listening to repeating

Translating or executing?

In the last few days, I’ve become incredibly interested in Yevgeny Alexandrovitch Sholpo and the variophone (1930), as well as Daphne Oram and oramics (1959).  Both Sholpo and Oram drew sound onto 35 millimeter movie film.  With a little work, they could then listen to these drawings.  Writing could be played.  It could be animated.

Here’s an example film strip drawing for the variophone, and here’s an image of the oramics machine.  If you prefer movement, then a significant portion of the following video, “Theremin, Variophone et musiques nouvelles russes 1930,” is dedicated to the variophone.  There’s also a lot of theremin action in there, too, so you can’t really resist.

In Protocol, Alexander Galloway writes: “Code is the only language that is executable” (165, emphasis his).  Granted, in the case of the variophone and oramics, we might not have “language,” per se.  For one, unless they were somehow formalized to compose music, I’m not sure what the grammar of either would be.  So call these soundings “noise.”  Fine with me.

What we do have are graphic images that are systemized and written and can actually be heard—they can be executed as audio. Here, the graphic images for the variophone or the oramics machine differ from, say, the grooves of a long play (LP) album in that sound (e.g., of a musical instrument) is not just recorded and stored to be played back later.  Instead, sound (once heard or not) emerges from the act of writing.  While I would imagine (and I am only speculating) that both Oram and Sholpo could read their graphics much like a musical score, a score cannot enact itself.  Scores are not executable, and record grooves can only reproduce.

Whereas Galloway’s notion of code implies both “semantic meaning” and the “enactment of meaning” (166), I’m wondering if a system of executable audio, including Sholpo’s and Oram’s graphic images, could still be an example of code.  Of a system that can actualize a phenomenon—that can actualize a sound—through the graphic image without ever making sense.   Executable audio might be code without denotation or connotation, where a shape, a line, a figure never intends to mean, even if it is put into a sequence.

Yes, yes: Executable audio could not escape the desire for meaning-making.  It will forever be nested or embedded in interpretations, in explanations.  All code is.  Nevertheless, it’s interesting to posit a code without semantics.

Obviously, I need to think through the implications of all this.  In the meantime, here’s an excerpt from Oram’s “Rockets in Ursa Major.”

Today, I re-read The Crying of Lot 49. This time around, the reading was for the technoculture studies class, which starts in less than two weeks. (Yikes!)

In Pynchon’s novel there is, of course, this wonderful line: “‘A sign,’ he whispered, ‘is what it is’” (115). That line—and that muted post horn, for which CoL 49 is so well-known—emerge, in part, because of a computer, which looks a bit like so:

The IBM 7094 (tho the above photo is of a 7090 console, the 7094′s predecessor).

As the CoL 49 story goes, in the 1960′s, an executive at Yoyodyne (a large manufacturing plant in the aerospace industry) is replaced by a 7094. Or, to be more precise, an “efficiency expert” determines that said executive should be replaced by a 7094. Important, and not explicitly mentioned in the novel, is the fact that the 7094 is famous for helping make compatible time-sharing systems possible. (It was also the first computer to sing, thereby inspiring a scene from Kubrick’s 2001. I digress.)

Replaced by a computer and rendered useless by the new phenomenon of time-sharing, the executive decides to commit suicide by dousing himself (including his tie) in gasoline and lighting himself on fire. But the drama is interrupted when two people enter the front door: “It was his wife and some man, whom he soon recognized as the very efficiency expert at Yoyodyne who had caused him to be replaced by an IBM 7094″ (115).

What happens next is—in its balance of humor and tragedy—typical Pynchon:

He took his tie out of the gasoline and started to snigger. He closed the top on his Zippo. “I hear laughing,” his wife said presently. “I smell gasoline,” said the efficiency expert. Hand in hand, naked, the two proceeded to the kitchen. “I was about to do the Buddhist monk thing,” explained the executive. “Nearly three weeks it takes him,” marvelled the efficiency expert, “to decide. You know how long it would’ve taken the IBM 7094? Twelve microseconds. No wonder you were replaced.” (115)

From that point forward, with the muted post horn as his sign, as his emblem for silence and disaffectedness, the executive swears off love. Not only that, but he also starts a society of isolates, who help him—alone, but networked—spread that swearing off.

