tedium of civil service bureaucracy upon which The Atrocity Archives draws so much of its humor is only hinted at in this novel, which is a good thing.
- The primary villains of this story are cultists seeking to awaken the sleeper in the pyramid aka the Eater of Souls aka CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN aka Cthulhu. With cultists at the center of this novel, I think it’s got a more Lovecraftian feel than the other two novels, but that’s a pretty subjective statement, especially as the other two are very much Lovecraftian in their own ways.
- As with Stross’s other two Laundry books, there is history to this novel, this time with roots in the Russian revolution and extrapolation based upon post-Soviet espionage. The arrest of an alleged Russian spy ring in the US the week before the novel’s publication and resulting spy swap a few days after the novel was released lends a sense of immediacy to the novel.
- In setting about writing this post, I came across a short post by John Brownlee of Wired, written after the publication of The Jennifer Morgue, in which he asks, “Which raises the question: exactly what genre of fiction wouldn’t benefit from the addition of the Cthulhu Mythos?” Good question.
“Overtime” is a fun story, set over the Christmas holiday with Bob serving as Night Duty Officer tasked with staffing the office while everyone else is off enjoying the holiday. (Mo, his wife, is off seeing her mother.)
While published before The Fuller Memorandum, it’s set after the book itself. Not only does Howard carry some technology he acquires in the FM, there’s a brief reference to climatic encounter in the novel. Very much worth reading, but I’d suggest reading it after FM.
Conan the Barbarian: The Musical
As long time readers know, I’ve got a fondness for the original Robert E. Howard Conan stories. I discuss reading the Lancier paperbacks in my technoliteracy autobiography, titled “On the Dangers of Reading Conan Stories and Playing Computer Games; or, The Making of a Technorhetorician: A Technological Literacy Collage,” I mention Conan in a discussion of why medievalists should embrace popular culture such as sword and sorcery fantasy, and in the post “Barbarian Chic” I talk about a review of the recent rereleases of Howard’s original Conan stories and my own 2004 MLA paper in which Conan played a featured role. You can find other references to Robert E. Howard and his most famous creation scattered here and there in other posts as well.
Having gotten all that out of the way, it is with much pleasure I share with you Conan the Barbarian: The Musical:
Thanks to Matt Eash, who posted a link on Facebook.
Recent Reading, Pt. 2
While I called Pt. 1 my recent adventures in fiction, most of this post is about non fiction. In fact, I read most of it for academic reasons.
Zot!: The Complete Black and White Collection, Scott McCloud
- Okay, well, Zot! is fiction and I did read for fun. Best known for his Understanding Comics, Reinventing Comics, and Making Comics books, all of which I’ve read, Zot! is a comic series that McCloud wrote before he wrote those books. Set in both the America of the late 1980s/early 1990s and “‘the far-flung future of 1965,’ a utopian Earth of world peace, robot butlers, and flying cars,” Zot! is the story of the interaction of two teenagers, one from each of the two alternate realities. The complete collection includes commentary by McCloud, which includes discussions of his struggles writing a comic series and how they lead to his writing Understanding Comics. Well worth reading.
Comics and Sequential Art and Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative, Will Eisner
- The first two of Will Eisner’s trilogy of “how to” books—the third is Expressive Anatomy for Comics and Narrative—these two I did read for academic purposes. Since McCloud’s books, especially Understanding Comics, have become required reading for visual rhetoric, I thought I’d take a look books he builds up from. In going through these, I’m looking more for student readings than theory, and for my purposes, they provide a bit of both, especially Comics and Sequential Art. I also hope to teach a comics/graphic novel course some day, and as when I teach science fiction and fantasy courses, I want to include theory to help foreground how the genre differs from the fiction they’ve been taught to read throughout most of their schooling. Obviously, these are essential books from that perspective.
- While good, I found them less accessible than Scott McCloud’s books, maybe because these are “textbooks” that emerged from Eisner’s teaching at New York’s School of Visual Arts. They’re full of examples from Eisner’s own comics and graphic novels, mainly A Contract with God, The Spirit, and Life on another Planet. For the casual reader or those interested in getting started in comics theory, I’d suggest McCloud’s Understanding Comics first.
