Mirela Roznoveanu

New York University School of Law, USA

roznovschi@juris.law.nyu.edu

 

 

The Virtual Mind

 

 

Abstract: There is evidence today that humans are experiencing a different biological reality related to the new virtual environment. Anthropologists affirm that Homo sapiens has developed alongside of technologies; philosophers are trying to understand the “screen culture” and the way we’ll cope with the “haptic culture,” the culture of touch; the theorists of aesthetic objects are trying to comprehend how contemporary screen cultures affect structures of aesthetic representation and perception. Will the book survive the dispersal caused by hypertext formats and the storage and mutability of the written word in the electronic age? Will culture – as we know it – survive the shift from digital images and text to that of acoustical culture, the visual experience in the digital age? The future will possibly employ a new language for a different kind of mind, the mind of virtual reality. Such minds will not make the ones that we now employ obsolete. A new form of alliance between the non-linear mind and the new media logic will be living in the fluid of the virtual mind reality.

Keywords: Postmodernism; ”Haptic culture”; E-literature; Virtual reality; Virtual mind.

 

 

An Anthropological Finding

 

A report commissioned more than a decade ago in the U.S. by the Kaiser Family Foundation on Generation M (the internet generation born in 90’ called M from ‘Media’)[1] revealed an unexpected fact: American children growing up in media-rich environments have brains wired differently than humans who did not come to maturity under such circumstances. Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year-Olds was the third in a series, and included data from all three waves of the study (1999, 2004, and 2009). Those reports have shown the effect that media can have in the lives of teens.

There is evidence today that humans are experiencing a different biological reality related to the new virtual environment. Anthropologists[2] affirm that Homo sapiens have developed alongside of technologies; that there is a connection between human biology and use tool. Discussing the human brain’s plasticity, its neural plasticity, Mark B.N. Hansen noted that humans are born with their nervous systems ready to be reconfigured in response to their environment. Synaptogenesis is a pruning process in the new born brain: the neural connections that are used strengthen and grow while those that are not decay and disappear. In his own words, “evolution is not solely physical … but psycho-physical; it is not genetic transmission alone that determines outcomes but rather the fitness of the entire individual, which includes the benefits bestowed by learning. In turn, learning and cerebral plasticity work synergistically together to accelerate evolution and give it a certain directionality by catalyzing environments in which learning and cerebral plasticity become even more advantageous.” In other words, “the new generations born in new media environments experience a dramatic, clear, cognitive shift from deep attention-willingness to spend more hours with a single artifact, intense concentration, a preference for a single data stream rather than multiple inputs – to hyper attention, brains developed to handle multiple incoming data streams.”[3]

For Katherine Hayles, the dynamics between the body and the machine, the transformative aspect of information technologies, the “temporalization of textual spatiality” and the human language interpenetrated by computer code[4] bring or will bring new narrative strategies; “the logic of coevolution implies, however, that just as networked and programmable media are transforming literature, so literary effects are revaluing computational practice…”[5]

Isn’t this new futuristic environment demanding (sometime soon) new kinds of writers? New kinds of teachers and teaching environments?

 

The Teaching Process

 

In my book, Toward a Cyberlegal Culture[6] written in the early stages of hypertext I noticed that the “enrichment of teaching with internet-based learning technology, and the ongoing process of introducing Internet-based technology into education are inevitably changing the ways learners think.” They were starting to experience a “non-linear mode of thinking,” a dynamism and a new logic connected to a metamorphic nature of change, deeply belonging to the World Wide Web. Michael Joyce[7] deciphered around the same time a “newly evolving consciousness and cognition,” — the emergence of a new mind.

How is my classroom of today? Surely, the teaching environment has changed dramatically. It adapted and it is every day adapting to the new media technology and to students’ advanced technological skills.

By default, the equipment simply projects from the podium or head-of-the-table computer audio and video into the room just as if I were in my office using my computer (with equipment on the podium or head-of-the table computer – and optional peripheral equipment – equivalent to a standard faculty office computer). Another feature is a one-button record option, under which installed cameras and microphones record and save (for later Blackboard posting) an audio-video recording of the class. The equipment blends into the room and is fixed into the mill work to create a natural operating position with few moving parts and no wires to tangle with during operation. All controls not directly related to audio-visual equipment, such as lighting and shades, are adjustable with separate physical switches rather than through the computer. Display screens (even in the seminar rooms) are behind the lecturer, rather than off to the side, so that the audience always face the lecturer rather than look away.

