nettime: Word Bombs Intro by Matthew Fuller

[Geert Lovink <geert@xs4all.nl>]

People Would Go Crazy

introduction to Word Bombs conference 'techno-' panel (London)
by Matthew Fuller
May 1996

        In the 17th century the word technology was used almost exclusively
to talk about grammar.  At the and of the twentieth century, the machines
of language and those of electrons are so irresolvably cross-contaminated
that, whilst we are at once facing a world in which you can only tell
whether you're a child or an adult by making the transition from being
infantilised by the hardwired ontology of Disney to being infantilised by
that of Microsoft, we are also being taken by the migration of language
into new, transmogrifying contexts that shred such stable relations on
contact.
        When flesh is becoming increasingly protean, those who have
historically been considered morphologically dubious share the doubled
situation of facing both immense opportunity and of becoming increasingly
subject to alteration and 'improvement'.
        When the current stories about the human being do not fit what is
actually occurring, a hybrid model of existence is required to encompass a
new, complex, and contradictory lived experience.
        Machinic fictions are ideally placed to deal with this mess of
situations.  As JG Ballard points out, 'Science Fiction is the literature
of the Twentieth Century'.
        This having been realised as a commonplace, we have seen a frenzy
of stitching healthy plastic organs into a dead patient, SF writers such as
Gibson and Stephenson have been decontextualised to revivify mainstream
fiction.
        Never at one with itself though, Science Fiction has always been a
place for border creatures of every kind.  A speculative fiction that
throws up more instruments of speculation than a looted hospital.  As a
motor of aberrant reflection it throws the truths that we are told about
the world by endlessly narcissistic father / critic / author / authority
into the blender.  The multivalent paranoia of Science Fiction writers like
Dick or Ballard or Pat Cadigan for instance is also echoed in the feminist
writings of Luce Irigaray where:
        "The logos would no longer simply be, for itself, the means of
translating his will alone; of establishing, defining, and collecting his
properties into one Whole.  Truth would loose its univocal and universal
character.  It could be doubled, for example.  At the very least it would
have a reverse and an inverse to shore up its constitution as such.  In any
case, another, still hidden, aspect.  Or another focus?  Another mirror?
There would be no way of knowing which way to look any more, which way to
direct the eyes (of the soul) in order to see properly.  People would go
crazy."

An addiction to driving themselves or other people crazy throws writers
into a directly political conflict.  News Corporation's Asia Star satellite
broadcasting is programmed in Mandarin, the region's numerically and
culturally dominant language.  Steamrollering out linguistic variation from
space is seen by Rupert Murdoch as being extremely useful in the
furtherance of the global mind become global clapometer.  As he says:  "it
will be not only prosperity that we catch in our networks, but also order -
and ultimately peace."
        This plane of consistency enforces nothing but a peace smoothed by
conformism: a smothering of tongues.
        Murdoch sends his image into orbit, but there is an intense fear at
the source, the single satelite commanding millions of relections of its
signal.  This is the fear of an alteration in some mirage that is always on
the verge of being deformed, or transformed, but of which it still claims
to be the source.

hypertext

One development that has been thrown up in a literary context as a way of
maximising the circumvention of the annexation of speech by a single
unitary source is hypertext.

        The institutionally solidified nexus of hypertext studies around
George Landow, Jay David Boulter and Michael Joyce has largely failed to
produce anything much more than smug diagrammatical work-outs of a neutered
poststructuralism.  The great thing about hypertext after all is that there
can be no masters, no final word.  You can go on. and on. and on.  Its
interminability may just have something to do with why it is so favoured by
many academics with an eye for the long chance.  Thankfully though, the
proponents of the tastefully interminable find themselves terminated, or at
least locked into a loop by a kind of sorites paradox: how much
literariness can you remove or do without before language ceases to be
literature and your status by association evaporates into just one more
breath?
        Both hypertext and print have the doubled aspect of striation and
smoothness.  In a solely hypertexted universe, someone would have to invent
the book.
        Once hypertext leaks out of the hands of its apologist priesthood
however the virulence of its dynamic becomes apparent.
        One thing that is particularly important, and that we relish for
instance in the production of I/O/D is that because of the strictly
transitory nature of the format, the thing has got to be done for the
moment.  As Bruce Sterling notes:
        "It doesn't matter how brilliant your program for the Atari 400 is,
it's dead.  Some huge section of the American populace sweated blood over
software for the Apple IIe and pretty soon it will all be gone.  It's just
dreadfully impermanent; it's more like performance art than literature"
        Already well beyond the power of its would-be intellectual
protectorate though, the dynamic of hypertext - which has to be treated as
a conceptual, or virtual dynamic, rather than one which is 'realised' by
any particular existing system - is emerging and taking shape as the result
of a massive amount of distributed action.
        As Sadie Plant states, embodied as the Net, this dynamic is
starting to 'creep through the screens of representation which have
previously filtered it out.'
        This is not of course to say that these screens themselves are not
subject to constant reinvention.  Again calling up Irigaray, we can note
that, attempting to reinvigorate the Source, John Perry Barlow, certainly a
poet warrior in the truly classic sense, can glibly assert:
        "The Internet is female because it is horizontal."
Whilst being on your back ain't of course so bad, I can think of better
ways of getting formulated over than by a superannuated technoshaman.
=46orced into maintaining its functionality at the edge of dissolution into
the hall of mirrors, control has had to become fractal, operating in a
recursive manner at many different scales.  The insect panic of not being
the Source - the priest of the future - the same fear that composes
Murdoch, is largely what passes for a culture of legitimation of the
networks.  One can sympathise of course with the motivation:  "Next to
domination, ownership is no doubt somewhat trivial."