- And no, I’m not looking to break into comics. I am, however, working on learning how to draw and cartoon so that I can create graphic syllabi and outcomes maps. (Think concept maps and mind mapping applied to representing the organization, schedule of topics, and learning outcomes of a course.” If accepted, I’ll discuss my use of these in terms of rhetorical memory and delivery at next year’s CCCC. In addition to creating a graphic syllabus and outcomes map for the course, I’m planning on creating an outcomes map for each of the major writing projects in the first-year comp classes I teach next year.)
The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything, James Martin
- Another read for academic purposes, I picked this up to better understand Jesuit spirituality and the Ignatian Way, partly to better understand its influence on Walter Ong’s scholarship; partly to better understand the Spiritual Exercises, an ongoing living tradition that is rooted in monastic rhetoric; and partly to better understand how to fulfill my role as a professor at a Jesuit University. (( I discuss a bit of this back in August 2008 when I talk about writing the “Statement of Understanding of the interrelated Missions of the University and College of Arts and Sciences” as part of my application/interview process with Creighton.
- It’s an excellent book. Funny, accessible, and informative, and not written just for Catholics or Christians.
The Android’s Dream, John Scalzi
- Another fiction book, and an enjoyable one at that. I briefly mentioned it earlier this year. Scalzi calls it his “‘popcorn movie’ book: No particularly deep themes, just lots of action and adventure and fun.” While not as philosophical as Philip K. Dick’s Do Andriod’s Dream of Electric Sheep, it does, as I note in that earlier post, as (in part) a homage to that book, it does touch on some of the same themes and issues. As Scalzi says, it’s full of action, adventure, and fun.
- Hmmm, you want a synopsis of the plot, do you? Okay. It’s about a low-level diplomat in Earth’s State Department—a guy who specializes in delivering bad news—who has to save the day after a high-level diplomat murders his alien counterpart, a representative of a far more advanced civilization that wouldn’t mind taking over earth.
Recent Reading, Pt. 1
Not sure I’ll ever blog as regularly about my media consumption as Brendan does, but I like his posts, so I thought I’d do this roundup of some recent reading. I wanted to call this my non-academic reading, but with me, you never know what becomes academic reading, so let’s call it a roundup of my recent adventures in fiction.
Saga of the Swamp Thing, Alan Moore et. al.
- About 20 months ago, I started plowing through the Hellblazer comics and I picked up Books 1 and 2 of Saga of the Swamp Thing, the hardback rerelease of Alan Moore’s run with the Swamp Thing, mostly to see John Constantine‘s origins. As Book 3 isn’t released until next week, I haven’t encountered Constantine yet, but it’s Alan Moore, so I expected it to be good. It is.
- While billed as horror, it’s much closer to Lovecraft than Stephen King. Getting academic here, I’d say it’s dark fantasy/Gothic fantasy rather than mainstream horror, which suits me just fine as I like dark fantasy but don’t like mainstream horror.
- It was interesting to see how Moore placed the series within the larger DC (superhero) universe while separating it from the DC universe at the same time. Much more overt than what Neil Gaiman did with The Sandman, but also more artful, I think. The Justice League shows up in issue 24: “Roots,”realizing that they’ve dropped the ball and may not be able to confront the threat before them. Green Arrow puts it like this, “Man I don’t believe this! We were watching out for New York, for Metropolis, for Atlantis but who was watching out for Lacroix, Louisiana?” At the end of the issue, after the Swamp Thing has done his job, Green Lantern asks, “What happened out here?” and Superman replies, “I don’t know. Let’s just be grateful that there’s something watching out for the places no one watches out for.” And that’s it for the costumed ones.
- I could have finished off Moore’s run by buying volumes 5 & 6, but having started with the new hardbacks, I’m waiting for Book 3, which has the two volumes together. I’m looking forward to next week.
Crooked Little Vein, Warren Ellis
- I picked up Crooked Little Vein because I’d enjoyed Ellis’ Transmetropolitan comic series (see below), and it was a fun read: the story, the writing, and the medium. (It was the first novel I read on the iPad.)