This scene is intriguing to me for a number of reasons, the first of which is how it contextualizes and refigures perceptions of time and space in the U.S, in the 1960s, in an age of mainframe computing. Here, we could get quintessentially postmodern with the symptoms: the waning of affect, alienation (despite contiguous relations), and life in the grid (or, as Pynchon writes later in the novel, “walking among matrices of a great digital computer” (181)). As the executive observes from the kitchen of his home, “the efficiency expert wished to have sexual intercourse with the wife on the Moroccan rug in the living room. The wife was not unwilling” (115). Playing both “the voyeur and listener” (123) and not the active participant (much like Oedipa Maas throughout most of the novel), the executive is able to share an intimate moment in a strikingly detached fashion. What’s more, if we read computers and other technologies as inherently gendered, then it’s difficult to deny how the executive’s wife is objectified (e.g., “the wife”) in this scene as a means of both communication and pleasure. She becomes a shared node for exchange between the executive and the efficiency expert.

Another reason is perhaps less obvious: memory. Later in the novel, Pynchon describes a used mattress as being “like the memory bank to a computer of the lost” (126). (Despite my general dislike of similes, this one is fantastic.) What happens, then, when the memory bank is erased, when it is gone without a trace, when it and what it stored cannot be recovered? Here might be a productive distinction between analog consciousness and digital memory. For, in his swearing off of love, the executive has to willfully erase his past, without committing suicide. Forgetting is a Nietzschean for-getting. It is active and repeated. To be a tad reductive, the act of erasing something from a computer does not demand such willful activity and repetition. I can send something to the recycle bin, perhaps sit on it for some time, and ultimately empty that bin. That said, it is, of course, arguable that CoL 49, with all of its references to seizures, forgetting, and arrests, is stressing how a new U.S. technoculture may be linked to new (posthuman?) forms of consciousness and memory, perhaps more akin to computation and things digital than to the spectra of the analog. However, what raises the level of critical engagement is this question: How are these new forms a part of world-making, too? That is, how does world-making, if at all, require the “swearing off” of the past, and, in that process, what differences between digital erasure and analog forgetting manifest?

My last reason is less heady. It’s actually a fun fact for coders who love computing trivia. In his personal history of the 7094, “The IBM 7094 and CTSS,” Tom Van Vleck points out that:

One change was to use the extra index registers that the 7094 had and the 7090 didn’t. And buried deep in the code, there was the line of code

SXA VR16,1 ‘SOMEBODY HAS TO SAVE IT’ SAYS BOB CRABTREE

Noel Morris and I created the Bob Crabtree Society, open to people who knew where that comment was and what it did.

Elsewhere, post-CoL 49, in “Is It OK to be a Luddite,” Pynchon, aside from his reading of Frankenstein, writes:

The word “Luddite” continues to be applied with contempt to anyone with doubts about technology, especially the nuclear kind. Luddites today are no longer faced with human factory owners and vulnerable machines. As well-known President and unintentional Luddite D.D. Eisenhower prophesied when he left office, there is now a permanent power establishment of admirals, generals and corporate CEO’s, up against whom us average poor bastards are completely outclassed, although Ike didn’t put it quite that way. We are all supposed to keep tranquil and allow it to go on, even though, because of the data revolution, it becomes every day less possible to fool any of the people any of the time.

Less possible by the day, indeed. Nonetheless, you call me a utopian believer in W.A.S.T.E. and the Bob Crabtree Society. I need something to save me from getting lost, and I still get a kick out of tactical acts of code-foolery. After all, sometimes they add up.

Work Cited:

Pynchon, Thomas. The Crying of Lot 49. New York: Perennial Library, 1990.

Below is my talk from SLSA 2007. It is simultaneously the closest I’ve come to science fiction and “bad cultural studies,” and it was a pleasure to write and present. I was fortunate to be on a “Robots and Zombies” panel with two brilliant people, who are both far more engaging and conducting much more interesting research than I am. Check out the work of Nick Knouf and Eleanor Sandry when you have the chance. They study robots and robotics!

Overall, the responses (immediately and for the balance of the conference) to my talk were rather positive. Most of the consequent questions and conversations related to treating zombies as something other than a metaphor–as points of correspondence with code, rather than representations of it. Also, I’m beginning to wonder how I might unpack this talk into a larger project, with more historical context. I want to go back to films like White Zombie and consider how zombies — as filmic bodies — are emerging. And, especially after this weekend, I’m quite serious about recognizing the conscious awareness of non-humans. (Hmm…Does this mean my return to vegetarianism? Can you argue for the recognition of, say, robot consciousness and still consume animals? I suppose you can, but…)

If, for whatever strange reason, you want to quote or paraphrase from what’s below, then please get in touch with me by commenting on this entry. I’m happy for it to circulate, but, you know, credit…

The talk begins here:

Writing about new technologies or zombie films is a tricky practice for me. It is not a matter of material; I could go on and on about either. Rather, as an academic, I am continually wondering if my work in technoculture studies doesn’t begin to bleed into fandom, if my immersion in new technologies doesn’t threaten my “critical distance,” and if my long-standing love for zombie films clouds my conscious awareness of both how the films function and their actual implications. Still, I like to think the question is not whether I can undo the days and re-capture the time I’ve spent mindlessly crunching computer code and watching zombie flicks. Rather, it’s whether I realize how the crunching and watching are different from, but nevertheless always influencing, my critical engagements with technoculture.

