The Information Society Is Held Back by the Specific Way that English Has Been Adopted as the Global Language

Other languages should be recognized and respected.

The entire multi-lingual situation of the network society should be pragmatically treated with more awareness.

On a planetary scale, the quality of communication, work, cross-cultural empathy, scientific and business development, health care, and leisure-time experience in the information society has been limited by the specific way in which English has been adapted as the global language. It is important to have at least one global language (Spanish and Mandarin Chinese are also candidates for this status), but it is also urgent that other languages be recognized and respected, and that the entire multi-lingual situation of the network society and the era of globalization be pragmatically treated with more awareness. The trend has been towards the unconscious creation of hybrids of English and a national language. We instead need to work towards restoring the separate autonomous integrity of both English and the national language. I will consider three areas, and present two empirical examples in each area. I will make concrete suggestions for improvements to the language situation in the context of case studies. First, in software development in the IT industry, in non-English speaking countries, the quality of communication among programmers and other IT experts has been affected by the reality of hybrid language situations. I will mention the examples of the software industry in Germany and Italy. Second, in museums, the same question of English-and-national-language duality with respect to the presentation of museum objects and artefacts (both to physically present and online-remote-virtual visitors) requires serious attention. I will discuss the examples of some prominent museums in Germany and Italy. Third, I will consider how communication in online social media like Facebook, Twitter, virtual world simulations, and chat rooms is affected by the global use of loosely structured English and netspeak. I will propose measures to upgrade social experience and interaction through the educational amelioration of the English in circulation, an expanded role for national and local languages, and an appreciation of the value of colloquialisms, slang, acronyms, emoticons, and other “digital culture” socio-linguistic practices.

The Trend has been towards the Unconscious Creation of Hybrids of English and a National Language

We instead need to work towards restoring the separate autonomous integrity of both English and the National Language.

The hybrid language needs to be codified and given some rules.

Everyone on the planet who is not a native speaker of English is in some way disconnected from full participation in the information society. Even the top academic media and technology thinkers, who spend their days and nights informing themselves in real-time about all the latest developments in the online world, are faced with significant language obstacles in trying to disseminate their ideas – through books, articles, blogs, chats, facebook discussion threads – if their English is not at the level of native speakers. Should I go and live in Los Angeles, USA or Sydney, Australia for a few years to improve my English? Should I write in English with mistakes – or perhaps in my native German, Dutch, or Italian – and then have someone translate it? Or should I run it through Google Translate and then edit it? If these dilemmas are the case for digital citizens at the highest level of understanding, then just imagine how difficult the situation really is for “ordinary people” whose native language is not English. Or, to turn the observation around into a more positive formulation: imagine a future – a more advanced stage of the information society – where the reality of the world’s many languages has been thought about and handled in a more intelligent way. Imagine the economic and cultural productivity that will be unleashed when a more subtle system is put into place that enables everyone to express themselves.

An Information Society where all Languages are Handled with More Awareness will be more Productive

Everyone on the planet who is not a native speaker of English is in some way disconnected from full participation in the information society.

Economic and cultural productivity will be unleashed when a more subtle system is put into place that enables everyone to express themselves.

Sociologists have given different names to the society that is the successor to the industrial society of the production of physical goods. This brave new world has been called the post-industrial society, the post-modern society, the knowledge society, the network society, the telematic society, the information society. The information society shifts the center of economic and cultural activity in late capitalism off-center to the handling of information. Beyond its restricted mathematical meaning, or its technical meaning as signs or signals in information science messaging, information more generally, in the sociology of work and culture, is about abstraction and complexity. Success in work-slash-business and in culture depends on the mastery of representation and communication. But a huge and crucial mistake has been made so far in our society-wide understanding of what information is. So far information has been conceived without any sensitivity to or appreciation of language and languages. Information has been recognized only in the British analytical-rationalist-empiricist-logical positivist way, as pure language-less thought in a networked brain of The Global Village, without reflection on language, and this has truly massive and limiting consequences. Consider the dialogue between Number Six and Number Two that opens each episode of the great 1960s British BBC television show The Prisoner, created, written, directed by, and starring Patrick McGoohan:

Number Six: Where am I?
Number Two: In The Village. (Marshall McLuhan’s Global Village)

Number Six: What do you want?
Number Two: Information. (The Information Society)

Number Six: Which side are you on?
Number Two: That would be telling. We want information, information, information…

Number Six: You won’t get it.
Number Two: By hook or by crook we will.

Number Six: Who are you?
Number Two: The new Number Two.

Number Six: Who is Number One?
Number Two: You are Number Six. (alternatively: You are, Number Six)

Number Six: I am not a number. I am a free man.
Number Two: Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha….

I think that there should be three global languages: English, Spanish, and Chinese. This would be a strong basis for a more sophisticated system. Other regional and local languages should play important roles within their territories and for each individual person who chooses to express herself in a particular idiom. Having only one global language (English) immediately establishes systemically a crude binary oppositional hierarchy between the haves and the have-nots, between the one global language which is above the bar of separation and all the regional and local languages which are below. Having three global languages (English, Spanish, and Chinese) – which are not themselves involved in a relationship of strict equality with each other – establishes the basis for a system of relationships which are, in their structure, beyond the binary oppositional structure of one term of the relationship being strictly above the other term. One of the global languages may be somewhat more important than a certain regional or local language, but there is a built-in limit to how much more important than the other it is. Having three languages instead of one at the apex of the language system of the global information society triggers a cascading effect throughout the system of the unfolding of more complex patterns and mutually reciprocal relations. The entire multi-lingual situation of the information society should be treated with more awareness. So far we are sleep-walking in unconsciousness with the imposition of English in a simplified rather than well-thought-through way. We need to restore the separate autonomous integrity of English, the national language, and a normalized hybrid vernacular.

The accelerated propagation of global digital technology and global media culture has brought with it the accelerated predominance of English. The result is a two-tiered system, with English as the master code. This system no longer entails a relationship of domination of one of the system’s elements by the other. It is rather a relationship of virus-like infiltration by the stronger element of the weaker. Taking the situation of German as an example, there is an implosion stemming from the epidemic proliferation of English terms in the interior of the German language. When a German speaker talks in an advertisement, movie, TV program, or on the Internet, she sprinkles her utterances liberally with English words. When a German speaker talks about business management, computer software, digital technology, telecommunications, financial markets, fashion, music, sports, shopping, consumer objects, or “personalized” emotions (Ich habe ein Happy Feeling), she supplements her speech with substitute or designer words taken from English. English words are used in the German language in any domain where the speaker wishes to enhance the prestige of her discourse by holding up a sign of globalized professional, technical, or consumer knowledge. But since the word is outside its living English context, and is not integral to any German context, it is like a fish out of both waters in a hybrid language called Denglisch.

The first case study that I will consider while making concrete suggestions for improvements to the language situation of the information society is software development companies in the IT industry in non-English speaking countries. My two empirical examples will be the software industry in Germany and Italy. I have worked on many software development projects in Europe and the USA, and I have observed the quality of communication among programmers and other IT experts being affected by the reality of hybrid language situations. Currently, I am working on a language internationalization project in Germany, and I am seeking to expand this area into part of a business that I hope will grow into what I call a radical technology company. I call the business that I am in: humanities informatics or Computer Science 2.0. Our slogan is: “Upgrade Information Technology with real knowledge from the arts, sciences, and humanities.”

Programmers and computing professionals in German-speaking countries are very attracted by the English language, which is seen as being the “native language” of information technology.

They tend to write documents which are principally in German, but which use a lot of conceptual and technical terms taken from English, including acronyms.

The result is documents written in a mixed hybrid language which is not especially comprehensible to readers.

* * * *

Improving IT Design Documents

We need to restore a high-quality original German version of documents.

We need to restore a high-quality English version.

We need a third version which is hybrid, but also work on codification and standardization of the hybrid language.

Our goal is also to upgrade the language in which information technology is discussed to a qualitatively richer and more sophisticated language in the humanities sense.

One of the most important professional aspects of software development is documentation. Written documents support the design phase of a project, the analysis of the functional-business area, the conceptualization of the software architecture, the technical implementation, and the operation and maintenance of the running system after it goes live and into production. It is very important to the success of projects that the documents written by one programmer or technology expert be useable and understandable for the subsequent readers of the document. Otherwise, there is very little point in the document having been written at all. Programmers and people involved with computing in German-speaking countries are very attracted by the English language, which is seen as being the “native language” of information technology. So they tend to write documents which are principally written in German, but which use a lot of conceptual and technical terms taken from English (sometimes applied incorrectly), including acronyms. The result is documents written in a mixed hybrid language which is not especially comprehensible to readers. I think that what we need to do is to restore a high-quality original German version of documents, and, in addition, have a high-quality English version, and then have a third version which is hybrid, but also work on some sort of codification and standardization of the hybrid language. Many young people in our society want to become doctors, lawyers, and computer engineers, but I believe that there is a lot of potential and very interesting work to be done in humanities informatics, such as in this language internationalization business area. Our goal is also to upgrade the language in which information technology is discussed to a qualitatively richer and more sophisticated language in the humanities sense.

* * * *

Museums are Another Area where the question of English-and-National-Language Duality Requires Attention

The quality of the English-language texts is sometimes mediocre, with German-influenced sentence structure, mistakes in historical usage of terms, and difficult to comprehend phrases.

Some of the difficulties in the English texts may be derived from ambivalences in the German or Italian ones.

Another language that I speak well is Italian. I have especially enjoyed reading great Italian novelists like Italo Svevo, Leonardo Sciascia, Italo Calvino, and Carlo Emilio Gadda in the original Italian, and even partly in local dialects. It is in some ways painful to imagine the beautiful Italian language getting corrupted by the infusion of English and hybrid IT terminology into its heart. At the University of Pisa, where computer science was first introduced to Italy in 1969, there is an academic programme in English-Italian translation studies, designed to train language specialists in professional domains like law, economics, IT, software localization, environment, energy, bio-medical and pharmaceutical industries, meeting the standards of the curriculum of the European Master’s in Translation, as established by the Director General of Translations of the European Commission. But take a close look at the English-language Wikipedia article on the University of Pisa. It contains sentences whose relationship to English can only be described as accidental: “The Computer Science course at University of Pisa was the first one in the area to be activated in the whole Italy, during the 1960s.” Activated? “After the second world war the University of Pisa returned to the avant-garde in many fields of knowledge.” Which avant-garde would that be? The artistic avant-garde? The futurists? The dadaists and surrealists? The best in computer science and the best in translation studies together at the same university. Wow! But the Pisa University administration seems to be neither aware of the importance of Wikipedia in the information society nor of the English-language skills available to it within its own faculties.

I believe that the scope of the academic field of translation studies should be greatly expanded to include subjects and goals concerning language in the information society like those that I have discussed here. Italy has been suffering badly from the global financial and economic crisis which began in 2008. The computer industry has been hit particularly hard. An Italian vice-president of Microsoft recently stated that he believes that 40,000 jobs are in danger of being lost in the IT sector in Italy. Perhaps one way out of the crisis would be to start projects having to do with language awareness.

Museums are another area where the question of English-and-national-language duality with respect to the presentation of museum objects (both to physically present and online visitors) requires attention. I recently visited the Berlin Wall Museum and the Film and Television Museum in Berlin. At both of these museums, texts that accompany exhibitions are in both German and English. I noticed that the quality of the English-language texts is rather mediocre, with German-influenced sentence structure, mistakes in historical usage of terms, and difficult to comprehend phrases. Yet I have been told by several individuals that these museums would not be interested in spending more than a little money on getting these translations right. The original German texts may have problems as well (so it seemed to me); some of the difficulties in the English texts may be derived from ambivalencies in the German ones. I apologize for not having the time in these 20 minutes allotted to me to present specific examples. I need to revisit those two Berlin museums and take detailed notes. At a famous art museum at the Piazza del Duomo in Milan I noticed similarly problematic English texts, although there seemed to be an inconsistent mixture of translations done by both native and non-native speakers of English.