- It’s a profane, dark comedy/detective/political novel about a down-and-out private detective hired to find and retrieve the “other Constitution of the United States” which “details the real intent of [the Founders'] design for American society.”
- To give you a sense of the writing, here’s one of my favorite passages, a description of the other Constitution itself:
It is a small, handwritten volume reputed bound in the skin of the extraterrestrial entity that plagued Benjamin Franklin’s ass over six nights in Paris during his European travels. Benjamin Franklin wasn’t some nancy-boy novelist who wrote sensitive books about aliens sticking things up his rectum, you know. On the seventh night he got right up and killed the little bastard with one punch.
Spook Country, William Gibson
- Not having enjoyed Gibson’s three previous books, Idoru, All Tomorrow’s Parties and Pattern Recognition, nearly as much as the first four, I held off on reading this one for a few years. It also took me a number of times to get into it: for some reason, I had some difficulty getting past the first few pages. It was the first book I bought on the iPad, so after a few months of dithering, I decided to read it despite the fact it wasn’t doing it for me, or least make a good effort at trying to do so. I’m glad I did. I think it’s Gibson’s best since Virtual Light and it’s got me looking forward to the release of Zero History later this year.
- Part of the Bigend books (along with Pattern Recognition), it’s science fiction thinking applied to the present rather than to the near future, what he has called “speculative fiction of the very recent past.”
- After reading this, I decided to get a hold of the Gibson documentary No Map for these Territories, which I watched Tuesday night. I enjoyed that as well and kept thinking I’d love to show clips of Gibson talking about recent social/cultural changes brought about by technology as I teach McLuhan.
- After reading this book and watching No Map, I’m beginning to wonder if my problem with the three previous books is rooted in me as a reader wanting Gibson to write like he had in the past rather than allowing him to mature as a writer. If that’s the case, then I’m probably maturing as a reader. And now I’m asking my self, what the hell does that mean?
The Windup Girl, Paolo Bacigalupi
- I first came across Bacigalupi when I read “The Calorie Man” in Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology, an excellent “biopunk” short story that scared the hell out of me with it’s dystopian, post-petroleum world in which Midwest agribusinesses used bioterrorism to control the world’s food supply and calories have become currency. It scared the hell out of me because it’s an all too possible future, what with agribusinesses patenting the genomes of conventional plants and animals and seeking to replace agriculture with bioengineered seeds and suing farmers for doing things like saving and replanting these genetically modified seeds. [Note: I stated college with the intent of being a biochemistry/English double major with the career goal of being a genetic engineer/science fiction writer, so I have no problem with genetic engineering or genetically modified food per se.] The Windup Girl is set in this same world.
- I highly recommend The Windup Girl. It’s a great book. The future here doesn’t scare me as much as it did in “The Calorie Man,” maybe because having read “The Calorie Man,” it’s not new. That’s not to say the book doesn’t have much new to offer. It does. It’s set farther in the future than “The Calorie Man” and the Midwest agricorps’ gene-rippers are working hard to keep ahead of the mutated horrors they’ve unleashed on the world. While I’m not sure I’d call the “Windup Gir”l the main character (she shares the stage with an agricorp “calorie man”; a “yellow card Chinese,” that is a survivor of the Malaysian purge of the ethnic Chinese now living in Thailand; and a few others), she’s the focal point of a number of the novel’s questions/issues. The Windup Girl herself is a genetically modified, creche-grown “New Person,” a “non-human” human abandoned in Thailand by her Japanese businessman owner because it was cheaper for him to buy a new one in Japan than to ship her back when he returned.
- The Windup Girl won the 2009 Nebula Award, was a 2009 Hugo Award nominee, and was listed by Time as 9th best novel of 2009. That’s 9th best fiction book, not science fiction book, mind you. It’s not too long ago that science fiction would not have made such a list simply because it was science fiction.
- As I said, The Windup Girl is set in the same future as Bacigalupi’s short story “The Calorie Man.” Also set in that future is his story “The Yellow Card Man.” Night Shade Books will let you download and read both for free. Look for the Paolo Bacigalupi’s Windup Stories link or get a hold of his short story collection Pump Six and Other Stories. [Pump Six is currently out of print, but you can buy an electronic version in a variety of formats from html and PDF to iBook/Nook/Kindle/Rocketbook/Microsoft Reader. That's how I got my copy.