 

The Cybernetics Dimension

 

There is much discussion nowadays around the models for reading digital literature, the status of the text in the era of hypertext, and new narratives in a post narrative world. According to Carolyn Guertin, “what passes for narrative in the new born – digital storytelling forms is hyperactive, postmodern, post dramatic, self-reflexive and repetitive. Instead of emulating the act of reading, what we perform in these spaces is a visual task of browsing. As a result, the whole concept of story has been transformed by its migration into the spaces of digital media. The interactive or performative nature of the new media alters how and why we read.”[8] Digital Poetry or e-poetry is also trying to re-formulate poetic language;[9] and similarly, cybertextuality and philology seem to be highly interconnected to the new media. For Ian Lancashire[10] a “cybertext is any document viewed from the perspective of the theory or study of communication and control in living things or machines.” Espen Aarseth coined the term “cybertext”; cybertexts are ‘ergodic” (Norbert Wiener meant by it a “path of energy or work”): “cybertextuality … is a subset of cybernetics that studies messaging and feedback modules – author, text, channel/media, noise, and reader – of languages and literatures…The five modules of cybernetics studied by literary researchers in parallel (sender, channel, message, noise, and receiver) … in our case translate into “authors of texts …readers of texts … texts themselves …the language technologies and media … which together form a channel that governs their transmission through wear-and-tear that might be called literary noise studied in stemmatics ( a rigorous approach to the textual criticism), and media.”

Specifically, “the term ‘new media’ acknowledged the fact that, in an era of comprehensive digital capture, storage, and dissemination, nothing about former modes of cultural production and consumption could be taken for granted anymore, neither their aesthetic standards nor their social or political reach, perhaps not even their very right to exist in the future. Just as importantly, however, the concept of new media offered a corrective to how scholars, researchers, and image producers in the final stretch of the twentieth century had promoted advanced technologies as tools to dislodge our need for extended structures of temporality and reliable spatial orientations.”[11]

 

Philosophical Propositions

 

How has philosophy in the past century acknowledged cultural changes arising out of technology? Could we learn from it? We can recall Siegfried Kracauer’s 1927 essay on the mass ornament, Walter Benjamin’s 1930 theory of mechanical reproducibility,[12] and Adorno’s view of the role of modern technology in the arts. If Benjamin and Kracauer ”considered mechanical reproduction a liberating and potentially democratic engine of cultural dispersal and distracted forms of reception,” for Adorno it ‘threatened to obliterate the specificity and incommensurability of aesthetic experience.”[13]

In our age, the amalgamation of time-based representation and advanced computing power make our mediascapes different from those of the early to mid-twentieth century: the open-ended plurality and simultaneity, contents and structures of older media are mimicked, supplemented, or rewritten according to the technological parameters of the present.[14] According to William Uricchio and D.N. Rodowick, “…new media today, with its stress on real-time interactivity, its favoring of simultaneity over sequentiality, and its point-to-point modes of access and connectivity had its historical models in nineteen-century technologies of image scanning and transmission…” and hence the conclusion that… “what is new about new media is their powerful ability to absorb, incorporate, assimilate, pillage, rework or simply over-write the content and formal logic of other media’.[15] Reality proceeds from virtual reality, brilliantly recently wrote Andre Petitat.[16] The action falls within both practice and representation. During human evolution, this pair has differentiated into many different worlds and become more complex in building blocks of our universe symbolic worlds of waking and dream, truth and falsehood, reality and simulacra, of the factual story and fictional narrative, etc. The extension of real worlds requires / supposes also virtual worlds. The concept of aggregating a plurality of worlds and the plurality of interpretive work emphasizes the participation of the virtual reality — to reality.

Philosophers are also trying to understand also our “screen culture” and the way we’ll cope with the “haptic culture,” the culture of touch; while the theorist of aesthetic objects is trying to comprehend how contemporary screen cultures affect structures of aesthetic representation and perception. Many questions have to be answered at this point: will the book survive the dispersal caused by hypertext formats and the storage and mutability of the written word in the electronic age? Will – culture as we know it – “survive the shift from digital images and text to that of acoustical culture, the visual experience in the digital age, ‘one that considers the entire human sensorium, in particular the haptic dimension’?”[17] Catherine Hayles in her recent book is confident that “When literature leaps from one medium to another – from orality to writing, from manuscript codes to printed book, from mechanical generated print to electronic textuality – it does not leave behind the accumulated knowledge embedded in genres, poetic conventions, narrative structures, figurative tropes, and so forth. Rather this knowledge is carried forward into the new medium typically trying to replicate the earlier medium’s effects within the new medium’s specificities.”[18]

 

From the Vantagepoint of Literary Theory

 

Before the internet era, McLuhan wrote that “the electro-magnetic discoveries have recreated the simultaneous ‘field’ in all human affairs so that the human family now exists under conditions of a ‘global village’.”[19] And I cannot help remembering here his famous statement about the fact that “in a culture like ours … it is sometimes a bit of a shock to be reminded that, in operational and practical fact, the medium is the message.”[20] He had foreseen a departure from the linear world of words to a three-dimensional world of pictorial space. This new phenomenon connected with literary theory and literature itself trying to understand languages’ limitations and to accommodate them[21] has generated an immense amount of scholarship. Perhaps is, at this stage, more interesting than the literary objects created according to the new media aesthetics.