As I reach the end of writing my own text – the paper serving as the basis for my talk at ISEA2011 in Istanbul on language and the information society – I realize that I will not have time to immediately keep my promise to discuss how communication in online social media is affected by the global use of loosely structured English and netspeak. I intend to keep this promise someday, but I will have to defer its fulfillment for now. I will say that I believe that the quality of online social experience and interaction could benefit from some real improvements in education in the schools in self-expression via language, and some real love for the English language and other languages. And what is the value of colloquialisms and slang? They are an important object of socio-linguistic inquiry. And what are we to make of all those acronyms and emoticons? LOL! Smile please!

Todd and I were going to a basketball game at Madison Square Garden. It was the Knicks’ second game in the NBA playoffs. We were hoping it wouldn’t be a repeat of the first game, which was as sorry an exhibition of roundball as you’ll ever suffer through. The Knicks’ guards couldn’t buy a bucket in the fourth quarter. All they hit was iron, but they wouldn’t stop gunning. Meanwhile the Pacer guards were draining threes and the Pacers blew the Knicks out, 111-92.

“The coach needs to crack the whip and make these guys toe the line,” Todd said.  “Ewing is working his ass off down in the blocks to get position, and those ballhogging guards are hoisting three-pointers from way downtown. That ain’t gonna get it. We need to pound the ball inside and get some easy baskets.”

“If they’d take the ball to the hole, then Ewing’d at least have a shot at grabbing the miss and getting some put-backs,” I replied. “Or maybe they’d get fouled and go to the line.  Starks and Harper only shot three freebies between them all night.”

“And Smith has to step up and play some ‘D’,” Todd said. “His man blew right by him the whole game. If that keeps up he’ll be seeing a lot of pine time tonight.”

“Yeah, well, maybe he needs to be on the bench. Smith can’t get his shot off under the hoop. Did you see Davis stuff him three times in a row? He really gave him a facial.”

We bought a program, and some beer and fries. We went down the ramp to Section 344, where we had season tickets. The crowd was already loud.

“The joint is jumping tonight,” I said.

“I guess we’ll be behind those loudmouth Pacer fans again,” Todd said.

“Man, what a bunch of dorks. They were jumping up giving high-fives in the first quarter. They must get loaded before the game.”

“Yeah, then they pig out on hot dogs and spill beer all over the floor.”

“Whaddya gonna do,” I said.

“I’m gonna tell ‘em to sit their fat asses down if they keep me from seeing the floor, that’s what I’m gonna do,” Todd said.

Todd likes to mouth off. When we played hoops together in high school he was known as the best bench jockey in the city. He could mess with guys’ heads until they lost their cool and started screwing up. Now that he wasn’t playing anymore, his outlet for his sharp tongue was to needle players and fans of the Knicks’ opponents.

“Get a move on,” I said.  “It’s almost game time.”

“Gimme a break, tip-off isn’t until eight o’clock and we’ll be in our seats in half a sec.”

“I don’t want to miss the introductions.”

“Okay already. I’m right behind you.”

The first quarter the Knicks came out like gangbusters. Oakley and Ewing were sweeping the boards, the guards were getting out on the break and Mason went coast-to-coast for a slam, jamming right over Smits. Mason’s a widebody, but he can sky. Harper was dishing the ball to the big men, and even showed some shake-and-bake moves to get good penetration. The Knicks went ahead of the Pacers by ten points. Todd and I were fired up.

Todd said, “We’re eating their lunch. This is taking the wind out of Reggie Miller’s sails. I don’t see him talking trash tonight.  Reggie, you suck. Bite me!” Todd screamed.

“Don’t write him off yet,” I said. “Reggie’s got game. When he gets in a zone, he’s unstoppable.”

“I know he’s got game. And he’s got the ‘tude too, but it’ll make my day if Starks can shut him down. Oh shit, he just faked Starks’ jock off.”

Sure enough, Miller had just given Starks a head fake, got him in the air and shot by him like he was standing still. The three Pacer fans in front of us jumped up out of their seats.

“Yo, Reggie, way to be, dude. Take it to ‘em!” said the first one.

“Did you see our homey? He burned him! He left scorch marks on his back,” the second one chimed in.

The third one stood up and looked over his shoulder at Todd before shouting, “Reggie’s the man!  He’s the man!”

Todd couldn’t stand it. He had to say something. He screamed down at the players:

“Reggie blows! He’s all mouth! Get that hotdog off the court!”

The three Pacer fans stopped cheering and turned back to glare at Todd. One of them said something to the others. Todd and I ignored them giving us the hairy eyeball. Finally they sat back down and we could see again. Unfortunately, Reggie got hot and started hitting everything he threw up. He was unconscious. At one point he scored eleven points in a row, either by breaking his man down off the dribble or running off screens. The Knicks were trying to key on him but once Starks got three personals and Davis came in off the bench to try to play defense, Reggie ate him alive. The Pacers were running and gunning. By halftime they had a 7 point lead. Todd and I went out to the hall to light up. Todd was looking pretty bummed.

“Man, what a dismal second quarter. We’re getting our heads handed to us. They’re killing us on the boards. They’re camping in the paint and getting every rebound, then Jackson gets it out to Reggie and he hits nothing but net. Did you see him drill that jumper from the corner? He even banked one in off the glass.”

“Yeah, they’re playing in-your-face b-ball tonight. If Ewing hadn’t hit those two hook shots we’d be down double digits. We can’t afford to get down two games to none at home.”

“We’re not going to. We’ve got a deep bench. We’ll wear ‘em down in the second half.  We got to. I can’t stand to hear any more bullshit from those Pacer fans.”

But the third quarter was more of the same. The Pacers were shooting the eyes out of the basket. Turn-around jumpers, sky hooks, reverse lay-ups, they made it look easy.  Meanwhile the Knicks couldn’t hit the side of a barn. At one point they didn’t score a basket for six minutes. Their only points came from the charity stripe. They had a lot of turnovers, too. Harper got called for traveling twice, and Starks double dribbled and threw the ball away a couple of times. It wasn’t looking good for us. The Pacer fans in front of us were eating it up. They were as happy as pigs in shit. Every time Miller threw down a dunk or swished a trey, they turned and razzed us. Normally Todd would have answered back. It wasn’t like him to sit there and take abuse. But the Knicks’ lousy play had him too upset.

“It’s over, man,” he said to me. “We’ve lost. We stink. We haven’t got a snowball’s chance in hell.”

“What are you talking about?” I said. “We still have one more quarter to go.”

“But we’re down fifteen and nobody’s playing. It’s like these guys never played hoops before in their lives.”

“Yeah, but we’ve weathered their run,” I said. “I think they’re just about out of gas. It’s time to take it to ‘em. Come on, don’t wimp out on me now. Get your second wind.”

Sure enough, at the start of the fourth quarter the Knicks started showing some signs of life. Oakley made a good hustle play to save a ball out of bounds. They started isolating Ewing one-on-one against Smits and he nailed a couple of short jumpers. Gradually the Knicks got back in the game. When Mason blocked Miller under the basket then threw a fullcourt pass to Davis for the jam at the other end, the Knick fans went wild.

“How’d that taste, Reggie?” Todd screamed. “Salty enough for you? Man, that was too cool for school. He made him eat leather.”

That started a Knick comeback. They reeled off thirteen points in a row to deadlock the score, then Smith threw one down on the break and suddenly the Knicks had the lead!  The Pacer fans in front of us weren’t liking it much. When Todd got carried away and shouted “You’re choking!” at Reggie, the biggest of the three fans took offense.

“Hey man, stick it up your ass,” he said to Todd, not very politely.

“The Knicks are the choke artists, not the Pacers. We beat your butt Monday night and we’ll do it again tonight. So shut the fuck up.”

If it had been me, I would have shut the fuck up or thanked the guy for correcting me. I’m telling you, this guy was a monster. His head was shaved in the back and the words “In-your-face” had been shaved into his hair. He looked like he just got let out of Riker’s with a day pass to come to the game. But Todd never backed down from anybody. He’d fight King Kong himself if the big guy rubbed him the wrong way.

“In your dreams, dude,” he replied. “If your mind wasn’t so clouded by steroids you’d realize it’s all over for the Pacers.” Then Todd said to me, under his breath, “This guy doesn’t have anything between the ears. It’s not a plea for less books about Star Trek, it’s a plea for an end to stupid books about Star Trek.”

I was getting worried. This guy looked like a professional wrestler and seemed just plastered enough to want to shove Todd’s teeth down his throat. But just then play started up again, the Big Guy’s buddies got him to chill out and once again we all had our eyes glued to the game.

There was one minute left. The Knicks went up by a point when Harper threw an alley-oop to Ewing which the Knicks’ center slammed home. Oh Captain my Captain! (see the 1989 film Dead Poets Society, starring Robin Williams and directed by Peter Weir). Then the Pacers came down and Reggie laid one in with a finger roll.  The Pacer fans loved it.

“What hangtime! He was in the air five seconds!”

It didn’t look great for us. There were fifteen seconds left and the Knicks were playing for one shot. The whole ballgame was riding on one throw of the dice. With the clock winding down, Starks passed the ball into the post to Ewing, who was supposed to take the shot but was immediately double-teamed and had to kick it back out to Harper at the top of the key.  With just two seconds left on the game clock, Harper took one dribble and launched a desperation shot from well beyond the three-point arc. It seemed like the ball was in the air for half an hour instead of half a second. Finally it dropped through the cords and the Knicks were winners, 96-94!

Todd was beside himself. He kept saying “Oh my God. Oh my God. What a clutch shot. Un-fucking-believable. I can’t believe it went in.”

The Pacer fans couldn’t believe it either.

“Christ,” said the Big One. “We had it in the bag and we let it slip away. Harper nails a prayer and that’s all she wrote.” The Pacer fans left their seats and started heading our way.

“Todd, keep your trap shut when these guys walk by us,” I whispered. “Don’t get that big S.O.B. upset. I don’t want to have to scrape you up off the sidewalk.”

I could see Todd was preparing to say something rude. He just couldn’t help it. I was just hoping I wouldn’t get bodyslammed too.

“Watch this,” Todd whispered, his voice croaky from screaming. I was ready for the worst.

The Big Guy strutted by in his yellow high heels. He looked at Todd like he was ready to jump down his throat if Todd said spit to him.

“It’s cool, man.  I dig your ‘do’,” Todd said.

The Big Guy looked back, rubbed his hand over his chrome dome, smiled, and said, “Thanks, man.” He walked on a couple of steps then stopped and turned around. “The Pacers are going to kick butt Wednesday night.”

“Hey, man,” Todd said. “Let ‘em take their best shot.”

The Big Guy turned and walked away. I took a deep breath. That was it. We didn’t get our butts kicked. We didn’t get whaled on. We lived to watch another game.

The Knicks won the series in six, but then got beat by the Bulls in seven in the conference finals. As Todd and I left the Garden after the final game of the season, Todd turned to me and said, “Next year, man. We’ll win it all next year.”

“For sure,” I said.