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Transmetropolitian, Warren Ellis et. al.
- A great series from the DC Vertigo imprint (which Hellblazer, The Swamp Thing, and The Sandman also belong) that follows the return of 23rd century outlaw gonzo journalist Spider Jerusalem to the City and to journalism. Imagine Hunter S. Thompson in a 23rd century cyberpunk America.
- The one big problem I have with Hellblazer is that it is an ongoing series. I’ve thought about getting a subscription, but that would entail tracking down past issues not yet collected in graphic novel form, reading it piece-meal, and then buying the graphic novels when they’re released. What I’ve chosen to do instead is wait until each author finishes their run as each has an overall story arc in addition to the individual stories and smaller multi-issue stories. I know, I’m not a good comic book reader in this sense, but I’d rather read each arc at one time as a complete story. Transmet, on the other hand, is a completed series with 11 volumes, all written by Ellis. Only, volume 8 is out of print and won’t be rereleased until September, so I’m waiting. I spent $35 to buy an out of print Hellblazer that has no advertised rerelease date, but I’m not going to spend $60 for a Transmet volume I can get in a few months. If there wasn’t a scheduled rerelease date, I’d break down and buy it. Yes, Transmetropolitian is that good.
Imagination, Low-bridge multimedia, and Fabulations
A commonplacing post that brings together memoria and cognitive science (image-schema) as justification for multimodal composition. From Johnson, Mark. “The Imaginative Basis of Meaning and Cognition.” Images of Memory: On Remembering and Representation. Ed. Susanne Küchler and Walter Melion. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991. 74-86:
According to the view I am espousing, we must understand imaginative activity as including all sensory modalities, motor programs, and even abstract acts of cognition such as the drawing of inferences. In this very broad sense, imaginative activity is the means by which an organism constructs an ordering of its perceptions, motor skills, and reflective acts, as it seeks to accommodate itself to its environment. Imagination, so understood, thus includes the full range of organizing activities, from the forming of images (in different sensory modalities), to the execution of motor programs, to the manipulation of abstract representations, and even to the creation of novel orderings. 79
Right before rereading Johnson’s essay, I reread Daniel Anderson‘s “The Low Bridge to High Benefits: Entry-Level Multimedia, Literacies, and Motivation.” (Computers and Composition 25 (2008): 40-60):
The links between motivation, new media, multiliteracies, agency, and civic participation can be readily traced. Less clear, however, are the connections between these items and changes in education. The most compelling advocate for considering personal motivation in terms of transformation in composition is probably Geoffrey Sirc. Sirc doesn’t argue for either alphabetic or multimedia literacies but rather advocates that compositionists should aim for the expressive process of production. Again, we must put things into motion. Sirc (2002) explained, “defining composition, exclusively around the parameters of page or canvas, results in that conventional, academic surface” and instead suggested we think of composition “as a record of tracings, or gestures, a result of body moving through life” (p. 111). Sirc was looking for a composition that might be “anti-conventional, expressive, discursively hybrid, and technologically innovative” but instead finds i most scholarship a composition that “is all about conventions; which sees its retreat from expressionism in academicism as some sort of progress; which prefers a purified, taxonomized, monophony to hybridity’ and consigns discourse on technology to a sub-real of the discipline” (p. 173). Sirc is clear that this over-disciplining of composition bleeds the motivation from students, leading only to “alienation” and “exhaustion” (p. 209). New composing processes feature literacies like juxtaposition, parody, or pastiche and build upon student interests. These remix modes can overcome the boredom and “exhaustion in most writing assignments” (p. 212), making students “architects of their own aesthetics” (p. 132). 46
Not that we need such justification, but I find within Mark Johnson, Mark Turner, Gilles Fauconnier, and George Lakoff’s work on image schema, conceptual metaphor, embodied cognition, and conceptual blending an explanation of how monastic rhetoric, as defined by Mary Carruthers, works at the cognitive level. It is, to crib the title of one of Gilles Fauconnier and George Lakoff’s collaborations, “the way we think.” The expressive processes of production Sirc advocates and Anderson demonstrates is inherent in “remix modes” of composition shares with Johnson et. al. and monastic rhetoric an understanding of imagination as an active process of memory which draws upon all our sensory modalities/multiliteracies to make meaning. For an example of contemporary monastic composition as an expressive process of production, see my discussion of Jeffery Jerome Cohen‘s” fabulations.”