Blocking up the future filtration systems of the net has been taken up by
political activists, notably the Net Strikes initiated by the Italian group
Strano Network.  Finding ways to maximise their inevitable leakage, has, on
the Alt X web site hosted by Mark Amerika provided a crucial example of how
in a networked environment a writing project differentiates and, more
necessarily, conjoins at times with a publishing project.
        One effect of the nets, and of this site in particular, is to
encourage a mutant fictionality which could exist in no other context.


At present, technoculture in the UK tends to find itself most intensely
realised on the dancefloor rather than on the telephone, and techno music
provides a vector through which much of the fiction under discussion today
can be explored.  The materialist and instrumental understanding of
language meshes with the compositional imperatives of techno:  fast,
distorted and brain-damaging - according to Praxis Records, true hardcore
is, "=8Aanything that's not laid back, mind numbing or otherwise reflecting,
celebrating, (or) complementing the status quo" .
        Not suprisingly then, the yawnsomely canonical intertextuality of
much postmodern fiction gets the stinky finger in favour of texts more
along the lines of that described by DJ Deadly Buda in his Morphing Culture
manifesto, hyping a turntable scenario that is seriously threatening to the
continued stable identity of anyone expecting what they're expected to
expect:
        "Jumble break to the best part of every song - that jet engine take
off, that good ole football crowd noise, the explosion at the beginning of
every KISS live album, that nutty pre-acid house baleric movement=8A =8Ahow
often do you wish the musicians would just give it up and make a whole song
out of all those kool sounds?"
        As TechNET have shown, and like Jazz before it, electronic dance
music seems set to provide a hardcore methodology that will find in fiction
a perfect medium for its mutation and transmission.   Cutting the legs from
underneath a purely stylistic interpretation of what I am suggesting,
Hardcore methodology - being nothing itself but a stupid joke - just laughs
at its inevitable clip-art reiteration.  Whilst most writers could do worse
than produce an encore to the typing of their precious manuscript with an
equal number of strokes of the delete key we are approaching the release of
a fiction that swallows up the processing of words into the mutation engine
of the sound studio.  All the adaptivity and dysfunctionality of language
is reinvigorated, thrown into communication.
        Hardcore methodoloy, mashed up in the machines, induces a depth and
power of revelation.  Infesting fiction with the disturbing noise at the
depths of language; and always yet another, still hidden, aspect.  Another
focus.  Another rythm.  Another mirror.  There is no way of knowing which
way to look any more, which way to direct the eyes in order to see
properly.

People are going crazy.


1 Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill,
Cornell University Press, Ithaca 1985
2 Bruce Sterling, Interview with Steve Steinberg,  Intertek, Vol3.2, Summer =
1991
3 Sadie Plant, The Virtual Complexity of Culture, Future Natural, George
Robertson ed. Routledge, London, 1996, p.206
4 Statement made in debate with Peter Lamborn Wilson, Next 5 Minutes
conference, Amsterdam, January 1996
5 Louis Aragon, Irene's Cunt, trans. Alexis Lykiard, Creation Books, London =
1996
6 Cristoph Fringelli, editorial, Praxis Newsletter 7, London, 1996
7 Deadly Buda, In Search of Morph, (The Morphing Culture Part 2), Alien
Underground 0.1, London 1995




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