“The 1970 NBA Finals are best-known for Willis Reed’s inspirational moment, when he limped out onto the floor at Madison Square Garden for Game 7 and scored New York’s first two baskets of the game, sparking the Knicks to a 113-99 victory over the Los Angeles Lakers for the franchise’s first NBA championship. But Game 3 of that series produced another memorable moment in NBA history, thanks to an amazing shot by Lakers guard Jerry West, who earned the nickname “Mr. Clutch” for his ability to perform in pressure situations. After splitting the first two games, the teams moved to Los Angeles for Game 3 and the Lakers promptly grabbed a 56-42 halftime lead. The Knicks, led by Dave DeBusschere and Dick Barnett, chipped away at the margin in the third quarter and finally drew even at 96-96 with two minutes to play. The lead seesawed until Wilt Chamberlain made one of two free throw attempts to tie the score again at 100 with 13 seconds left. DeBusschere scored on a short jumper with three seconds to play to put New York up by two. The Lakers were out of timeouts, so West took the inbounds pass from Chamberlain in the backcourt, dribbled as far as he dared and then launched a 60-footer. It found its target as DeBusschere, under the basket, threw his arms up in disgust. West’s bomb tied the score at 102-102 and sent the game into overtime, but the Knicks managed to regroup for a 111-108 win. Had West’s shot been taken today it would have been worth three points and the Lakers would have won the game in regulation, which might well have changed the course of that series.”

The above paragraph is stolen from the office of www.Redux.com

from the Time-Memory Experience project

(this is part 3 of a 4-part essay)

by Anja Wiesinger

The Optical Unconscious in Walter Benjamin’s writing appears first in „A little history of photography“ (1931), which Benjamin wrote a few years prior to the famous Artwork essay. In the photography essay, Benjamin describes how photography evolved from the portrait photography of the early days of the technology in the middle of the 19th century to the Paris recordings by Eugene Agdet’s in the 1920s to the applications of the mass media. The early portrait technique didn’t allow for short exposure time. The model would have to sit and hold out longer. Benjamin saw in those pictures a captured auratic appearance, manifested in the gaze of the person, looking outside of the picture into an undetermined distance, as well as in the material features of the Daguerreotype, which left traces of light on the photo paper.

Benjamin concluded that the auratic phenomenon is caught in an older appearance, that it is the view of the portrayed person, because it attains to the cultic mode of observation, which is a contemplative attitude of the subject towards a sacral object.

By contrast, Eugene Atget’s recordings of Paris’ empty streets bear a different kind of aura. Through the quietly missing and drawn away („Verschollene und Verschlagende“ 157) which the picture brings out and to the consciousness of the viewer, history itself is charged with aura, which has been lifted from the portrayed person. Benjamin noted that through the lens of the objective things appeared much larger than when viewed with the human eye, which sets forth a different kind of perception. There is a different picture revealing itself to human vision:

„Es ist ja eine andere Natur, welche zur Kamera als welche zum Auge spricht; anders vor allem so, daß an die Stelle eines vom Menschen mit Bewusstsein durchwirkten Raums ein unbewusst durchwirkter tritt.“ 158

This technical image shows, as compared to painted landscapes, not an optical distance, but the disclosing of microstructures.

The optical unconscious makes an appearance in Benjamin’s Artwork essay, once again, making a reference to the stretching/expansion of time and space though the camera eye. It is possible to see new modes of movement, something that has a floating, sliding and celestial quality. Benjamin concludes that the human perception of space, which is informed by our consciousness, is supplemented by an unconscious one. (160) It hence depends on the relationship of the subject to its object, which means its understanding/notion of the essence of the technic / technological, which includes a human experience, in other words, one that makes technic it’s organ. (161) Benjamin puts it like this: “yet what determines photography is the relationship of the photographer subject towards his technical device.” (162)

The optical unconscious references two different discursive mental frameworks. One is the optical, which Benjamin, as is well known, draws from the pairing optical-tactical made by the art historian Alois Riegl (1858-1905). This first aspect underlines that aura is not something tangible but entails something inaccessible. The second aspect, the unconscious, is taken from the theories of Sigmund Freud. As I explained before, for Freud, the unconscious is the part of the psychic apparatus that absorbs experiences not being tackled properly and installed as a memory, and which then manifest as a symptom in the actions and thoughts of the subject.

Benjamin and Freud apply the same method: Reduction of the distance towards the objects by cutting through it

A few scholars, among them Jutta Wiegman, argue that Walter Benjamin transferred Freud’s symptomatic psychic analysis of the individual onto the collective. For Benjamin, modernization, which happened parallel with technologisation or mechanization in the industrial age, eliminated a prior balance between humans and nature. Reality appeared to become superior through the acceleration of everyday life by way of mobilization, and the alienation of work though machines and so on. According to Benjamin, this traumatic experience open the way to the presence of something that is not coped with. The machine world appeared as a mysterious superpower (similar to the wild, cruel animal nature) that the individual is subjected to. Thereby, a second technique (the machines) turns back into first nature (mysterious primitive nature).

But Benjamin also suggests a healing methodology for people to help cope with this sensory overload. A certain use of technology can have this healing power. In this particular case, it is photography which creates new strategies of defense and helps become accustomed to the acceleration.

In the context of the optical, Benjamin offers to us a complementary partner, the tactical as method, which he describes in the image or metaphor of the surgeon. Several times he compares the cameraman with the surgeon; it is he who, via technical tools, hacks an image into pieces and puts it together in a new way. Both the surgeon and the cameraman intervene into the cellular textures or the microstructures.

In order to disclose the suppressed events of history, Benjamin’s tactic was to blow open the superficial appearances. In this moment the optical, which had unleashed a memory, changes to the tactile, which triggers an action by the subject, leading to the reduction of the formerly installed distance between subject and object and ultimately to the overcoming of the trauma.

Both Freud and Benjamin make use of the same method for revealing the suppressed memory to consciousness. Which is by way of destroying the distance between subject and object, by penetrating the object operatively, by dissecting the object or the image.

We shift now to the body, not only the body of the object, but also the body of the subject, which participates in the process of perception.

This brings in the role of the body, and another thinker who has adapted Benjamin and Freud through Benjamin to make for an alternative history of vision that includes the subject’s body: Rosalind Krauss.

Rosalind Krauss’ Optical Unconscious

Rosalind Krauss composed in her book The Optical Unconscious a counter-history of vision in modernity. In contrast to the typical modern time- and bodiless notion of vision, she connects vision to time, the body and the unconscious. We will see how important this becomes when looking into the experience of time and its bodily effects on the body in digital environments.

More precisely Krauss writes paradoxically with and against a modern logic of vision, in particular in the writing of the art critic Clement Greenberg, which, according to Krauss, is a rationalized and reflexive vision. Krauss characterizes modern visual logics as transparent, simultaneous, immediate and framed. (177) These characteristics underline the autonomy and timelessness of modern abstract painting, which Greenberg deemed to be the highest value of modern art.

Krauss illustrates the history of this conception, beginning with a classical theory of perception, which distinguishes between a figure and a ground, which dissolves into a modern reflexive vision of non-figure and non-ground. Her reference here is the invention of flat abstract painting, which rejects the illusion of space and therefore a background. According to Krauss, this background is re-introduced as figure in the new order of vision. Perception and vision – or background and visual structure – swap roles in the advent of abstraction but don’t get lost. Rather negated to a figure, the background re-appears in the abstract grid-structure. The figure is suppressed to the unconscious. For Krauss, the visual structure as non-figure is synonymous with the unconscious.

The frame of an image, with Krauss, does not embed an actual figure into the image, but constitutes a map of logical relationships. It doesn’t mark the inside and outside, but amplifies the seemingly self-enclosed immediacy of the image.

With the optical-unconscious, Krauss traces strategies of alternate techniques of vision, which, analogous to Benjamin’s enlargements through the lens, release the visual structure to consciousness.  With this counter-history to modernity, Krauss looks for aesthetic practices which disrupt the blending of figure and ground and which set deep structures against the optical logic of modern vision. She finds examples in a mix of theoretical and artistic output: the Precision optics of Marcel Duchamp, the concept of Mimicry of Roger Callois, the uncanny with Sigmund Freud, the mirror stage of Jacques Lacan, and the informé of Bataille.

With Krauss’ work, I would like to introduce two modes of vision: one is embodied, and the other is reflexive.

According to Krauss, the modern perception is characterized by transparency, simultaneity, and immediacy, as well its rendering frame. This is taken from Greenberg’s notion of abstract painterly aesthetics, which is the ultimate expression of modernism. As such it is universal. The optical unconscious is structure: formless, uncanny, pulsating and masking.

I would like to show that both modes of vision appear in the digital image archive. The appearance of the interface, connected to the calculating machine computer, makes for a universal modern perception. While in the rhythm of the dynamics of the calculating processes, it constitute a vision connected to the body. This is why I chose Krauss’ remarks on rhythms and pulse for my argumentation.

Krauss sets up links between vision, the body and desire. These links oppose the modernist reflexive vision. Take for example Duchamp’s Rotoreliefs. Duchamp created an apparatus in the 1920s for optical illusions. Several circles are mounted on a rotating disc, which is set in motion by a motor. This creates the illusion of contracting spirals, which come closer to each other and are distanced from the subject’s viewer position. Krauss observes in this game of the moving discs, and in this game of transparency and opacity, how the hypnotic pulse of the discs penetrate the viewer’s body. The melding with the viewer’s body opens up, therefore, a bodily dimension of vision. Pulse, according to Krauss, arouses and stimulates libidinal energies, as much as it suppresses them in the next moment, in this play of presence and absence.

While Greenberg would not attribute meaning to Duchamp’s Rotoreliefs in the modernist sense, a work which produces its own meaning out of its inner logic. The work is autonomous as an artwork, and time is the critical factor. Yet, this factor must necessarily be a logical one by which the body of the viewer is not addressed, but the object stares back empty at the viewer in order to guarantee the artwork’s autonomy. The Rotoreliefs seem to resist this kind of rationalization of vision:

„The Rotoreliefs are spinning, vertically, horizontally, all around Duchamp. [...] but

the experience of an anarchic, infantilized desire irrupts inexorably in their midst, creating, if ever so fleetingly, a space of resistance to rationalization. Temporal, carnal, it is the space of what I am projecting as Duchamp’s version of the optical unconscious.“ (Krauss., S. 214.)

In Duchamp’s Rotoreliefs, a different kind of vision manifests itself, one other than what is experienced with modern abstract painting. This vision addresses the mind/intellect of the viewing subject, yet it creates a rhythm, which is constituted by repetition. Krauss discovers an optical pleasure, which is linked to the viewer’s body. This evokes questions about the rhythms of the page load of the screen. What determines the rhythm of observation? In the creation of an optical pleasure – in this case the pleasure on viewing images – does it catalyse or negate deeper possibilities of experience in the sense of Benjamin’s intervention into the object? (Narrowing the distance and allowing for an experience with the object.)

The movie camera gave us the time lapse, a new perception of time. This was explored by Proust in his major literary work “In search of lost time.”

Freud gave us the unconscious, which was explored by the surrealists who gave us l’écriture automatique.

Rosalind Krauss discusses an embodied perception, preceding an aesthetic discourse of high modernism in art.

What new mode of time and perception does the computer or digital technology give us?

“Simulation” of time lapses, the loop, recursion (fractals and so on), self-growth, animation, precise reconstruction, program crashes, unnerving sounds, jump cuts.

The computer interface, as the interface of computer processes and user processes, is something dynamic. It moves. It is animated. Neither is passive. The programmer is merely the third component: he or she who has designed the topology of the interaction between the software program and the user.

from the Time-Memory-Experience project

(this is part 2 of a 4-part essay)

The Construction of ARTstor as Collection

The object of analysis is a specific kind of digital image archive. I chose ARTstor, the biggest online image library for research and education. ARTstor is located in the USA but collaborates worldwide with other institutions to include as many collections as possible. The non-profit organization was founded in 2003, out of the urgency to make image material available by using the advantages of the Internet. One of the advantages was to offer a central platform where all kinds of resources can be searched and viewed all at once by an international community. Currently, ARTstor holds more than 130 image collections and is steadily growing. The collections come from museums which have produced digital photographs of their art works, such as MOMA, and academic research databases, which were up to this point accessible only to the students on campus.