A vast corpus of articles survey the digital rhetoric, including novel strategies of self-expression and collaboration, the constraints of new digital media, and the formation of identities and communities in digital spaces, calling for an integrated theory of digital rhetoric. The concept of a digital rhetoric holds promise of opening new opportunities for rhetorical studies and it’s also “troublesome because it reveals the difficulties and the challenges of adapting a rhetorical tradition more than 2,000 years old to the conditions and constraints of the new digital media”.[22] Explorations of this concept show how traditional rhetorical strategies function in digital spaces and suggest how these strategies are being reconceived and reconfigured within these spaces.

The growing relevance of the transformative effect of information technologies on literature due to the temporalization of textual spatiality, the fusion of the human language with the computer code in the logic of coevolution seems to demand new narrative strategies. First of all we might conclude that traditional narrratology is challenged at its very base: the electronic text cannot be accessed without running the code; and running the code makes, for many, the source code part of the work![23] Human language is interpenetrated by computer code and literature as well; new definitions will try to grasp that: “…literature can be understood as a semiotic technology designed to create – or more precisely, activate – feedback loops that dynamically and recursively unite feelings with ratiocination, body and mind,” and Hayles goes further to define that: “Electronic literature extends the traditional functions of print literature in creating recursive feedback loops between explicit articulation, conscious thought, and embodied sensorimotor knowledge. … Electronic literature performs the additional function of entwining human ways of knowing with machine cognition.”[24] Is this true? How is this process taking place?

George P. Landow[25] enthusiastically wrote twenty years ago about the beginnings and endings in the borderless text, the dispersed and the fragmented text, the text in hypertext, visual elements in the print text, extratextual and intratextual, nonsequential (or multisequential) reading and thinking (see Chapter “Reconfiguring the Text”), the death of the author, the decentered self in the network paradigm (see Chapter “Reconfiguring the Author”), while the writing would have as a main attribute the readers’ disorientation (Chapter “Reconfiguring Writing”).

At that time, Jean Baudrillard had already discussed the shift from the tactile to the digital produced by information technology (Simulations, New York, 1983) that was seen as a primary fact about the contemporary world; Jacques Derrida had noticed in the hypertext the perfect medium of his theory of decentering the text and hypertextuality — the dismantling of the book as we know (Dissemination, University of Chicago Press, 1981); while Roland Barthes had glimpsed the new era of information technology as one in which operates the readerly versus the writerly text, the atomization and dispersal of the text (S/Z, New York, 1974) .

Initially published in 1992, Landow’s book’s merit was to gather together many literary theories and philosophical issues related, at the time, to the topic. As I live in that future described by the book, manipulating the reality it described, I can testify that, during the almost 20 years of hypertext, new media, and hypermedia, very little of note, if at all, occurred in the field of literary theory and literature itself.

What has truly changed in the past few years was the democratization of communication (blogs, home pages, listservs, etc) and the globalization of thought.

The created hypertextual narrative products – including hypermedia – were mostly a collage with interesting effects but nonetheless not unforgettable! As we were starving for originality in the arts.

The narrative products manufactured in our Western civilization in the past twenty years through hypermedia links and images had been a failure and were abandoned. We can look, to convince ourselves one more time, at the disappointing texts published in the Electronic Literature Collection: Volume One, October 2006 (College Park, Maryland: Electronic Literature Organization http://collection.eliterature.org/1/ \) or at a book titled Enter the Unknown, the Great American Hypertext Novel http://unknownhypertext.com/unknown.htm, and at a 2010 hypermedia novel published on the Iowa Review Web site http://research-intermedia.art.uiowa.edu/tirw/vol9n2/ , Concerto for Narrative Data http://research-intermedia.art.uiowa.edu/tirw/vol9n2/ and http://research-intermedia.art.uiowa.edu/tirw/vol9n2/artworks/concerto/interface.html, trying to mimic simultaneity.

In my opinion, these are experiments generated by “traditional minds” or by what is called “deep attention” minds, imagining the minds of the future, — those brains that will be experiencing another kind of cognition — “hyper attention”.

