Reading Notes: Botting, "Of Meat And The Matrix"

[rax]

Human history about to end and be replaced with the history of the machine? We are most likely a simulation being used by robots as a living history museum? Author says that's awfully optimistic, why waste the processing power. (Best argument against that I've heard in a while.) In that version of the future, all of human needs would be met except the desire for recognition.

Virilio claims "In the very near future, our history will happen in universal time, itself the outcome of instantaneity --- and there only." 

Here comes the author to say "history has always been driven by machinic systems." 

"Synthanatos" as the death that becomes irrelevant as the machine-subject goes about its business?

"Excess is no longer linked to lack, but signifies a positive process which undermines paternal authority and disentangles the father's metaphors to weave the multiple and mobile connections that signal the end of Man and the emergence of the new woman-cum-machine. Can't you see she's coming?" That subtle dig at Plant is amazing.

Photographic relation as a navel --- navel-gazing as looking at history --- heh. Terminator movie as origin myth!

Whoah this paper cites _Rudy Rucker_. Maybe hanging out with scifi nerds will be useful to me after all. :P Wetware is the book in question, I should look it up in my Copious Free Time, the presence/absence of navels and human bodies with robot parentage sound pretty interesting. (Lyotard was suggesting sexual difference would be necessary for artificial intelligence; Rucker's plot in this book at least seems to agree. I find Botting's take on it a little problematic but I'm gonna move on.)

Lacan says "the true formula of atheism" is that "God is unconscious?" That's something to chew on.

"Every bopper tried to avoid any taint of the human notion of self." This sounds astonishingly like something Rik would say, and also ties into all of this D&G froofcore "there is no subject" stuff.

Merge, openness to the Other, death --- Kristeva's abjection?? Oooh, or BODY WITHOUT ORGANS.

"meat" and "machine" as slurs.

Angela Carter, now? The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr. Hoffman --- well this essay is giving me interesting stuff to read in the future if nothing else.

Neuromancer and disability? Maybe, from what I'm reading here? I dunno, I haven't read the primary source.

"Sex... never lies far from descriptions of the ecstasies of future technological transcendence, no matter how incorporeal it appears to be." Matrix as masturbatory fantasy of returning to the womb? Socket in the back of your head as artificial navel? 

Networking vs. weaving (pg172) interesting. ...replicunts? o.0

"As a bodily metaphor, the navel signals a resistance to psychoanalysis and remains 'loaded with the connotations of gender' but it cannot be reduced to one sex, a 'democratic' figure, a 'tribute not only to an antiphallic semiotic but also to an antiphallic genderness that does not assign women a second-rate position' (Bal 1991)."

Barthes described text as weave and network? Neat, that's not too surprising, but it means there's good Barthes I haven't read yet. :) 

Virilio sees research on cyberspace as research on God and (my word) apotheosis.

There's a great analysis of Blade Runner with regard to Barthes and Lacan in here that I am not going to take notes on to the extent that it deserves. If I have seen Blade Runner and read Camera Lucida, I should come back here.

Virilio on substitution versus Baudrillard's simulation; a split into two worlds, virtual and actual. My brain is kind of turning to mush, conveniently I am near the end.

Page 204 has Zizek on virtual sex: "The true horror evinced by virtual sex is not simply the loss of real sex, but the disclosure that this real sex never existed in the first place, that sex always-already was virtual."

Comments

[sprrwhwk.livejournal.com]

Page 204 has Zizek on virtual sex: "The true horror evinced by virtual sex is not simply the loss of real sex, but the disclosure that this real sex never existed in the first place, that sex always-already was virtual."

++

[eredien]

this real sex never existed in the first place, that sex always-already was virtual.

I approve of this statement.

What I find most appealing about sex is being able to pay attention to how what is happening with my body impacts what I'm thinking and feeling and what is already happening inside my head, which is where most of the real work of sex takes place, for me. And vice versa.

Virtual sex allows me--forces me--to drop the pretense that sex and sexual desire can't start inside my head and must emenate from the body, and forces me to drop the pretense that sex inside my head isn't or shouldn't be sexy, and forces me to drop the pretense that what is inside my head shouldn't or won't affect my body.

[occultatio.livejournal.com]

Whoa, I'm glad I kept reading these after the D&G clusterfucks. I absolutely adore the term "synthanatos," both conceptually and aesthetically (as a really awesome word). Dude.

Also very intrigued/amused with that "formula of atheism."

This actually sounds like a paper I might be able to navigate -- does it exist online anywhere?

[sovay]

Angela Carter, now? The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr. Hoffman --- well this essay is giving me interesting stuff to read in the future if nothing else.

Recommended. Also Blade Runner, especially now that the director's authoritative cut has come out.

[krinndnz.livejournal.com]

You are getting deeply into really funky stuff, and it is a curious journey to observe.

[postrodent.livejournal.com]

Lyotard was suggesting sexual difference would be necessary for artificial intelligence

Did you mention this before? I am appalled that I missed it, because it's fascinating, and contrasts interestingly with Moravec's comment that uploaded posthumans would only put on gender for costume parties. Tell me more.