Traditionally, the collection as form is not considered an archive. Archives are per definition locally restricted storage spaces for historical documents. They have originally been systematized by provenance [location and era], which means that the parameters to be entered for retrieving a document are time and place. Whereas the archive is supposedly a neutral trustee of cultural heritage, collections are subject to the individual interests and tastes of a collector. Hence the weighting and classification of objects in personal collections are usually more specific and individual.

[As Jean Baudrillard explains in The System of Objects, the subject's relationship to the object is inherently one of passion. In its non-practical mode, the pure or 'beautiful' object is held dear as part of an assortment or compilation. The human orderer of things may collect porcelain eggs, Persian miniature portraits, matchboxes, rare books, postage stamps of a certain country or baseball cards. But it is my own stature as a singular being that I civilize and refine as I exercise my taste and discrimination in seeking out objects which are more and more singular. There is a secret rule - known only to the collector, but perhaps concealed even from her - that governs the choice or selection of the individual pieces in the collection. For Baudrillard, what I really collect is always myself. "The last [item] in the set is the person of the collector.” The most complete collection is paradoxically the one with at least one member missing from its array of objects. — ANS]

Since the images are semantically enriched with metadata, the search process differs from searches with big search engines a la Google on the World Wide Web. ARTstor is a closed system. It integrates the collections according to strict international standards which have been developed over the years. ARTstor uses CDWA (Categories for the Descriptions of Art Works), a standard for a set of fields which are machine-readible as well as useful for the user to retrieve information. Names are checked against so-called name-authorities to ensure formal standards. Certain instances of control (control over authorship, the authority of information, registration via institutional membership, etc., and the classification system as a whole) are incorporated into the design of the information architecture.

The combination of the collection form together with a strict classification system allows for information retrieval by provenance [location and year] as well as by categories that suit the established terminology of the disciplines working with the database, which in this case is mainly art history, architecture and cultural studies. The organization into collections in ARTstor allows also for more flexibility, ensures the high quality of the images, is respectful of the images’ origins, and helps in the handling of copyrights and institutional memberships.

Not only are the resources collections, but ARTstor allows users to create their own personal collections extracted from the image library. These selective collections can also be shared within user groups, which aids in the organizing of material for classes, presentations and publications. ARTstor is also running pilot projects for community-based research and collection building. In this context, archived material that has not yet been made available to the public is tagged and evaluated in a collaborative process through commenting and discussion tools. The results get integrated into the library. ARTstor hence differs from a traditional archive, altering the traditional functions of an archive to become also a social media in which the material is constantly reworked, newly sorted, and transformed.

The metaphor of trace as discussed in Freud, Benjamin and Assmann

Generally stated, the metaphor of the trace and its usage derives from the insight that text is an abstract and formal medium that privileges certain forms of knowledge and through which other modes of communication (like verbal communication) are not easily preserved.

The trace as metaphor – which has been the leading keyword for historiographical disciplines in the 20^th century –  has by now a history of its own. In the 18^th century, the mass production of books led to mass circulation of information (possibly similar to the information overload that one experiences today), and the text medium came under critical examination. Until then, writing (or, to borrow Jacques Derrida’s term, ‘ecriture’) had been believed to be the most comprehensive storage medium to conserve and pass on the past. Through writing, the past was stored and could also be made to come alive again. The text was seen as something magical, just as Walter Benjamin described new technologies as being something magical.

Yet through writing, and the abstract-formal character of the book form, other forms of knowledge were repressed. Especially repressed were those forms of knowledge formerly passed on verbally via close human contact and communication, as well as those transmitted sensually, or in the trenches of practical, technological or hands-on experience. In the 19^th century, it became clearer that historiography as conventionally practiced is accompanied by a process of selection which, over longer periods of time, forecloses access to the events of everyday life subsumed under the grand narratives of history.

In response to this, history later came to be read not only through texts considered to be “historical documents,” but also through traces. This new methodology became especially popular in archeology, where the objects of observation were usually not texts, but rather ruins and fragments of everyday objects that could be sewn together in a tapestry in order to reconstruct the past into what is regarded to be a complete image. With industrialization, the new media of photography was elevated to the status of allegedly being capable of capturing a “record” of “truth” and “reality.” Marcel Proust, for example, compared the “presence” of the past in human consciousness with a photo negative, a shadow-image that is yet to be developed. A memory-trace. The search for traces left its imprint on historiographical research, in the sense of an index, the physical imprint.

Freud’s involuntary memory

Sigmund Freud distinguished in his description of the psychic apparatus between the voluntary and the involuntary memory. Voluntary memory meant the ability to bring to mind things from the past by themselves and without any outer influences. Involuntary memory accounts for moments that resemble something which has happened in the past. Freud assigned the voluntary memory to consciousness and the involuntary memory to both the pre- and unconscious. He also emphasized that the psychic apparatus is an open and porous system. The pre- and unconscious save experiences which are then – in the process of remembering – re-activated and updated.  This also means that the present influences how we remember (and what we remember of) the past.

Freud also specified the trauma as being that situation where the subject is not capable to cope with an event. He or she fails to clear or defend the mind from those stimuli which are in excess, where self-generation fails to protect the subject’s psyche. If the subject experiences a trauma, a portion of the stimuli remains “undigested” and are escorted to the unconscious.

The method of the defense mechanism is one of suppression. The not- remembered however, is not forgotten. It returns in a specific mode. The not- remembered reveals itself in side issues, actions and narratives about which the subject has no conscious awareness.

The work of the therapist is then to extract and decompose — in other words, to analyze the elements, to discover and resolve densifications and displacements, and to decipher and interprete certain codes.

The work of the therapist is to bring unconscious processes to the conscious awareness of the subject. This, in turn, triggers a positive shock, leading the subject to overcome the experienced trauma and set the subject back on a course towards self-management.

Of course it is our belief (myself together with Alan N. Shapiro) that this cannot really be accomplished by the classical Freudian psychoanalysis where the analyst says almost nothing to the analysand. It will require the practice of Gestalt Therapy, which is psychoanalysis raised to the level of the unity of theory and practice, a psychology of consciousness where the deciphering of the text of the unconscious is but a component of the overall self-practice of awareness and change, where there is an explicit concentration on healing rather than just a focus on “recognition” (Erkenntnis).

Freud’s description of a mystical writing pad in 1925 was that of a type which gets imprinted into a plastic mass and slowly disappears, and by which an indexical trace remains, opening up new possibilities for accessing the past. Freud applied this to the functionality of human memory. He made the analogy with memories which have not been lost, but which have been repressed into the unconscious. These memories are still there, but they are not directly accessible to consciousness. Trace is then everything that cannot be “absorbed” by the text and holds the secret to to the past (it holds the direct print or proof-form of the past) and is the key to emancipation in a possible future. It is also that which has yet to be transferred into consciousness, which has yet to be remembered again.

Aleida Assmans’ usage of the trace

In the 21st century, the traumatic experiences of the world wars of the 20^th century are no longer remembered by lived experience. The generation of survivors or contemporaries has died away. In this context, a new discussion about cultural heritage came about in the 1990s and early 2000s. According to the cultural studies scholar Aleida Assmann, the past is less connected to one kind of memory which in German is called Erinnerung, and more to another kind of memory which in German is called Gedächtnis.

In this shift, memory is passed from an individual to a collective, where it is administered by public institutions. With respect to the archive, Assman has offered a distinction – inspired by Freud – between an arbitrary and and an involuntary memory. Concerning the archive, there are two different memories: the memory storage (Speichergedächtnis) and the functional memory (Funktionsgedächtnis).

The Speichergedächtnis is responsible for the conversation, editing and (re-)activation of history. The institutions and administrators in charge remain necessary distanced and/or neutral towards the archived material. This prevents immediate identification with the material, and any kind of instrumental or political abuse. This corresponds to a disembodied historiography where any kind of emotions and/or personal experiences are withdrawn.

The Funktionsgedächtnis, by contrast, is constituted by contemporary states and subjective events and experiences which actively transform the Speichergedächtnis. Assmann understands the Funktionsgedächtnis to be an embodied corrective to the Speichergedächtnis. It gives meaning to and stabilizes the Speichergedächtnis. Similar to Freud’s theory of memory, Assmann in her theory emphasizes the notion of transparency or porosity between the two forms of memory. This is a political measure for prevention of abuse, as well enabling an allowance for change and alternatives. Time would not just stop in a way which would equal the end of history. Ironically this is precisely what has been criticized about modernism by many thinkers.

I conclude with a citation from Assmann:

Assmann’s understanding of digital information is that of electronic impulses, immaterial by nature, a constant flow of information which has no form, but which is instead in constant flux, some kind of chaos where we are dealing with a plastic mass being constantly reformed.

The materialist theory of New Media and New Technologies that we (Alan N. Shapiro and I) will develop is the other to these immaterialist assumptions of Assmann’s.

To mention the ARTstor library again: the role of ARTstor is to distribute and administer data for sustainability, a goal which is reached by way of semantically enriched data. This highlights even more how Assmann’s view is informed by earlier notions in discussions among humanities scholars, who looked only at the binary structure as being the computer’s working paradigm. Today we see more clearly that the binary structure is a very limited idea of what computers and technology can do. We must instead look at all the software and application patterns.

Some theorists of digital technology have claimed that, due to the operational and formal character of automation – and the strict logics thereby applied – database design predetermines not only the past but the future.

My goal is to relativize the assumption that the database alone predetermines past and future. The digital archive, by way of the design as collection, is the place that allows for a multiplicity of stories.

by Anja Wiesinger

(this is part 1 of a 4-part essay)

In my Master’s Thesis in Art History, done at the Technical University of Berlin in 2011, I attempted to do the following:

My project is to revise the theories and concepts that arose in the advent of the Internet in the early 1990s, when the Internet emerged from a blank canvas and served as a projection for dreams about utopian cyberspace.

Have these theories of New Media and New Technologies stood the test of time with the technological development known as Web 2.0?

The first goal to arrive at is a media theory that can comprehend how the medium forms the message (in a McLuhan-esque sense).

The medium as understood here concerns the form: the information architecture, the logic applied to the software and programming languages, as well as social aspects which affect the content.

My approach is to stress that programming and software are not neutral.

This perspective also means starting not at a level of discussion of the binary structure in computing, but rather at the level of software that is constructed and embedded in social and cultural contexts (as well as technical contexts).

The second goal of my project is to develop a vision and perception of media that is connected to a bodily experience.

When thinking about the relationship between the computer and the body of the user (in the sub-field of software design known as User Experience), I ask myself: how do we perceive the objects on the interface, how do we interact with them through diverse technical devices?

I feel that the fascination for interfaces, computers, ipads and so on that kids have before they can even read indicates that we are dealing here with something that is very vital and somehow alive.

It flickers, it responds to our touches, it animates and so on.

Since the Internet has become a giant archive, the image of the Internet as a huge memory prosthesis had become very popular.

Popular response seems to express the fear that computers will outwit the human race in a few years, when they have become more intelligent and are able to process more data from their gigantic memory.

This is an important science-fiction theme that I take very seriously: the super-computer ruling over the human race — as in Isaac Asimov’s short story “The Evitable Conflict” (1950), Arthur C. Clarke’s novel Childhood’s End (1953), Philip K. Dick’s novel Vulcan’s Hammer (1960), and the film Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970).

