Cyberpunk Classroom

2005-09-01T16:56:00.000-07:00

The dimensions of the room disintegrate. The volatile reminders of discipline, enforcement and control begin to dissipate into the echoes of nineteenth century mechanization of the formative years.

Compulsory education?

Moving out of the era of the machine, and into the discourse of information, many of the assumptions inherent within centralised, functional, social organization are being torn apart. The point is not to delve phenomenologically into the remnants of these shredded hierarchies, or to attempt a piecemeal recovery of the grounds for learning, but to move the process along, to take the 'transformative potential' as Foucault puts it, and to set it into a coherent unleashing of the chaotic elements to be found emerging asymptotically beyond the prying pens of the system's managers.

A relationship with technology and power is established. Through use of the computer, the student is directly able to interrogate knowledge as 'given'. The fundamental use of information can be transformed. Analysis of language from a squared angle, for example, such as that found in Chomsky, or in a behaviorally orientated theory to explain the process of learning, no longer holds precedence when obtaining a fixed eyelevel, peering at the student. The student surges ahead, escapes. Thus lines of flight redefine the object as a self-organising property. The expression used by Deleuze and Guattari - 'the assemblage'.

A different politic may be embarked upon. A politic which sets its assumptions in the student herself. She is the cybernetic process. Hiro in Neil Stephenson's Snow Crash, is not merely a mythic figure of the computer age, but is a figure reinventing the grounds of discourse through engagement with the process - 'to hack'. The multi-faceted avenues through which Hiro travels, give rise to the extension of coded pixels by which information is transformed and redeployed at every level, until the course route devours itself at the stage of encounter with the panacea of code, in this case the floating nightmare of The Raft. Hiro is a front for a more dynamic set of parameters, which in a similar way to Molly in Neuromancer, are punched in to run via the image and body-politic of Y.T. Hiro is the cowboy, displaying one last attempt to retain his humanity by practising martial arts, securing the familiarity of engagement with the ritualised forms of tradition that are engulfed and eaten away by technology and code. Y.T shows no such decadence, but merges with the process. She makes love with the machine. At every stage, her body is a ligature for the direct interaction between process and code.

The sense of mutation cannot be side tracked into the biological grounds for its emergence. Machine thinkers such as Daniel C. Dennett, or Richard Dawkins miss the point if they wish to elaborate the relative coexistence of evolutionary fitness regimes, by extending such practises as 'memes'. Félix Guattari is closer to the mark when he said that 'computer-assisted forms of thought are mutant and arise from other kinds of music, from other universes of reference'. It is not that Molly and Y.T are displaying a rather well developed kind of survival in the face of huge odds, but that their assimilation with the process is giving rise to mutating conditions for emergence, which set into action the codings that other figures struggle to corrupt. At this speed of mutation, the theoretical questions of dissemination become hugely infected by partial and fleeting objects. Sandy Stone fell in love with her prosthesis. The deterritorialisation of Deleuze and Guattari becomes 'hypertactile'. All surfaces, however placed, are open and ready for the play of light, bearing loaded messages of digital submergence, the arcade, nuggets of advertising, jingles wrapped and enunciated.

A complex maze-like cyborg? Donna Haraway posited the figure of the cyborg as 'text, machine, body, and metaphor- all theorised and engaged in practice in terms of communication'. Yet this animate already seems dated. The processes which are feeding into the mutational resource are substantiated and informed by deadlier precursors. Sitting a child in front of a computer also enhances the practise of disequilibrium. Andrew Ross speaks of 'cyberpsychosis'. Marshall McLuhan, 'The age of Implosion'. The game which is being embarked upon does not cease with the neat reification of a micropolitic, or easily placed zone of refusal. It is the knotted and knotting maps of dispersal, where displacements make inroads into themselves, taking form and marking it with others, inverting the initial step onto a selection of instability, focusing 'broken segmentation'. Virtual universes are appearing throughout the gaps in the binary locus of 'on ''off'. In many ways they are redefining what a gap is, or what could be envisaged by questions of communication, translation or language. That is, the mutational process does not halt on the level of a defined 'outward' rupture, but it continues when communication has ceased, when the computer has been turned off, when the nearest television set is a hundred kilometres from base camp.

The poet and social critic Hans Magnus Enzensburger, wrote of the television as occupying the position of zero medium. By this he meant that it piles all the stupefying elements of the modern world into itself and distributes them universally as a type of postmodern opiate. This he further qualifies as the 'Buddhist machine'. This is not merely to inflame practising Buddhists, but to lay at the foot of television the quasi-mystical status that its hypnotic cascade of information and sensation attests to. Enzensburger’s convulsive arguments to and around this point make it plain that it is impossible to effectively place value judgements on the subject. Rather the television can be theorised more directly as a type of 'attractor-and-repellor', a transduction machine. The plane that the television inhabits could be said to be close to zero, as the infecting rate of process cannot be signified by positive or negative quantities. Deleuze and Guattari theorised this figure as the 'body without organs', which corresponds to the capitalist breakdown, schizophrenic desiring-production. The body without organs at once affects all parts of the machine, and is a partial object. It is the inscription plane, where the recording process of capitalist production takes place. Television, where all world news piles relentlessly into fictional political discourse and aggrandisement of the entertainment business, has its theoretical implications in the movement to and from its immense pathway. As a mutational factor in the expansion of communication into and out of our understanding of learning, television displaces all that is causally signified and broadcasts it. This results in skating between programmes, channel hopping for any forecast phonology. This is why the invader inhabiting the world of television is soon lost in its smooth universe. Television is a world in itself, a body which does not react.