With this preface aside, I would like to now add a second preface to my talk by briefly stating what I am not doing with zombies today. First, I will not be conducting a zombie historiography or genealogy, though I acknowledge the need for and am interested in both. Instead, I will be focusing on zombies in popular culture and film. Secondly, while I am aware of philosophical arguments concerning the logical possibility of zombies, for the purposes of today’s talk, I am willing to accept them as fictitious constructs in a George A. Romero film or dancing characters in a Michael Jackson music video. And while I’m also cognizant of zombies as metaphors—zombie as Communist, zombie as late capitalist consumer, and zombie as suburbanite—today I want to be rather literal, if you will so allow. In other words, even if I’m not invested in the possibility of zombies hypothetically existing, I am equally un-invested in zombies as representations of particular socio-cultural phenomena. I want to let zombies be zombies. In so doing, I understand the very condition of being “undead” as corresponding with some behaviors of code and, for the next eighteen minutes or so, I will unpack how zombie films might help us articulate and visualize how we tend to perceive code, its politics, and its materiality.

Before I continue, let me clarify how—exactly—I’m mobilizing the term “code” in this talk. In My Mother Was a Computer, Katherine Hayles details and historicizes several ways of understanding code, from Roland Barthes’s general sense of code to imply decorum, fashion, and the rules of conversation, to a more a narrow sense, whereby code is “a system of correspondences that relate the elements of one symbol set to another symbol set” (108). In this latter sense, Hayles gives Morse code as an example, but then also moves to computer code, which is inherently active and functions “as instructions that initiate changes in the system’s behavior” (108). As a system of correspondences, then, I’m considering the filmic condition of being undead—of being a zombie—as a way of relating the elements of mechanistic intelligence to conscious awareness. This relation, which locates agency outside of humans, is one that Hayles identifies as key to the work of Lacan, Deleuze, and Guattari, as well as to her own arguments in How We Became Posthuman. True, my definition of the undead falls somewhere between Barthes’s general sense of code and the more narrow sense of Morse or computer code; nonetheless, a liminal definition allows me to—persuasively or unpersuasively—read the new and improved zombies of recent films, such as Land of the Dead and 28 Days and 28 Weeks Later, as bodies that testify to the inadequacies of the living/nonliving dichotomy when determining conscious awareness, as well as to the problems with, as Wendy Chun puts it, conflating freedom with control in human-technology interactions.

Within the context of practically any zombie film, “living” characters often feel compelled to translate zombies through the metric of consciousness. From the vantage of the living, the worst case scenario is to remain dead alive, or, more specifically, materially embodied but unconscious. Without consciousness, there is no human in there. There is just a body. And, as we all know, zombies are rather unforgiving bodies. We might attribute the undead’s lack of forgiveness to a number of things: hunger, rage, desire . . . the list goes on. Whatever the reason, zombies correspond with code at a number of points. They emerge, network, and swarm. One zombie today, one thousand tomorrow. They are inflexible. You may be able to re-route or corral a zombie, but you cannot exactly convince one to alter her or his rules of engagement. Plus, while zombies do not read or write, they no doubt connect, compile, and communicate. To spread as a collective virus and increase their population, zombies must bite humans, thereby transcoding the human into an undead form. Then, and only then, are the instructions, “seek, find, consume, and replicate,” able to be executed. And, as writing and speech resemble, yet are different from, code, the undead still evoke, even if they are not, human. Finally, and perhaps most relevant to my talk, new zombies also render their previous instantiations obsolete. If Microsoft Word 1 from 1983 is unable to read a file from Word 2007, then a zombie from Romero’s 1968 film, Night of the Living Dead, will not compute with the fast and furious zombies from Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later of 2002.