The Apparatus and Weak Technological Determinism
I’m slowly making my way through Ulmer’s Teletheory and I thought I’d go all commonplace bookish and post some passages and thoughts. (Which reminds me, I intended to write some posts based on Ulmer’s Applied Grammatology.) I’m most of the way through chapter 2 and I’m really looking forward to getting to chapter 4 (Memory I: Place/Roots) and chapter 5 (Memory II: Tour/Routes).
As Eric Leed demonstrated, the distinction between “voice” and “print,” between orality and literacy in general, is an explanatory myth (a “theory”). This myth was devised by bourgeois intellectuals, themselves products of literate culture, to define everything they were not—their other. Another case of the analytico-referential discourse constructing a primal order. Oral culture and its opposition to literate culture, then, is a “concept” [...].
Rather, using the logic of the apparatus, he suggests that the qualities associated with orality and literacy are not so much effects as causes—capabilities turned into values. In the myth, then, orality represents the values of social integration into the folk community, while print represents the values of individualism and critical autonomy. The effects of mass media, in a postindustrial culture, are associated with oral culture—as secondary orality—and one’s attitude to the electronic paradigm will tend to be determined by the attitude to these values [...]. (26)
I’m still processing the idea that the distinction between orality and literacy as an explanatory myth. Frankly, I’m fascinated by the fact that while I seem to balk at “explanatory myth,” I’m much more comfortable with calling it a “theory,” and I’m even comfortable with a formula like “explanatory myths are to orality what theory is to literacy, ” which means, I think, that my roots in print culture are clearly showing here. I mean, isn’t this part of what Ong means when he writes that “literacy is imperious,” that “[i]t tends to arrogate supreme power by taking itself as normative for human expression and thought” (23)? 1
At the same time, however, is it really a theory or an explanatory myth? Ong would argue that he was describing features that we find present in these two noetic processes (or more broadly what I call techno-cultural-noetic matrices) and the artifacts that emerge from them. And as someone who studies the oral-literate transitional culture of medieval England and Scandinavia, I see these differences at play. And to push this further, how does current thought on oral tradition work with all this, the idea that the “orality’ of an oral poem is rooted in a set of practices that are not dependent upon the means of transmission.2 If we take as a given that there is such things as oral tradition and oral poetry, and I do, doesn’t that mean the distinction between the oral and the literate is more than just a theory, more than just “analytico-referential discourse constructing a primal order,” that is, more than just an explanatory myth?
Or is the myth, the theory, our understanding, our construction, of orality and literacy? That is, is the myth, the theory, not difference between oral tradition and written text, the distinction between The Iliad and the Encyclopedia Britannica for instance, but our construction/explanation of orality as concept and literacy as concept? That I can get behind wholeheartedly.
While I clearly need to read Leed,3 Whether we think of these qualities as causes, as effects, or as part of a larger dynamic process, I do like the idea of identifying them as “capabilities turned into values,” and I think all three perspectives agree on this point. And this brings me to the idea of weak technological determinism.