But what I also take seriously is that the interaction between user and computer needs to take into account both sides of the memory equation: the memory of the machine and the memory of the user, as they become intertwined and tangled up.

What kinds of experiences enable technologies which enhance the memory of the user or the human subject?

Are we dealing with a short-term attention span or does visual information leave a stronger imprint because it spurs our photographic memory?

I will begin with the aspect of time-memory.

Together with Alan N. Shapiro, I will start to elaborate a “materialist” theory of New Media and New Technologies.

Our goal is to arrive at a description of an aesthetic experience for digital and virtual technologies, one which focuses on an embodied subject-object relationship, and thereby opens the way for a description and discussion of aesthetic practices in New Media – and in New Media Art – today.

And to arrive at a new media theory which has a truly deepened understanding of New Media.

I am concerned with digital archives, and with a changing archiving paradigm, and with how this changes the classical function of the archive.

Our approach towards the archive and towards objects of the past must change.

Digital archives, due to their ability to save huge amounts of data, now alter irrevocably the paradigm that has existed for a long time with classical archives — namely, the assumption that throughout history a process of selection (related to storage limits) always already took place.

The assumption that archives were/are the official authority of the past, of knowledge and of “cultural heritage,” is placed into question today by the reality that everything is now saved and stored.

What’s more, the collaborative mode of working the digital archive takes into account multiple views and resources, not bound anymore to a local space and practice.

We will arrive at a universal archive (at least more universal than before).

Among the aspects to be considered are the following:

- The construction of Artstor as a collection.

- The metaphor of trace as discussed in Sigmund Freud, Walter Benjamin, Rosalind Krauss, and Aleida Assmann.

- A new archiving paradigm.

- Memory (of the user, of the computer), connected to the body and emotions.

- Emotions in interaction with the computer.

- Libidinal memory and the experience of work in the machine.

- Timeness of computers.

When thinking about the changing function of the archive in the digital era, I think of a metaphor that we often use when talking about history, the concept or metaphor of the trace, which is an important term in the field of media archeology.

An author like Aleida Assmann says that the trace is now obsolete, because of the endless data stream (which is immaterial in her view).

In discussing the work of thinkers like Freud, Benjamin, and Krauss, I am going to draw ideas from these authors and theories — but to make a point, not necessarily to be faithful to their original intentions.

I think it is necessary to mention this, since none of these writers wrote about digital technologies.

On the other hand, digital technologies were born in a time when these thinkers were still alive, and I would also like to locate and integrate the discourse about the journey of digital technologies into a general one about modernism.

So, in this context also, it makes sense to read Freud, Benjamin and Krauss, and also many others.

This was part of an event sponsored by the Dirty Art Department of the Sandberg Institute called the AGE-ISM Lecture Series. It was principally organized by Elise Van Mourik.

More information at Facebook about the event.

(I hope that I will not get attacked this time by anti-Facebook fanatics for daring to mention Facebook. This was sort of like getting attacked by rabid anti-capitalist Marxists for having the chutzpah to participate in the social institution known as money).

The event took place at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie Amsterdam, Frederick Roeskestraat 96, 1076 ED Amsterdam, Netherlands, from noon to 6 pm.

The topic of my lecture was “The Model Precedes the Real.” It was a Baudrillard-style lecture. And I sang “Cocaine Blues” by Johnny Cash.

Here are some excerpts from my lecture notes:

In his swing song “Cocaine Blues,” the legendary Johnny Cash makes fun of both the criminal who is the protagonist of the ballad and who has committed murder, and the hypocritical and non-democratic criminal justice system that tries and convicts him.

“Cocaine Blues” was written by T. J. “Red” Arnall, probably in 1947, based on the earlier classic song “Little Sadie,” whose author is unknown. “Cocaine Blues” was famously sung by Johnny Cash on January 13, 1968 at his Folsom Prison concert.

In the Folsom Prison live concert version, Johnny Cash says “she made me slow” instead of “she made me sore.” It is clearly a “Freudian slip” of some kind, the substitute word emerging from somewhere within Johnny’s complex and vast mind.

The phrase “had no friend for to go my bail” demonstrates the incredible flexibility of the English language. In order to get the word “bail” to the end of the line, so that it can rhyme with “jail”, grammar rules are legitimately reversed and turned inside out.

Into the courtroom my trial began

They brought in Franz Kafka and twelve honest men

Just before the jury started out

I saw that little judge commence to look about

Here we reach the heart of the song’s critique of “really existing democracy” (as opposed to the real principles of American democracy as first defined at the end of the 18^th century by writers like Thomas Paine and James Madison – Madison was the fourth President of the United States and he was a political theorist!). A man accused of a crime is supposed to be tried by a “jury of his peers.” But the truth is that you would be hard-pressed to find twelve honest men in all of the United States of America, let alone in downtown Jericho Hill, South Carolina. And in the society described by “Cocaine Blues,” justice has no stature. The judge’s attribute is that he is “little.” And he does not think or contemplate. He goes through the motions without awareness, limited to the activity of “looking about.”

In about five minutes in walked a man

Holding the verdict in his right hand

The verdict read murder in the first degree

I hollered Lawdy Lawdy have mercy on me

A man is going to be sentenced to death, and it is decided in five minutes.

* * * *

The argument that I will present today is that, in order to progress further, software development or computer science must begin to concern itself with cultural codes as well as with software codes. Computer science must transform itself into a hybrid engineering and humanities discipline.

* * * *

In his well-known essay “Simulacra and Simulation,” the French philosopher and sociologist Jean Baudrillard says that the map precedes the territory, the model precedes the real. In other words, the assumption that the widespread creation of models of reality is going to leave physical reality as it is is naïve. Models are not only tools for assisting the real, they act upon the real, they transform the real, they become themselves a major part of the real. There is a stubborn persistence in our culture of belief in the supposedly intact nature and robustness of our experiential reality. The Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Elementary, Dear Data” depicts a Holodeck malfunction during a Sherlock Holmes story that gives rises to the surprising appearance of Dr. James Moriarty as a simulation or Virtual Reality avatar come to life. According to the Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual, there exists a category of Holodeck objects, made by transporter-based replicators of the matter-conversion subsystem, that “can indeed be removed from the Holodeck.”

* * * *

Baudrillard sets out in his first book The System of Objects to “classify a world of objects.” He wants to go beyond a strictly “technological” analysis of how ordinary objects are intended – by the companies that manufacture them – to operate and to be used. He will instead study the “directly experienced psychological and sociological reality of objects.” But as soon as he contemplates the “secondary meanings” of modern day objects, he discovers that these everyday life connotations – when considered as a whole – constitute a cultural system. More decisively, this consumer culture or System of Objects is founded upon a lack. Baudrillard distinguishes between the concrete contribution to social and individual existence that ordinary manufactured objects made in earlier times, and the abstract “semiotic” function that objects serve in contemporary Consumer Society. In traditional society, people maintain a moral, natural and poetically expressive relationship to their objects, which still have a strong physicality and singularity. It is the same “organic” intimacy that “binds [the person] to the organs of his body.” In the classic “bourgeois home,” each object must be in its proper place – at best garnished with trimmings. For modern man the “cybernetician,” the physicality and locality of objects is subordinated to their participation in the “perfect circulation of messages.” The intercommunication and relationality of sign-objects to each other takes precedence over the specificity of each. All objects enter into an equivalence through their common belonging to the “universal” System of Objects.

The fictionalist mode of investigation performed by Baudrillard in his exercise of raw phenomenology might be called the pataphysics of the object. As defined by Alfred Jarry, pataphysics is the painstaking elaboration of imaginary scientific and technical solutions, expressed in a persuasive language that pays almost “pathological” attention to particulars. Facing a system of hyper-reality, the only effective counter-strategy is pataphysical – “in other words, a science fiction of the reversibility of the system against itself.” Baudrillard has always been a pataphysician. One of his earliest known texts that has been published is called “Pataphysics.” He wrote it when he was “about twenty.” Baudrillard co-taught a seminar (together with Jacques Donzelot) in the early 1980s at the University of Nanterre outside Paris called Patasociology. In Fragments (2001), his illuminating book-length interview with François L’Yvonnet, Baudrillard asserts that pataphysics is the most appropriate response to the project of integral reality – or bringing the world to total “realization” and completion – currently being carried out by mainstream technology, science and media culture. The fatal strategy of pataphysics is “neither critical nor transcendent, but is rather the perfect tautology of this integral reality.” To add further interpretation, pataphysical praxis sets into play a quantum system that is non-local (yet relatively near) in the fully qualitative sense (beyond obvious physical non-locality in the classical Newtonian sense). This quantum system is accessible via an intellectually imaginative man-made dimension-traversing wormhole. It engineers into existence the impossible-possible “quantum vector” operator (of a fractal nature) that must be given time to operate, to develop its energy signature. It implements the “de-realization” (against integral reality) of the mutual remote control of two particles engaged in long-term reciprocity, a step forward in praxis-poesy for the quantum entanglement ideas first put forth by Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen in 1935. In patasociology, the two entangled particles do not have to be subatomic.

In the first part of The System of Objects, Baudrillard mentions a certain material substance – out of which a plethora of contemporary objects is made – that catalyzes the transformation of the object from physical and vigorously singular to virtual and merely a signifier: Glass. A French advertising campaign of the sixties designates glass as the “material of the future” – and this same future is touted by businessmen, politicians and intellectuals alike as “transparent” and “value neutral.” Glass exists at a “zero level of matter” and embodies a “universal function in the modern environment.” It is “the material used and the ideal to be achieved, both ends and means.” But what glass actually effects is the opposite of what is promised and intended. The promotional discourse of the glass window claims that this aperture enables us to see more objects, thereby extending our horizons. What the windowpane really does is to introduce more objects – including nature and landscapes – into the systemic unity of our own self-contained environment. Although it appears to be an opening up to the outside or onto the world, the glass window in fact diminishes the world by bringing it into our closed-circuit atmosphere or system of ambient signs as a mere component. In an analogous way, media technologies assure through their transactions that all of reality gets “integrated as spectacle into the domestic universe.” In the high-tech era, the pictures imported into the subject’s ambient network are computer-generated, as the interface to her surroundings is upgraded from glass panes to monitor screens.

Regan is working in these areas:

internal body rhythm
neuroelectric receptivity
phenomenology
economy of movement
clarity and communication

This was part of an event sponsored by the Dirty Art Department of the Sandberg Institute called the AGE-ISM Lecture Series. It was principally organized by Elise Van Mourik.

More information at Facebook about the event.

The event took place at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie Amsterdam, Frederick Roeskestraat 96, 1076 ED Amsterdam, Netherlands, from 10 am to 6 pm.

I think that this happening had a lot to do with Jean Baudrillard, and Baudrillard attended the event. I was excited. It reminded me of July 2004 when I met Baudillard at the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie in Karlsruhe, Germany.

The topic of my lecture was “The Car of the Future” and I also showed visualisations by the virtuoso concept designer Nick Pugh. And I sang “Folsom Prison Blues” by Johnny Cash.

Here are some excerpts from my lecture notes:

Today I will speak about my ideas for “the Car of the Future.” On March 28, I will speak about the future of software. The argument that I will present on March 28 will be that, in order to progress further, software development or computer science must begin to concern itself with cultural codes as well as with software codes. Computer science must transform itself into a hybrid engineering and humanities discipline.

My lecture today will focus on four key ideas. First, I will present the idea of the transformer car that becomes a vertical car when it enters the city. Second, I will offer the idea of the car as a 3D Virtual Reality game platform. Third – and more briefly – I will discuss technologies for the reduction of noise. And what is noise? Fourth, I will examine the use of human simulation models for automotive design. Here I will also address the question of simulation generally. My work on simulation consists of my striving to develop a position that synthesizes Jean Baudrillard’s key concept of simulation and mainstream ideas in technology of what simulation means.