The reason for new and improved zombies is not easily located in a particular cause or origin. It could be that audiences now want more out of their zombies: more intensity, more rage, more CGI, and more speed. For example, consider Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright’s 2004 film, Shaun of the Dead, which is a zombie parody. The film’s organizing principle is that the zombies of yore are laughable. Pushing the Jamesonian waning of affect to the extreme, the undead are barely distinguishable from some humans. In one scene, our protagonists, Shaun and Ed, take their precious time in defending themselves from zombies in their back yard. They throw various objects, including a carefully selected Dire Straits vinyl LP, at the zombies, and even capture a few photos of their encounters with the undead. In short, according to Shaun of the Dead, the zombies of yore—at least when alone or in small batches—presumably pose no threat and, in terms of genre, are becoming more comedic and less and less horrifying. Yet, if we look at newer films in the zombie genre that are revisions rather than parodies of the traditional undead, then we do find some interesting emergences. These emergences spark more than generic changes; they also connect with the increasing complexities of code and how we understand and perceive conscious awareness. That said, with what time I have remaining, I want to parse out the differences between what I ever-so-reductively and conveniently deem the two types of new zombies, to whom I will bestow two elegant names—fast zombies and semi-aware zombies.

Given their lack of patience and their tendencies toward impetuousness, let’s start with fast zombies. In 2002, fast zombies became popularized in a few films, with 28 Days Later doing especially well in the United States. 28 Days Later and its sequel, 28 Weeks Later, bring us zombies on fast forward—superfast zombies with superhuman affect. To get a quick sense of these zombies, let’s give the end of the trailer for 28 Weeks Later a quick gander. Once infected with the rage virus, the only goal for the zombie is consumption of the other, who, in this case, is the human. This goal is, of course, common amongst all zombies in film. Nevertheless, if these zombies make the zombies of 1968 look dated and dull, then the reason is that they get the job done quicker and more convincingly. They seem quite alive, but not quite conscious. That is, what’s new about these zombies is not that they have finally developed self-awareness, but that their mechanistic behaviors occur more rapidly. To return for a moment to Shaun of the Dead, these new zombies leave no space or time for comedy or photo ops or the kairos of Dire Straits. Furthermore, in the case of the fast zombie, to be undead is to be relentlessly individualistic and determined to consume, re-inscribe, and repeat. And in the case of those who are living in the presence of fast zombies, the only response is to eradicate them at any cost. For instance, in 28 Weeks Later, upon realizing that they are facing yet another zombie breakout, the military decides to kill everyone—zombie or human—located in a certain sector of London. In order to be free from the fast zombies, there can be no fast zombies. To understand these zombies in correspondence to code is to therefore perceive code as not only determinant, but also as repetition and replication without difference.

It is difficult to argue against the notion that we tend to want our code and coding technologies to be faster, more efficient, and more engaging. Yet, as our new, fast zombies very well might suggest, we must also be cognizant of the slippages between the desire for speed and increased intensity and the desire for control. As Wendy Chun argues in Control and Freedom, control is not freedom, although the two are often conflated online and through the use of information and communications technologies. In response to this conflation of freedom with control, Chun argues for the creation of “vulnerable systems” (viii) through which we can “seize a freedom that always moves beyond our control” (30). Such freedom is neither conflated with control nor possessed by the individual. Instead, it recognizes how people and technologies participate in continuous feedback loops of influence and exchange. In terms of human engagements with code, a vulnerable system would necessitate a more distributed, less human-centric sense of agency, in addition to a broader understanding of how conscious awareness emerges and who (or what) is actually capable of it. To return to Hayles in My Mother Was a Computer, “The central question . . . is no longer how we as rational creatures should act in full possession of free will and untrammeled agency. Rather, the issue is how consciousness evolves from and interacts with the underlying programs that operate analogously to the operations of code” (192). The human-zombie dynamic generated in 28 Days and 28 Weeks Later, with superfast and uber-individualistic zombies on the one hand, and “control-or-else” human reasoning on the other, implies a system of correspondences without and hostile to built-in vulnerabilities. Consequently, the obsession on both sides is with mastery and the elision of difference. Of course, this obsession makes for a great zombie movie, even if the connections with code are not as promising.

The other version of the new zombie that I mentioned earlier is the semi-aware zombie. Of the post-2000 zombie films that I have seen, this zombie only exists in George A. Romero’s fourth and most recent installment in the “Dead Series,” Land of the Dead, which was released in 2005. What is perhaps most interesting about these zombies is that they appear to be learning, typically through social referencing or imitation. To get a sense of their learning, let’s take a look at a scene from the film. In Land of the Dead’s rendering of the post-apocalypse, zombies are still rather slow. They still bite and feed on humans. And they still do not speak or write. Yet Romero gives us a twist, a twist which I find crucial in connection with recent work in technoculture studies on what we mean when we refer to “code.” In short, zombies in Land of the Dead swarm, organize, and, indeed, becoming increasingly techno-aware as the film progresses. They are not exactly technoliterate; however, they do fire guns, hack into walls, start fires, and even toy with jackhammers. True, we could judge zombies for selecting weaponry and choosing warfare over opting for more civil and friendly means of negotiating with humans, but let me state the obvious here: Zombies are not humans. To boot, humans do not exactly have a peaceful track record with zombies. Just as we cannot expect code to function like speech or writing, we also cannot expect the undead to always behave in accordance with social codes.