Weak technological determinism doesn’t assume X will happen because of Y but that the affordances and constraints (i.e., the capabilities) of X help or hinder the possibility of Y happening, understanding that this help or hindrance occurs within a larger ecological context. Apparatus theory, as I understand it, seeks to identify and understand the role of ideology within this ecology, with specific ideologies bringing with them their own affordances and constraints
- Ong, Walter J. “Writing is a Technology that Restructures Thought.” The Written Word: Literacy in Transition. Ed. Gerd Baumann. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986. 23-50. [↩]
- For instance, in How To Read An Oral Poem, John Miles Foley argues that oral poetry can live its entire existence from composition to reception as a written text. [↩]
- Leed, Eric. “‘Voice’ and ‘Print’: Master Symbols in the History of Communication.” The Myths of Information: Technology and Postindustrial Culture. Ed. Kathleen Woodward. Madison: Coda Press, 1980. 41-61.) the above makes more sense in light of the second paragraph with its claim that “the qualities associated with orality and literacy are not so much effects as causes—capabilities turned into values.” From a strong medium theory perspective such as McLuhan’s, we would of course argue the opposite, that the qualities associated with orality and literacy are medium-based effects. Ong, on the other hand, would argue that these qualities are neither simply causes or effects but that they exist as one part of a much larger dynamic process embedded within the extant culture. (( See, for instance, the “Complications and Overlappings” section of ch. 2 in The Presence of the Word. [↩]
Kairos Manifesto Issue
Via Kairos:
Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy is pleased to announce the release of Issue 12.3, our special issue for Summer 2008 with Guest Editors Scott Lloyd DeWitt and Cheryl E. Ball. This is the Manifesto Issue: “[w]rought with connotation, politically and emotionally charged, manifestos call us to action and demand change—in the streets, in the workplace, in our classrooms, in our minds, and in the virtual spaces we inhabit. [...] The manifesto’s typical dense state and its sometimes confrontational approach make it easily susceptible to critique yet can quickly facilitate invention for new scholarly conversations and directions.”
New Journal: Memory Studies
Via the H-Net’s H-Memory:
SAGE Publications has released the first issue of Memory Studies. They describe the journal thusly
Memory Studies responds to and seeks to shape public and academic discourses on the nature, manipulation, and contestation of memory in the contemporary era, and examines the social, cultural, cognitive, political and technological shifts affecting how, what and why individuals, groups and societies remember, and forget. [Read more.]
They’re allowing free access to the first issue (with registration), and it is most definitely worth checking out.
Of Singularities and Orality-Literacy Studies; or OLS and Technological Determinism
I’ve never really been happy with my January 19, 2007 post on orality-literacy studies and technological determinism, and a couple of things I’ve read recently have made me want to return to the topic. I still think the distinction between strong and weak theories of technological determinism is important and help us understand why charges of technological determinism in orality-literacy studies all too often miss the mark. (That is, critics often fail to recognize a distinction between the models of weak and strong technological determinism, therefore assuming that accounts of technological development operate under the strong model. On the other hand, I’ve never been entirely comfortable with the questions I ask about what is and is not technology and the distinctions we make between humans and animals, even when I wrote them, but that’s not what I want to address here. Rather, I want to consider orality-literacy studies and technological singularities.
I first started thinking I wanted to blog about this issue again while at MLA. As I usually do when traveling, I brought along some science fiction to read. Of late, I’ve been focusing on short story collections as their easier to dip in and out of (finish a story and you can set the collection aside and return to it months or even years later), and I’d picked up Charles Stross’ Toast, in large part because it has the short story “A Colder War,” which extrapolates Lovecraft’s Mythos into the Cold War.1 It wasn’t “A Colder War” or any of the stories, however, that got me to thinking about this post. Instead, it was the collection’s introduction, titled “After the Future Imploded.”
In it, Stross writes:
The sheer speed with which change swept over the twentieth century, bearing us all towards some unseen crescendo, was a tonic for the imagination. Science fiction wouldn’t have flourished in an earlier era—it took a time of change, when children growing up with horse-drawn carriages would fly around the world on jet engines, to make plausible the dreams of continuous progress that this genre is based on.
But the pace of change isn’t slackening. If anything, it’s accelerating, the coming century is going to destroy futures even faster than the last one created them. (9)
One of Stross’ points in this introduction, which I can’t quote since my book is about 1,000 miles away at the moment, is that cultures reach points in their development (singularities) at which there is no return without tearing the whole system down. (The interiorization of literacy, I’d argue, is one of those singularities, and so too the interiorization of numeracy.) We can move on from that point in history, but we can’t return to the pre-singularity state without apocalyptic consequences because the singularity radically reshapes the whole of the culture. A singularity means more than that, however.