…

As long as automobile manufacturers persist in not recognizing the cinematic nature of the driving experience, the car will continue to be upstaged by the “trans-dimensional” vehicles of media image streams such as TV and the Internet, tele-commuting and tele-shopping, experienced by the public as a better way to navigate the Virtual Reality in which we now live. In an important sense, the car needs to be redesigned from scratch in order to keep up with these developments of the supercession – to a significant degree – of the physical real by the virtual (what we want is a new, more embodied relationship between the physical real and the virtual). This comprehensive redesign is something entirely different from simply equipping the car with high-tech gadgets ranging from cell phones, MP3 players, video screens and recorders to radar detectors, global positioning systems, and command-oriented speech interaction.

This analysis of the deficit of the automobile with respect to TV, computers, and telecommunications leads to the formulation of the idea of the “Car of the Future” as a new VR entertainment platform: the Tele-Car or Tele-Mobile, the Holo-Car. The car will become a cockpit for all kinds of simulations or Virtual Realities.

…

The “Car of the Future” will flexibly alter its basic planar orientation between horizontal and vertical. It will transform its shape as it exits the highway and enters the city. When in the city, it will only be 55% as wide as today’s cars. It transforms into a double-decker with four passenger compartments: lower front, lower rear, upper front, and upper rear. Each compartment is about as wide as the seat of a golf cart, and can comfortably accommodate one or two persons. Up to 8 persons can ride in the car. The driver sits in the lower front compartment. There is a retractable electric stoop on the exterior side of the car that goes up and down like a small elevator platform, enabling access to the upper compartments. The engine turns vertical with the car, or is small enough to not need to be rotated.

Thanks to its decreased overall width when in the city, the “Car of the Future” will provide the prerequisite for the humanly beneficial redesign of urban streets. They will be only half as wide as they are now. Cars can go in single file in this much narrower street. This will make for a much wider sidewalk, and give back much physical space to the urban environment to rebuild the social sphere and the community. Street life will make a comeback. Parking problems will be greatly alleviated.

…

In 2010, the Committee on Technology for a Quieter America published a report of its findings to the National Academy of Engineering. The report began with the following statement: “Exposure to noise (i.e., unwanted or potentially hazardous sound) at home, at work, while traveling, and during leisure activities is a fact of life for all Americans. At times noise can be loud enough to damage hearing, and at lower levels it can disrupt normal living, affect sleep patterns, affect our ability to concentrate at work, interfere with outdoor recreational activities, and, in some cases, interfere with communications and even cause accidents. Clearly, exposure to excessive noise can affect our quality of life.” A common measure of noise is the sound pressure level in decibels (dB). This level is almost always weighted according to the A-frequency weighting curve which is applied to the signal to make it more representative of the noise perceived by a listener. The resulting value is expressed in dB(A). For the most part, however, the public has little or no understanding of the decibel or A-frequency weighting and thus is unable to appreciate or participate in a discussion of quantitative levels of noise. In a quiet library with soft whispers, the sound level is 30 decibels. The noise from a typical refrigerator is 40 decibels. Light traffic, normal conversation, quiet office: 50 decibels. Air conditioner, sewing machine: 60 decibels. Vacuum cleaner, hair dryer, noisy restaurant: 70 decibels. Garbage disposal, alarm clock, average city traffic: 80 decibels. Subway, motorcycle, truck, lawnmover: 90 decibels. Garbage truck, chain saw, pneumatic drill: 100 decibels. Rock bank concert: 120 decibels. Jet plane at airport: 140 decibels. Rocket launching pad: 180 decibels.

…

In 2001, the American Society of Automotive Engineers published a report entitled Digital Human Modeling for Vehicle and Workplace Design, edited by Don B. Chaffin. In his foreword to the SAE report, David O. Swain of The Boeing Company states: “The ability to digitally simulate how humans interact with a product has the potential to revolutionize the way companies design, build, operate, and maintain new products. Digital modeling and simulation techniques have already proven their ability to significantly reduce the cycle time and cost of designing new products, and have generally improved the quality of products and made them faster, easier, and cheaper to produce, operate, and maintain. But many products – such as high performance aircraft and spacecraft – present additional design challenges in human factors. To get the greatest performance, comfort, and safety from these products, engineers need to know early in the design process how effectively and efficiently humans will be able to interact with them.” What we see emerging here is a new generation of the practice of engineering which is much closer to the humanities and the concerns of the human than the previous generation of engineering practice which was more strictly technical in orientation. In software engineering, this is known as the field of “user experience.” But it is a development that is occurring throughout all of the engineering disciplines.

by Alan N. Shapiro

for Dominick and Rupert

What is the crux of my disagreement with almost all contemporary Marxist thinkers - Slavoj Zizek, for example, and many, many others? The crux of my disagreement with them is that they are dogmatically and simplistically too anti-capitalist. I am both a critic and an advocate of capitalism. Sweepingly negative statements about capitalism are partly fuelled by the sense of superiority and satisfaction that the "critical intellectual" derives from his "anti" stance.

When the designer is faced with the task of designing a singular object, not a widget (!), that he/she wants to design, he wants to do something creative, but not re-invent the wheel. He/she wants to design an object in a workspace with help from already existing components in a library database. Yet these components will not relate to the new singular object in a typical mechanical relationship of the parts to the whole. There will instead be an exciting, inspirational relationship of creativity between the existing components and the coming-into-existence new design. The relationship between library elements and new object is like musical composition. What corresponds to this suggestiveness and resonance in “new computer science“ (Alan Shapiro) is the radical OO coding of patterns and rules. It is exactly like sports where (1) rules are respected, (2) many previous patterns are known, thereby (3) playfulness is liberated. New computer science is based on a paradigm that combines engineering with art and humanities, rather than being just engineering.

The exact goal of this software development project is to demonstrate, in working code, and in a working client application, the new relationship between the code in the Engine and the software instance.

This relationship will be something new and different, powerful and valuable, that no other software has. It will be a qualitatively new relationship of similarity/patterns/samples between smallest data items and ALife software instance.

The structuralism that underlies standard OO and the “mechanical” way that the software instance instantiates itself from code in an engine is obsolete because structures in fact do not have a rigid, stable center. The center of a structure is wild, dynamic, self-evolving, unstable, creative.

The delivered software will consist of the following 4 packages:

• Logic Engine for Rules and Patterns Extreme OO New Intelligence.

• Logic Parsers for testing the operations of the Logic Engine.

• PSQL (Post-Structuralist Query Language for aesthetic operations)

• Test Client Application (ACAD – Aesthetic CAD)

The Structure class provides the basic repository, or data structure, in the Logic Engine. It is a functor associated with a group of terms. A functor can be any object. A term is either a structure or a variable. A structure is an aggregation of other structures.

The PostStructure class extends the Structure class. It is radicalized OO. Everything is a PostStructure in a Aesthetic Logic Engine.

A Variable is an object that has a name and can Instantiate Structures, PostStructures, and other Variables.

A Rule is an axiom, or statement of truth, or pragmatically simulated hypothesized truth, that has more than one Struture, or PostStructure. In a Rule, the truth of the first PostStruture follows from the ability to prove the remaining PostStructures.

A Program is a collection of axioms, which are Facts or Rules.

A Query, in the conventional “Building Parsers” subdivision of computer science, is a Structure that can prove itself against a program. For us, a Query is a PostStructure that can prove itself against an ALife program.

What does it mean to “Prove” a Query? The Post-Logic Engine proves a Query by aesthetically unifying the query’s PostStructures with Rules in a program.

To “aesthetically unify” means not to do a mechanical calculation, but rather to try out a series of hypotheses, verifying their facticity, their conformance to a set of rules. This establishes their truth in the way of a pragmatic simulation.

The Engine has additional features like Comparisons and Evaluations.

A Parser is an object that recognizes the elements of a language. A Parser is either a Terminal or a composition of other Parsers. I will write a hierarchy of Parsers for Pattern Recognition. The point is to do both standard Pattern Recognition (we need to have that in order to then build on top of it) and a new kind of Pattern Recognition that is non-combinatorial.

We will have a Parser base class, simple parsers for simple operations, then special subclasses of Parser that provide composite Parsers, to describe Sequences, Alternations, and Repetitions of other Parsers.

What we will have here that no one else has is an emergent property of Pattern Recognition arising from “Difference within Repetition and Alternation”. This subclass of the Parser class will be called Differance.

PSQL will resemble SQL. It will have SELECT statements, which implement a new, more powerful relationship among the metadata in the database. It will have JOIN statements for multi-table queries. PSQL will have a simple user environment application, showing Queries and Results.

PSQL will be influenced by list-processing languages like LISP and by Pattern Recognition and Robot command languages (two areas where AI has pragmatically succeeded).

The Centrality of Roles

The object-oriented ontology needs to be radicalized in the direction of Roles and of the autonomy of objects.

The attributes of software classes or software objects are containers of data. Data is a consequence of a subject-centered worldview. Data is reductionist. What we want is a Gestalt of information. An informational field that is the true opposite of chaos, rather than a compulsive need for order in precise information.

The object-oriented model has no real appreciation of time. A class is a blueprint of an instance, and an instance is culled from classes one single time, at construction. It cannot modify itself during the real-time activity of the program, of the software system.

We need a software instance that it is a state of “not knowing.” This makes it alive (almost sort of human). It goes along being alive without being so precisely defined. It picks up its definition in real-time, during the live in-play of the system.

Therefore one can say that may roles are available to the instance. It is existentially free to “choose” among all these available roles.

The system does not define classes, it defines roles.

In the current OO model, there is a kind of Sartrean bad faith going on. The object is fixed or pinned down to its identity.

The object should have no identity. Everything that it does is a “performance.”

After Captain Kirk replaced Captain Pike for the eventual prime-time series, the footage from “The Cage” was re-edited into a two-part episode called “The Menagerie.” The Pilot wrapped in an Envelope won the coveted Hugo Award for filmed science fiction excellence, and has been called “one of the most famous two-parters in television history.” (Herbert Solow and Robert Justman)

The starship Enterprise, with Captain Christopher Pike in command, answers a mysterious radio wave emergency distress call from long-lost Federation personnel believed to have crash-landed eighteen years earlier on the planet Talos IV. The distress signal turns out to have been counterfeited by the super-intelligent beings of Talos to lure Captain Pike into a zoo-like captivity.

Captain Christopher Robin Pike of Mojave, California, Sector 001, UFP, born April 11, 2214, is in command of the Enterprise when the mysterious distress signal from Talos IV is received. The super-advanced Talosians seek to confine Pike, played by Henry Herman “Hank” McKinnies, Jr., screen name Jeffrey Hunter, and two of his female officers, Executive Officer or “Number One” Leigh Chapel, elder sister of Nurse Christine Chapel, also played by Majel Barrett, listed as “Leigh Hudec” in the credits, and Yeoman J.M. Colt, in a Cage designated for Homo sapiens inside their Menagerie.

The pale, swelled-cranium custodians of the galactic Zoo are so techno-scientifically advanced that they are all brain. They have lost the capabilities to experience sensory and tactile reality, to feel or emote, and to stroke the physical world. They seek to benignly imprison two humans, a male and a female, cut them loose in a virtual, live-out-any-fantasy-you-desire Disneyland, and start grooving vicariously on the sensations and emotions.