There is an important distinction between computer assisted mutation and straight technical innovation. Technical innovation is set against the backdrop of social change, and the various ways in which we could theorise a society 'emerging' or 'developing'. This has nothing to do with computer mutation. Stanislav Andreski makes the point well that theorists embarking on the amazing fact that society changes, often wrap their ideas in an absurd jargon and inept restatement of the obvious in more technical terms. Stanislav in particular attacks the 'linguistic contortions' of McLuhan as being 'gratuitous, slick, but nonsensical metaphors'. Stanislav, perhaps following essayists such as Ralph Waldo Emerson or Michel de Montaigne, advocates a balanced sense of humour when approaching social change, and attempting to theorise it. The stunning mediocracy which academic institutions ceaselessly churn out, may be eliminated from the process of computer mutation. For example, any thesis on biological mutation is bound to be buried in an impenetrable barrier of chemicals, equations and graphs. Social theorists, eager to progress, are entranced by the idea that this density of specialised knowledge, transposed to a more general field will yield an electrifying reponse from the intended intellectual audience. The point at issue is the limit of computer mutation. Certainly in a time based analysis, the emergence of computers transforms the learning process. Yet what are the real effects of this emergence? I would suggest that Stanislav is caught in the philosophical distinction between appearance and reality. The effects which we perceive and the effects which are real are mutated by computers. There is at stake the comprehension of the postmodern world, and a coherent expression of it. Of course McLuhan offered some quite absurd sound-bites, but they are reduced and subsumed by fleeting, partial moments of clartity, through which speeding emergence takes place, and the passage to the other side may be broached.

Logic itself is infected. With the advent of computer-based mutational emergence, the inputs taken as organisational factors are complexifying. Historical moments may be innovated outside of their chronology. Geographical factors spatialised by such figures as the Möbius strip or Mandelbrot sets. The philosophical proposition, whether synthetic or analytic, to use the traditional Kantian distinction, does not have the connective bias of 'either-or', or 'and', or 'not', or even the prestigious 'if-then', but may perform more inter-dependently as phyla phonetic. In other words, communication acts transversally between species. Prigogine's theoretical apparatus of self-organisation, saw the most obvious effect of this process at the level of molecules in non-equilibrium situations. This has quite clear implications for the humanities and the arts. No longer do the disciplines make their dogmatic assumptions the basis for further inscription. The mutational process therefore bears a direct relation to ideology. As Fransico Varela wrote, "the organization of a machine has nothing to do with its materiality". Computers, cannot be seen as parts of a machine, interfacing with cyborgs, or indeed cyborgs with computers. Rather the cybernetic process with its feminised characteristics, acts as a type of an 'autopoietic nexus', to borrow from Varela once more.

With the autopoietic nexus, we have the prototype for a process which is continually replacing its components with others to extend itself 'heterogeneously'. This does not only mean that the various inputs are seen as a plethora of possible options, or various connective matrices which index themselves over the plane of interaction. But, as a speeding mutational machine that has a virtual frequency and singular genus. The characterisation of the 'virtual classroom', is therefore not to be added to the already understood learning curves which inundate educational theorists. Fed into the social-economic reality of students battling for useful activities, the mutation of the virtual is non-predictive. Learning about the genesis of the tool does not extend the use of the said tool to further ends. Instead the tool crosses over into the tropic playground of the child's imagination. Who knows where we will go today?

The activation of desire to buy computer products, is also the "mobilisation of the polymorphous effects which emerge from fields of techno-social dynamics". Knowledge becomes real. Jurassic Park or the Terminators are hybrid cybernetic channels flowing from the well-spring of data which is no longer dispersed and issued at the bequest of higher powers. Stories about mutant giants, or superbeings with incredible skills were always interesting, the only difference now is that Ovid does not have to be laboriously repeated with the aim of getting your Latin conjugations right, but may be directly accessed with the aid of a CD-Rom. The process is not only dynamic, it is also nonhuman. The universe which transpires is an intricate mathematical crossing point, defying the links which are made between its parts as soon as they are even hypothetically arranged.

The cyberpunk classroom forms into a mutational musical score. It is a play of intensities which are over-written by others, by dances on the very fabric of their space or time. As to the key for unlocking their more fascinating, darker and subversive edges? Just take it.

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David R Cole

Cyberpunk Classroom