The real digital novel would be, from my point of view, very close to the homophonic novel conceived centuries ago in the Chinese civilization, in keeping with its forma mentis – the relationship between the hieroglyph and thought – as I described it in my book, The Civilization of the Novel[26]. This epic architecture – a name I give to what we call ‘the novel’ in our Western civilization – is a mixture of narrative and poetry, of paths and meanings specific to the Chinese cast of mind and thinking, operating simultaneously on several levels, completely foreign to the Indo-European conceptual and linear thinking modes. It is therefore not a simple coincidence that today the experimental digital or electronic poetry is the only productive literary genre in Western culture, as far as digital literature is concerned. Robert Coover[27] and Jean Clement noted in their later works that hypertext seems to lean more toward poetry than toward the narrative, that we witness “a shift from narration to poetry in fiction hypertexts”. Landow himself recognized that almost all the examples in his books “of both digital texts and hypermedia textuality and rhetoric (….) came from poetry rather than from fiction.”[28]

The Indo-European mind – linear by definition – is reflected in the grammar and syntax that generated the books we know and cherish. What is not linear in this mind is the range of the semantics, connotations, and ideas. Nevertheless, it is true that “the new narratives push us toward a new understanding of story that is rich in tentativeness, parallel possibilities, and boundlessness, and that digital narratives might encourage writers to imagine new “categories of stories and prompt new terms of analysis.”[29] Why not follow more easily what was produced in the European and Western civilizations over the past twenty-five centuries?

If print and electronic textuality deeply interpenetrate; if digital technologies are deeply connected with the narrative, then we will witness changes within the print tradition, and perhaps eventually in the novel. When “natural language is put into dynamic interplay with a wide variety of mechanical codes, and textual surfaces are littered with marks of digital machines. …digital technologies .. put into play dynamics that interrogate and reconfigure the relations between authors and readers, humans and intelligent machines, code and language… digitality has become the textual condition of twenty-first century literature.”[30] Landow[31] argued that the chaos of hypertext links replicates mental processes and/or that they can be used to discover our own “distinctive structures of thought” such as James Joyce’s ”stream of consciousness”[32].

 

Digital Poetry in the United States

 

Is the Editor dead? Can anybody publish whatever s/he wishes? There are many conversations on this topic on the American poets’ listservs. However, it is a little weird to see that poets are not accepting any input from anybody else, that the editor is reluctant to interfere, and consequently personal blogs, e-portals, and many other similar virtual products proliferate. The Logolalia Project / Altered Books http://www.logolalia.com/alteredbooks/ is one of them. I will add here UBUWEB http://www.ubu.com/contemp/silliman/index.html , Invisible Notes http://invisiblenotes.blogspot.com/, The Argotist Online devoted to poetry and poetics http://www.argotistonline.co.uk/ , The Mudlark An Electronic Journal of Poetry & Poetics http://www.unf.edu/mudlark/, Otholits http://the-otolith.blogspot.com/2010/04/poeteditorsi-contents.html, The Electronic Poetry Review http://www.epoetry.org/issues/issue8/poetry.htm.

Supervised by Dan Waber, a very active promoter and creator, The Logolalia Project helped raise many others, two as such being Vispoets http://www.vispoets.com/ and The Minimalist Concrete Poetry http://www.logolalia.com/minimalistconcretepoetry/ . Trying to understand what is happening here I subscribed to the American experimental – digital e-poetry listserv and I began to experience this new kind of poetry. Dan Waber published my digital poetry—as you can see here http://www.logolalia.com/minimalistconcretepoetry/archives/cat_roznoveanu_mirela.html — and recently asked me for a book, which I intend to produce. The software I worked with allowed me to play with colors and shapes and at least a few of these poems I consider viable and powerful, different, in its capacity to produce emotion.

Spidertangle http://www.spidertangle.net/home.html is another powerful project of e-poetry with outstanding poets communicating via spidertangle’s listserv and producing a great collection of books, anthologies, portals, a.s.o..

The Electronic Literature Organization http://www.eliterature.org is not as active as the Electronic Poetry Center http://www.h-net.org/~clc/etext/literature.html with its Poetic List from SUNY-Buffalo, a remarkable presence in American poetry, with Charles Bernstein on its Advisory Board.

Digital poetry already has its own public in place, recruited mostly from the community of digital poets. Poets read their works in the academic environment as many digital poets are professors in American universities teaching poetry and writing. Writing about digital literature I would like you to know at the same time that this article will be available online in the digital format. That is why I prepared two versions: one to be available online and one for a print version.

At the end of these pages I forecast that the future will possibly employ a new language for a different kind of mind, the mind of virtual reality. Such minds will not make the ones that we now employ obsolete. However a new form of alliance between the non-linear mind and the new media logic will be living in the amniotic fluid of virtual reality, the virtual mind. This process will take decades of gradual change. Humanity makes use of languages relying on words, images, musical scores, and mathematical abstractions. Therefore, why not welcome on the scene a new language capable of using all the above and more to express a new reality that is building around us, down multilinear paths? A new kind of mind will surely emerge ensuring the very survival, perhaps, of humanity itself.

 

 

Notes