The Talosians have collected biological and post-biological cyborg specimens from around the Milky Way whose shadows Pike can see in nearby cages: snarling anthropoid-arachnoid creatures with saber tooth fangs; humanoid-birds with “angel wings” from a spired city in the sky; Lemur-life rodents from Arcturus with miniature weapons technology and clothing; and imposing hominid refugees from the Planet of the Apes.

But the two “Adam and Eve” humans, endowed with “excellent memory capacity” exceeding all the others, will be the Talosians’ premium ticket to a virtual reality lust-fest.

Aside from scattered hints about its multithreaded, high-performance operating system architecture, the fundamental algorithms and software class inheritance mechanisms of The Menagerie’s virtuality engine are never specified. We can assume a ring zero concentric clustering saltation, descendant from early complex-adaptive Artificial Life programs. Captain Christopher Pike and his hologynic “computer-generated” ideal woman can live out any scenario found in the dream-reservoir in Captain Pike’s head.

Pike rejects the two female Starfleet officers, Commander Chapel and Yeoman Colt, in favor of the gentle hologram as his companion. Any childhood memory, sexual fantasy, “historical” time and place, folklore, fairy tale, strategic game situation, vision of home, or galactic adventure can be “brought to life” and felt in full sensual intensity by The Menagerie’s virtual reality “neural network” and wetware. The ideal woman is synthesized from a reading of Captain Pike’s capital-intensive libidinal unconscious worked upon the ruined body of an Earth female. The ubiquitous woman-special effect named Vina, played by Susan Oliver, was the sole survivor of the Talos IV crash of the Federation citizens’ spaceship, the archeological survey science vessel S.S. Columbia. “They found me in the wreckage dying, a lump of flesh,” Vina later explains. The badly scarred woman appears beautiful to Captain Pike through a chimerical Talosian mind technology resembling trick photochronography. Her first “optical illusion” appearance to Captain Pike and the Enterprise landing party is as one of the ensemble of eleven marooned, non-existent S.S. Columbia crew members and scientific researchers who appear to live in a makeshift survival encampment on the planet’s surface. The landing party includes a much younger Lt. Spock, with more Satanic-looking, harshly diagonal eyebrows.

Vina takes Pike aside to a remote clearing near an unusual rock formation, on the pretext of wanting to show something of urgent import to him. Then she suddenly disappears, without any transporter-like shimmering effect taking place. The aging Earth scientists in tattered clothes also disappear. Two Talosian All-Brainers with pulsating forehead veins emerge from a camouflaged elevator shaft embedded in the rocks. They drug Captain Pike with a yellow tranquilizing spray-gas, and drag him down to his sparse holding cell in the deep underground zoo.

After some mind pre-processing and preliminary Cage orientation, Captain Pike is sent on a whirlwind tour of lifelike scenes which The Menagerie’s virtual reality engine instantiates from the databases and “software base classes” of Pike’s memories and fantasies. In each incidence, the multimedia server adds the ingredient, in a different guise, of the seductress Vina. It installs Pike as the first-person star of the interactive storyboard.

I am inside a deserted fortress, in the Middle Ages of the planet Rigel VII, just as it was when I was trapped there two weeks ago by an attacking Kalar warrior. My previous Yeoman and two others were killed, seven injured. Vina is a colonized peasant girl with long braided hair. I engage in combat at close quarters with the ferocious gargantuan soldier, using assorted spears, swords, maces, rocks, and crossbows as weapons. I defeat my opponent this time by tricking him into leaping from a platform directly onto an elongated blade.

On a splendid summer’s day, at a parkland setting near my small-town North American West Coast boyhood home on Earth, I am greeted by my favorite quarter horses, Tango and Mary Lou. Vina is my affectionate wife dressed in casual warm weather clothes. We have been riding all day and have stopped for a picnic lunch. Coffee and my favorite chicken-tuna sandwiches are spread out on a lawn blanket. My loving spouse also informs me that my mother is nearby.

In Roddenberry’s “Pilot Story Outline” for “The Cage”, dated June 29, 1964, there are also sketches of Captain Pike debauching with virtual Vina in a sumptuous palace in Renaissance Venice; and in a penthouse apartment overlooking an Earth city’s magnificent skyline in 2049.

When his Talosian guards wish to punish him for “wrong thinking,” Pike is sent to a Spanish Inquisition torture chamber. In the filmed version, he is dispatched to a macabre hell and engulfed by flames. He stands waist deep in a hot, bubbling liquid for a few moments of eternity.

The Magistrate or head Keeper of The Menagerie, played by Meg Wyllie, tells Pike via telepathy that this gruesome display comes from “a fable you once heard in childhood.” “Deeper in your mind,” the Keeper adds, “there are things even more unpleasant.”

As the business potentate of the Orion colonies, reclined in barbaric leisure in his rainbow courtyard, Captain Pike wears luxurious silk robes, and is surrounded by fountains, an opulent feast, and intoxicating music. There are bountiful female servants outfitted with exotic physiognomies, body piercings, and scant costumes (designed by William Ware Theiss). Vina is the green-skinned Orion slave girl, with razor-sharp claws for fingernails and a wild lioness’ mane for hair. She is divulged nearly naked with oiled, glistening skin. The nimble temptress tosses her head back, emits an unanticipated shrill, and begins to whirl and writhe rhythmically to the beat of the clamorous music. She traces the legendary Rigellian barefoot dance “which no man can resist.” We sense Vina’s ceremonial movements and see details of her facial cosmetics in a camera close-up. Pike is completely entranced and unable to take his eyes off of her.

The sensual enticement of the Orion slave girl is the culmination of the Talosians’ efforts to seduce Pike into assenting to serve as Vina’s mate in the breeding of a submissive race of virtual reality-sedated planet rebuilders. The Talosians moved underground thousands of centuries ago after devastation from wars left the surface of their world catastrophically uninhabitable. Talos IV is only now “becoming able to support life again.” After concentrating for so long on developing their mental powers, the Talosians have become desensitized and immobile. They feel alive through virtual voyeurism, taking seats as live-along “passengers” inside the “experience vehicles” of captives like Pike and Vina.

Captain Pike has two traveling businessman guests at the virtual banquet table. As Vina’s dance intensifies toward crescendo, one of the male companions turns to face Pike, motions towards her, and poses the question: “Wouldn’t you say it was worth a man’s soul?”

At this moment, the Captain of the Enterprise, holder of the Starfleet Citation for Gallantry and the Palm Leaf of Axanar, is brought back to himself. He rises abruptly from his pillow-chair in the virtual garden and walks away in defiance, summoning all his will power to return to the austere Cage. He puts an end to his participation in the virtual reality goodies proffered by the Talosians.

Captain Pike’s concrete freedom and ontological grounding in the familiar “order of reality” of his physical dwelling in the world are more precious to him than fated reunions with loved ones and pets from his childhood. The intrepid commander of the starship Enterprise was explicitly designed by Gene Roddenberry to be a space-age Captain Horatio Hornblower. Pike’s instinctual sense of what “the real” is has a strong philosophical-cultural affinity with the liberal-modernist epoch of the “natural world” as robust reference point; the fixity of truths and meanings; the substantiality of “use values;” and the unshakeable self-confidence (or “self-presence” in the terminology of deconstruction) of Promethean or Enlightenment subjectivity. From the humanist epistemic standpoint of an “objectively existing real” and secure physical “embodiment,” Captain Pike refuses the Talosian virtual reality of simulation and fractal “selves.” These cyber-seductions and net immersions already gesture beyond liberal humanism towards the destabilizing circumstances and unsettling questions of the hypermodern or posthuman era. Pike’s sworn duty to get back to his ship is more important than saving the “damsel in distress” of his dreams from monsters in a Gothic castle. A polymorphous perverse prisoner is still a prisoner. Captain Pike has nothing but contempt for his over-cerebrated, sedentary captors. Soon he will summon all his cunning and exhort himself to figure out a way to escape from The Menagerie. “There’s a way out of any Cage,” he declares to the Keeper, “and I’ll find it.”

Long before the VR Holodeck technology of The Next Generation, there was Captain Pike and the VR-inebriated Talosians. The virtuality engine of the underground Menagerie enabled those super-advanced alien beings to offer provocative interactive experiences to Pike. But Pike rebuffs the fantasy-realization cyberspace system as a generator of illegitimate semblances that degrade the real, much as Plato, in the Socratic dialogue of Politeia, denigrated “imitative” poetry and painting as false or inauthentic simulacra.

Pike’s rejection of immersive cyberspace can alternatively be understood as dismay at that techno-cultural project’s betrayal of reality not because it plunges the real into deeper “meaninglessness” or apocalyptically bring about its “end,” but rather because it ironically endangers reality by bringing it to completion. Mainstream virtual reality imperils the world’s equilibrium (on the analogy of an ecological threat) through its over-elaboration of an exorbitant hyper-reality and superabundance of data. It is a hyper-rational yet dizzying project of the disappearance of the real into the codes of digital, genetic, subatomic, and holographic information. The dominant version of VR is at the same time the climax of Western society’s belief in an absolute techno-scientific real and the apex of simulation. It is the scheme of wresting the world from its form in order to deliver it up to its formula. It suppresses the open-ended activity of imitation or representation, eliminating the vital aesthetic illusion necessary to the maintenance of reality. VR is the Holy Grail of a perfectly seamless media technology, dispensing with borders and screens, beyond the dualistic dynamics of television or cinema, with no more separation between viewer and spectacle.

Captain Pike works out a cogent double-strategy, or two-sided defense of reality,  foreshadowing an appropriate response to the hybrid cultural system of the model and the series. In “The Cage”, Pike acts as a liberal Enlightenment subject and man of the natural law of value. He defends existentialist or humanist reality against its forsaking by the rule of simulation. The “framing” story that filled out the two-part episode takes place thirteen years later, with Captain Kirk in command of the Enterprise. At the end of “The Menagerie, Part Two”, Pike changes sides to an anticipated new order of creative simulacra and defends reality again, but this time by paradoxically embracing the virtual reality of the Talosians.

In both variants of his attitude towards cyberspace, Pike avoids the widely accepted view that mistakenly assumes that liberal humanist reality remains untarnished by the effects of the vast resources invested every day into making the Holodecks of the world just like reality. Nor is reality in any way diminished, according to this prevailing position, by the consequences of extracting limitless information of every stripe from every nook and cranny of reality. This was the viewpoint espoused by Chairman Bill Gates of Microsoft in his book about cyber-consumerism, The Road Ahead (1996). According to Gates’ vision, cultural citizens will soon work, learn, make friends, shop, explore cultures, and be entertained from the privacy of their homes, and without leaving their armchairs. On the post-Web Internet, which Gates calls the interactive network, they will enter total immersion cyber-environments via high-bandwidth connections. We will be up to our android eyeballs in cybernetic prostheses and virtual excavations of the strip-mined real. Yet we will still firmly believe, in adhering to an antiquated order of simulacra (or stage of the “production of value and meaning”), in the bounded coherence of our liberal individualism and the “rational pursuit of our enlightened self-interest.”

In the doubled story of Captain Pike, a much later and conclusive stage in the regime of the endless production of meaning is invoked. It is the unconditional worship of simulacra, a final phase emblematized in digital media’s “cyberpunk” synthesis of synthetic four-dimensional video and the jacked-in nervous system.

Having completed the first pilot in December 1964, the producers of Star Trek, Gene Roddenberry and Robert H. Justman (and their patrons at Desilu Studios and NBC) immediately realized that they had given birth to a Captain whose precocious engagement with virtual reality disqualified him from serving as the model for a sustainable sequence of media commodities.