In _Software_, the book before _Wetware_, two robots with bodies like "a tall spindly-looking thing with tweezers instead of fingers" and "a file cabinet sitting on two caterpillar treads" are both given male pronouns, and are said to have "something like a sexual love for each other", having reproduced together more than once. Rucker never talks about boppers having a "sexual preference" beyond preferring to mate with those they perceive as successful, but to me that begs the question of why you'd bother with gender at all. Strangely, by _Wetware_, some of the boppers seem to be embracing human ideas about gender to a greater extent, to the point of the "males" "pursuing" the "females". But they still only put on humanoid bodies to mess with human minds. :)

As for _Neuromancer_, you could say that Gibson _invents_ a disability -- when the novel starts, the protagonist has basically been neurally maimed by his former employers, and is unable to access cyberspace. This is a multidimensional disaster for him -- not only does it destroy his livelihood, it damages his very identity and sense of self ("He fell into the prison of his own flesh" as the line famously goes). "Meat" is definitely an insult to him, one he applies to himself.

"The true horror evinced by virtual sex is not simply the loss of real sex, but the disclosure that this real sex never existed in the first place, that sex always-already was virtual."

Can't say I get where the horror is here, unless this is some new Theory meaning for the word "horror". :) By this token, "real" sex would be what (nonsapient) animals have -- they exist fully in reality because they lack the wetware, or the cultural software, or both, to do otherwise. I guess that's fine and all, but imagining all the other possible and implied realities is part of what makes sex and human interaction in general enjoyable -- constructing "consensual hallucinations" (as cyberspace is described in _Neuromancer_). I am a big lump of CHON wandering around, bumping against other lumps of CHON, but we can imagine being more, being different and better things, and these imaginings are both rehearsals for future realities we might bring about, and useful examinations of the one we already live in. To state the obvious. :) *bong-rip*

[ab3nd.livejournal.com]

contrasts interestingly with Moravec's comment that uploaded posthumans would only put on gender for costume parties.

This actually plays interestingly with Ian Banks' observation that if you have some cultural imbalance that is gender-based, and anyone in you culture can switch genders at will, everyone will become the gender that it is better to be, and your culture will either fix the imbalance or have no breeding pairs.

I think this is kind of a naive interpretation, as what will actually happen is that part of your culture will turn on another part which is chosen via some method such as the judicial system to be acceptable to be used as victims and use force of arms to cause that subset to be whichever gender is required for breeding purposes, unless you have a culture like the Culture, in which individuals are weakly godlike and therefore not really force-able. You can't threaten someone who doesn't have to eat, has multiple hot backups of their personality, can heal having their head cut off, and can shoot armor-piercing lasers from their fingernails, unless you are so advanced that you don't need them anyway.

Also, so far all attempts at AIs have been gendered only in that they are arbitrarily assigned gendered pronouns. Since the development of gender identity in humans is, to the best of my knowledge, not a solved problem, implementing it in a computer isn't a solved problem either.

Advanced fictional AIs, a la Gibson's Wintermute, are sometimes not really gendered, but are not necessarily comprehensible either. Saying Wintermute is "male" would be like saying that my car is "squeamish". Wintermute fails to male in the same sense that my car fails to squeam. I also want to hear more about this suggestion of the requirement of sexual difference for AI.

[postrodent.livejournal.com]

Either that or they'll have kids by a means other than conventional sexual reproduction. Certainly the Culture's Minds could straight-up _manufacture_ new citizens, with appealing quirks of personality and amusing resource-consuming obsessions to pursue, out of whole cloth if they had to. I suspect they'd feel dirty doing it, but they sometimes feel dirty when they stick their fingers into the development process of other, less-powerful cultures too... and yet. :)

[xlerb.livejournal.com]

This talk of Neuromancer and disability is reminding me of what Delany did with disability in Nova — specifically [possible minor spoilers ahead?] how Prince Red, with his cyborg arm and its superhuman strength and speed (taken to outright comic-book-superhero levels at one point), still can't do the most important thing that anyone born with two meat-arms can do: plug himself into a computer interface.

[ff00ff.livejournal.com]

"the true formula of atheism" is that "God is unconscious?"

This tortures the idea of god beyond any meaningful recognition, and putting it like this only serves to try to make atheists the object of ridicule. It's specifically phrased to play to an audience of theists. Its sort of a disingenuous translation of atheism into terms a theist can grasp.

[ff00ff.livejournal.com]

Also, the bit about our universe being a giant machine simulation of history is I believe an end-of-universe scenario known as the strong anthropic principle, wherein tech industry jerks predict that increases in computational power will continue exponentially until the entire universe is organized to preform calculations at peak efficiency, giving that new universe the computing power to simulate many other universes in which information is not so dense, such as this universe computer's own past, which leads to a single universe creating a giant multiverse of libertarian tech-head futurists living forever or something.

I much prefer the weak anthropic principle or just the anthropic principle (because the version with the prefix strong is just silly and some people don't choose to recognize it as valid philosophy) which is just an effective counter to theist awe about how perfect the earth is for human life, and how cosmically unlikely such a place is, and hence there must be a god.

[ab3nd.livejournal.com]

I think you are mixing Tipler's Omega Point, Kurtzweil's technological singularity (a.k.a the rapture of the nerds), and possibly one or two other strands of posthumanist thought, with the strong anthropic principal, which merely makes statements about the required structure of any observed universe.

Tipler's Omega point conveniently overlooks the fact that while the universe may eventually be entirely given over to performing some form of informational processing (and may in fact, already be doing that), that doesn't mean it sent its only begotten son to be our savior.