Specific technological developments not only open us up to possible futures (and singularities), they also close down (implode, to use Stross’ term) other possible futures. Technologies, whether found or invented or physical or mental, come with specific affordances and constraints, and those affordances and constraints channel future development. You can fight them, resist them, hack them, and even abandon them, but those affordances and constraints mean that their (personal and cultural) interiorization does set you on specific paths, it sets limits on the possible futures you can have. And the interiorization of certain technologies—not all technologies mind you—are so complete in their reorganization of a culture that they invoke a singularity, a point of no return, a point where we can not conceive of a world without that technology without much difficulty.2
And that’s where technological determinism comes in. Because a technology’s affordances and constraints afford us certain possibilities and constrain other possibilities, they set us on certain paths, certain futures. Proponents of strong technological determinism look at the past and declare that Technology A meant that Future Y had to happen, that the future (our present) was inevitable. Proponents of weak technological determinism, however, recognize that we always have possibilities, but those possibilities are channeled/shaped/structured by other possibilities, that there is no one determined future but a set of possible futures made both possible and limited by the technologies we adopt. (Recognizing at the same time, of course, that these technologies are but one part of a much larger matrix of human culture and civilization.)
When someone like McLuhan or Ong describes what happened in the past to get us where we are now, they can appear to be engaging in a strong deterministic model because they don’t focus on the branches we could have followed but one the path we did follow.3 When we read someone who explains that X lead to Y, we need to recognize that this does not necessarily mean that they are arguing that X had to lead to Y (strong determinism), but that Y was one of the possible futures resulting from X and just happens to be part of the future we followed. Likewise, when providing accounts of technological development, we need to remember to not fall into the strong model fallacy, even when there really was only one possible future.
- “A Colder War” is not part of Stross’ Bob Howard-Laundry books, I should note because that’s what I thought it was going to be. I’d like to know for sure, but my guess is that “A Colder War” provided the genesis for the Bob Howard books in the same way Pratchett’s Strata provided a genesis for the Discworld series. Atrocity Archive, the first Bob Howard novel, got me hooked on Stross, and his novel Accelerando, which I read during Computers and Writing last year, sealed the deal. Accelerando‘s vision of a post-singularity future involving uploaded consciousnesses (including a group of California spiny lobsters); nanotech assemblers reconstructing and reconstructing, among other things, said uploaded consciousnesses; computronium; matrioshka brains; and routers from a long-past galactic empire circling brown dwarfs–all concepts I was familiar with–was so powerful and novel that I literally had weird dreams every night I read some of the book, so I finally decided to finish it off in a marathon read. [↩]
- Of course we can imagine a world without a specific technology, but only to a limited extent. To put it another way, how would the world be different without you? To simplify this thought experiment, let us consider one question: how would the future be different if Catherine Kassner had been placed in your Second Grade class rather than Mrs. Landcaster’s class because you didn’t exist? What social networks might have formed and not formed that year because of your absence from the school and Kassner’s presence in the one class rather than the other class? Might Tonya Jones and Kim Woo not have died on the night of Feb. 24, 1991 because they were at a wedding that night rather than driving home from that Iron Maiden/Anthrax/Public Enemy concert? You see, from the get go it’s not just the possibilities shut down by your absence that we have to take into account but the possibilities opened up by your absence as well, along with the possibilities those differences both open up and shut down, as well as the possibilities those possibilities open up and shut down, and so on. And therein resides the problem, how do you go about understanding all the possible effects, all the ripples and interconnections, one person or one event or one technology has in the vast ecology/network we call human culture? How do you take it all into account so that you can say that you actually understand what it means to not have that person, event, or technology? [↩]
- Terry Pratchett, in his Discworld series, refers to the “trousers of time,” which is an apt metaphor. When we look into the future, we look into the trousers of time from the waist end, thereby seeing multiple pants legs, but when we look into the past, we are looking into trousers of time from pants leg, giving us the illusion that there was only one possible path. [↩]
Twitter Feed- Four separate sets of plans canceled on me this weekend. With few friends in this state, that's an epic failure.
- One class down and one to go.
- The Call of Cthulhu in Under 2 Minutes http://nblo.gs/7sqXb