In their non-mainstream subversive forms, the fully achieved simulacra of VR threaten the stability and profitability of the consumer cultural system of simulated differences. This is why Pike, who was too far ahead of his time, had to be shunted aside in favor of the valorous Kirk. A fully accomplished virtual network, such as the one which beckoned Pike, endangers the primacy of the model and the dissemination of its lingering aura in the interminable substitutions and rearranged set elements of the series. The logic of the enchanting media model and its propagated array of “differences” was essential in assuring the sense of uniqueness and individuality of each consumer of shared media spectacles. The displacement of this system by immersive or spinal-neurological joining with holographic environments portends a potentially reversible endpoint to the history of images and simulacra.

When NBC Vice Presidents Mort Werner, Jerry Stanley, and Grant Tinker saw “The Cage” at a private premiere screening in Los Angeles in February 1965, their impassioned reaction was that it was “the most fantastic thing we’ve ever seen.” The executive television programming decision-makers were completely “blown away.” They watched the 78-minute, 35-mm print of the film over and over again, as in a trance, becoming more fascinated with each viewing.

In spite of this enthusiasm, NBC rejected the first pilot and the character of Captain Pike. The Original Series did not make the cut for the 1965-66 network television Fall Schedule because the executive committee perceived that the chronicle of Captain Pike was “not a story that properly showcased Star Trek’s series potential.” The encounter between Pike and the Talosians was too cerebral and literary. In the words of Production Vice President Herbert F. Solow and Associate Producer Robert H. Justman, “No one previously had ever attempted to film a complicated television script like ‘The Cage’.”

NBC did make the decision to finance the production of a second pilot film. To do so after the failure of an already underwritten pilot was a move unprecedented in television history. The actor Jeffrey Hunter was unwilling to continue in the role of the Enterprise Captain. Hunter feared that the repudiation of “The Cage” by NBC authorities presaged a shift in Star Trek’s concept toward repetitive formulae of characterization and plot that would be harmful to his already prosperous career and solid reputation as a Hollywood movie actor. From a different perspective, the star of King of Kings (1961) and No Man Is An Island (1962) was seen as having been let go by Roddenberry for making “excessive demands.” (Leonard Nimoy) Hunter died on May 27, 1969, as the result of an accident suffered while shooting the film Viva America! on location in Spain.

In the zoo on Talos IV, Captain Pike is at first as valorous as Captain Kirk eventually will be. He discovers a bug in the Talosians’ system, a flaw in their security software. They have not accounted in their human resources package for the emotion of raw hatred. When Pike concentrates all his feelings on his loathing of the Talosians, their telepathic ability to read his mind is blocked out. He throws the hand phasers belonging to Number One and Yeoman Colt to the ground near the concealed sliding wall panel entrance to “The Cage”. Pike then lies in wait for the Keeper to fall into the trap. Believing that Pike is crouched asleep against the wall, the Magistrate enters the incarceration room to retrieve the phasers. Pike grabs him by the arms and rings his hands around the Talosian leader’s neck. Firing one of the phasers (which appeared to be drained of power due to mental deception) at the holding cell’s front transparency, the Captain opens a large hole in the processor-generated force field surrounding the chamber. Pike and his fellow officers dart out of “The Cage” and flee in the elevator back to the surface. After this outburst of hatred, the Talosians are only too happy to let Captain Pike go. They admit that they underestimated the human species’ aversion to confinement. “The customs and history of your race show a unique hatred of captivity,” the Keeper concludes following a belated scan of all Enterprise computer library records. “Even when it’s pleasant and benevolent, you prefer death.” Extreme phenomena like violence and hatred were not considered in the Talosians’ software design. In most cases, proper software engineering instructs that reality is a bug to be fixed in the next release. But a radical passion like hatred necessitates more than a version patch. To the Talosians, this vehement human potentiality is like a rogue virus which threatens to bring down their entire planetary network.

Captain Pike is reunited with the Enterprise crew, and Talos IV is classified as an off-limits planet which all Federation ships are prohibited from going near, on penalty of death. But thirteen years later, Pike is involved in a terrible, disastrous accident, a fiery explosion which leaves him nearly dead.

After completing his tour of active duty as a starship Captain, Pike was promoted to the rank of Fleet Captain, and became an Instructor at Starfleet Academy. After the baffle plates aboard his Class J training vessel ruptured, Pike risked his life to save the lives of seven Academy Cadets, but was exposed to nearly lethal Delta radiation in the process.

His body, aside from a brutally scarred face, was destroyed, and his consciousness or soul was transferred into a stationary box or “housing unit” without prostheses. His only means of communication is the simplest digital code of beeping (and flashing a light-emitting diode) once for “yes” and twice for “no.” Faced with this reduced, diminutive existence, Fleet Captain Pike is reminded of the virtual paradise offered by the Talosians where he can be “able-bodied” once again. He now wishes to return to The Menagerie.

By this time, Kirk has taken command of the Enterprise, and he sees it as his duty to enforce the injunction against visiting Talos IV. Mr. Spock is Pike’s loyal Science Officer from thirteen years back. Spock places his career at risk by commandeering the ship without Kirk’s knowledge in order to bring the “homuncular” Pike back to the zoo planet. Spock is the only officer to serve under the Captainships of both Pike and Kirk. For the quasi-comatose Talosians, thirteen years was just a nanosecond, and they are waiting to greet Pike with as much revelry as their atrophied funny bones can muster.

For Captain Pike, the appeal of virtuality is relative. Compared with the able-bodied, open-spaced conditions of vitality, mobility, and irreducible language, mainstream VR is a sham. It is a pale facsimile of life, and Pike will have no truck with it. But compared to the degraded conditions of immobility and digital inarticulateness, reduced to the unraveled binary code of communication, a certain form of VR is preferred. From the standpoint of spatial, quadriplegic, and semantic incapacitation, an alternative and self-aware virtual reality is accepted and embraced. As long as Captain Pike has a body, he is not seduced to make the leap beyond the screen to the full achievement of simulacra. Once he no longer has a body, he is ironically ready to put on his full-body DataSuit, head-mounted display, and PowerGlove. At the dawn of James T. Kirk’s term as Captain, and the seminal confusion of Kirk’s status as original or copy, we have a powerful statement about the new “interactive networks.” It is only from the position of an already debased spatial immobility and urban hyper-concentration that we are prepared to adopt the doubled or substitute world of virtuality. Fellow homunculi, as the ubiquitous Microsoft advertising slogan might ask, where do you want to go today?

So Pike, the true firstborn, was whisked away into virtual reality and replaced by the changeling Kirk. There was, of course, another way forward for Captain Pike, but the scriptwriters of “The Menagerie” were unfortunately ignorant of the basics of writing operating systems wetware drivers for peripheral devices. Pike’s bio-rehabilitation programmers already resuscitated at least one controllable nerve impulse from his consciousness (his “brain waves,” to which his wheelchair is constructed to respond). Since the flesh machine developers succeeded in connecting the discrete signals of this impulse across the synaptic gap to an output device (the beeping and light flashing for “yes” or “no”), additional layers of software to drive more sophisticated output devices and sound cards would be possible. From the single binary registering of a 0 or 1, an entire operational-transactional language can be devised. One merely has to enumerate and combine varied sequences of 0s and 1s as discrete identifiers in an infinitely permutated system. The only drawback would be that Pike’s consciousness would always remain at the level of the lowest machine language, forced to perpetually master and will the lengthy binary number sequences in order to express himself! He would literally be the autonomous machine and its finally awakened artificial intelligence.

At the end of “The Menagerie, Part Two”, the Keeper famously says to Captain Kirk, telepathically and through the medium of a viewscreen: “Captain Pike has an illusion, and you have reality. May you find your way as pleasant.”

But it is a mistake to so simplistically (or lucidly?) describe, as the Keeper does to Kirk, the new attitude that Pike intends to have towards The Menagerie’s virtuality engine during his second stay on the Forbidden Planet. The German version of “The Menagerie” is called Talos IV: Tabu, or Talos IV: Taboo. The Talosians have been wrong before in their expectations regarding the behavior of the noted twenty-third century space explorer. Pike did not accept customary Disneyland-style VR before. It is unlikely that Fleet Captain Pike, in spite of his new honorary diplomatic designation as Advisory Federation Ambassador to the eleven planets of the Talos star group, is going to make an unprincipled about-face and enthusiastically welcome what he previously had scorned. Pike’s turnaround is instead going to be of a more reputable sort. He will carry out his two-sided defense of reality by switching to creative partaking in the new cybernetic order of technology-mediated simulacra, while keeping his own transformational and illusionist goals uppermost in mind. Having tragically lost his biological body, and having just intimately confronted the sobering fact of his own death, Pike is venturing back into cyberspace in acute awareness of the disappearance of the concrete phenomenology of his immediate here and now and of the vanishing of his own physicality. His life circumstances are analogous to the conditions of social existence which have spawned the “interactive networks,” and which the latter, in their most influential forms, further catalyze. Pike is not going online to conduct a commonplace search for the satisfaction of his desires; not to have good times, sex, and rock ‘n roll. He is returning to Talos IV to inventively regain and extend his severed proximate lifeworld contexts and environs. He goes back into the Talosian cyber-matrix, not as an eager consumer of techno-wares seeking cool experiences, but as a hacker-philosopher or wetware recoder of the system. He is looking for ways to regather his dissipated orientation and undone materiality. Pike is going to employ Talosian prostheses to make outrageous, diverting, and poetic uses of their fantastical technologies. He is going to artistically undermine the virtuality engine of The Menagerie to find a certain acceptance of the reality of his disability. He will stake out a new practice of real “embodiment” and dynamic partnership between humans and intelligent machines.

Gene Roddenberry’s creation of Star Trek was strongly influenced by the 1956 science fiction film Forbidden Planet. This was the case in many areas, such as the look-and-feel of the spaceship’s interior, the appearance of the planet, the interpersonal relations among the ship’s officers, and the earlier narrative’s Hyper-Drive faster-than-light speed technology. For the present study, what is most interesting is the thematic “warning” in Forbidden Planet about a civilization (the Krell) that developed a definitive scientific system of total “virtual reality” or “nanotechnology” control over the physical world (“an ultimate machine to instantaneously project solid matter to any part of the planet for any purpose”), but ended in total self-destruction.

There is a clip of virtual Pike on the surface of Talos IV, strolling hand in hand with virtual Vina up the slope that leads to the elevator leading down to the underground Menagerie. At the end of “The Menagerie, Part Two”, this strip of film is used to show the spectral Pike, just lifted out of his wheelchair-bound body, rejoining Vina after a thirteen-year separation. Moments later the Kirk-commanded Enterprise warps out of orbit.

But in the 1986 video release of “The Cage”, we see that the same footage was originally used in a different way.

The first modernist Pike has just said “no” to Talosian virtual reality and is standing near the rocks, preparing to be transported back to his ship. Number One and Yeoman Colt have already gone on ahead. To appease the heartbroken Vina, who cannot leave with Pike because of the terrible physical deformity of her real body (“the female’s true appearance,” as the Keeper says), the Talosians create a double of Pike. The clone walks up the incline with Vina while the “real” Pike gazes approvingly at them. One of the twin Pikes beams out. The other one reenters cyberspace with his female companion. “[She] has an illusion, and you have reality,” the Keeper says to the departing Pike, instead of to Kirk in reference to Pike as at the end of “The Menagerie, Part Two”. “May you find your way as pleasant.”

In this montage double-image from the “suppressed” version of “The Cage”, the resolution of Pike’s desire for virtual Vina is a more provocative and literary one, raising the philosophical questions associated with the double, cloning, and the transporter. What is undecidable in this scene is which of the two Pikes has ontological primacy or can be considered to be the original. In Portuguese dubbing, “The Cage” is called Jornada nam Estralas: onde tudo comecou, or Star Trek: Where Everything Began.