What emerges in Land of the Dead, then, is a more complex zombie, who develops a sense of semi-awareness from mechanistic intelligence. With the conclusion of the film, we see, as we practically always do with zombie and horror films, the gesture toward a sequel. Where Land of the Dead differs from its predecessors, however, is that there is a hint at human-zombie coexistence. Rather than continuing their assault on zombies, the humans, or, more specifically, the main protagonist, Riley, decide to let the zombies be. Apparently, just like humans, the undead only need a place to go. As trite as this conclusion might be, the point here is not to critique popular culture for a lack of coherency or sophistication. Rather, I want to stress the film’s willingness to at least entertain both a broader sense of conscious awareness and the possibility of agency or freedom without control. Today, as we become more and more familiar with the intricacies of artificial life and automata, the question of living or dead becomes less and less productive. What is more productive is a closer look at how human control is undermined and consciousness is made vulnerable by code. To explain the exclamation in the title of my talk, it is derived from a line in Land of the Dead, in which Kaufman, played by Dennis Hopper, states: “You’re dead. Oh my god, you are dead.” This statement-cum-realization, aimed at a foe-turned-zombie, includes most of Kaufman’s final words as a human. As a zombie, Kaufman’s foe finally gets the upper hand. And still, Kaufman gets the situation all wrong. His foe isn’t dead; he’s undead. As Max Brooks notes in The Zombie Survival Guide, becoming-undead is the alteration of life, not its end (5). Declaring the undead to be dead is the last refuge of humans bent on mastery, of popular perceptions of code as determinant, and of the conflation of freedom with control. And, for Kaufman and others, it is a losing battle.

Of course, the assertion—“You’re code! You really are code!”—is equally reductive, as our new, semi-aware zombies suggest. More than mechanistic intelligence on speed, these zombies nearly necessitate speculation, or every nerd’s favorite question, “What’s next?” As both a zombie fan and an academic, I cannot avoid answering. The zombie fan-boy portion of me wants to see fast zombies mapped onto semi-aware zombies—affective, technoliterate automata or emergent, hyper-animate mutations, if you will. Meanwhile, my more critically aware tendencies implore me to keep pressing the question, “Why does the assertion, ‘You’re code,’ frighten so many of us?” Regardless of whether it’s reductive, why does it make so many of us, myself included, feel so vulnerable? Are we so invested in perceiving living as free will and control that we refuse to consider the conscious awareness of the undead, automata, and artificial life? I don’t think so, but I’m not so sure. Even if I am convinced that code’s emergent behaviors will not replace speech, writing, or humans for that matter, I am not convinced that humans are quite ready to let code have a place to go. In Doom Patrols, Steven Shaviro writes about Romero’s zombie films and notes that: “Romero’s heroes face the classic problem in dealing with zombies: how do you kill something that’s already dead?” (53). Given Land of the Dead, 28 Days and 28 Weeks Later, and our new zombies, I wonder if a new question is in order. Now, ten years after the publication of Doom Patrols, we might start asking, “How do you recognize something as consciously aware?”

Works Cited:

Boyle, Danny, dir. 28 days later. [United States]: 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2003.

Brooks, Max. The Zombie Survival Guide Complete Protection from the Living Dead. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2003.

Chun, Wendy Hui-Kyong. Control and Freedom Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006.

Fresnadillo, Juan Carlos, dir. 28 weeks later. Beverly Hills, CA: 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2007.

Hayles, N. Katherine. My Mother Was a Computer Digital Subjects and Literary Texts. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.

Romero, George A., dir. George A. Romero’s Land of the Dead. Universal City, CA: Universal, 2005.

Shaviro, Steven. Doom Patrols A Theoretical Fiction About Postmodernism. New York: Serpent’s Tail, 1997.

Snyder, Zack, dir. Dawn of the Dead. Universal City, CA: Universal, 2004.

Wright, Edgar and Simon Pegg, dirs. Shaun of the Dead. Universal City, CA: Universal, 2004.