Flatline_Constructs 4.6 Mechanism and Animism (or, Gremlins in the Hyperreal)

Kant: “[M]oral teleology compensates for physical teleology and for the first time supplies a basis for theology. For physical teleology on its own [ ..]. could not provide a basis for anything but a demonology.”[291]

But if Baudrillard’s simulated history culminates here – in the triumph of a code that can only be subverted by its own drive to perfectibility[292] – Gibson and Deleuze-Guattari seem to open another set of possibilities for the connections between the demonic and the cybernetic. In contrast with Baudrillard’s cybernetics of control, the convergence of voodoo with cybernetics presents a vindication of the views of Freud’s children and “savages” – a counter-narrative to Baudrillard’s vision of cybernetic hyperrationalization which unsettles stable, linear temporalities by uncovering strange coincidences between the deeply archaic and the most gleamingly hypermodern.

At first sight, the Gothic elements in Gibson could appear to be merely vestigial, superstitions whose carry over into terminal culture is motivated by a psychological need to populate the Godless regions of cyberspace with familiar belief structures. This, indeed, is how one of the characters rationalizes it. “There’s a whole new apocrypha out there, really - ghost ships, lost cities [...] There’s a pathos to it, when you think about it. I mean, every bit of it’s locked into orbit. All of it manmade, known, own, mapped. Like watching myths take root in a parking lot. But I suppose people need that, don’t they?’” (MLO 111) To the extent that this is true, Gibson would appear to be complicit with a Weberian narrative of rationalization - what Weber, after Schiller, called “the disenchantment of the world”, a process characterized in part by the disappearance of the supernatural. This, in effect, is the narrative Baudrillard accepts: cybernetic control by the Code constitutes the final triumph of a post-Protestant culture which has stripped the world of its gods. [293]

Gibson himself is equivocal. His own theologizations (or demonizations) of cyberspace hesitate between a vision of technotheoteleogical transcendence, in which the Matrix – as late-arriving “cybernetic godhead” (MLO 238) redeems a human history it effectively culminates, and a Deleuze-Guattari picture of a dehumanized cyberspace peopled by roaming intelligences. The following passage – from Mona Lisa Overdrive – summarises the two positions:

“’The folklore of console jockeys, Continuity. What do you know about that?’ […]

‘What would you like to know, Angie?’

‘ “When it Changed” ...’

‘The mythform is usually encountered in one of two modes. One mode assumes that the cyberspace matrix is inhabited, or perhaps visited, by entities whose characteristics correspond with the primary mythform of a “higher people”. The other involves assumptions of omniscience, omnipotence and incomprehensibility on the part of the matrix itself.’

‘That the matrix is God?’

‘In a manner of speaking, although it would be more accurate, in terms of the mythform, to say that the matrix has a God, since this being’s omniscience and omnipotence are assumed to be limited to the matrix.’

‘If it has limits, it isn’t omnipotent.’

‘Exactly.’ [...]

‘How about the stories about - ‘, she hesitated, having almost said the loa, ‘about things in the matrix, how do they fit into this supreme being idea.’

‘They don’t. Both are variants of ‘When it Changed’. Both are of very recent origin.’” (MLO 138-9)

The discussion is somewhat reminiscent of the theo-cybernetic debates in Wiener’s God and Golem, although – in line with a certain cyber-transcendence – Gibson plays with a possibility that is almost the reverse of the one Wiener entertained. As we saw in the last chapter, Wiener wondered what limits there were to the escape of machinic intelligence once the “dogmas” of omnipotence and omniscience are abandoned; Gibson, meanwhile (or his more mystico-transcendently-oriented characters), imagines “omniscience, omnipotence and incomprehensibility” emerging, as side-effects of the production of cyberspace. Against this picture of emergent oneness, the “stories about things in the matrix” posit the fragmentation of the Matrix into entities, paralleled – or identified – with the loa of Haitian voodoo. The crucial moment (retrospectively accorded mythic status) is the end of Neuromancer, when Wintermute and Neuromancer fuse into a Matrix which is itself metamorphosed: When it changed. On the one hand, what it changes into seems to be a familiar image of Science Fictional transcendence – achieved sentience as the Mind of God ; on the other, what it changes into it is a properly cyberpunk – and Gothic Materialist – vision of teeming multiplicity (“things in the matrix”): Pandemonium (all the demons, and demons everywhere).[294]

The cybernetic lexicon has shown a remarkable predilection for invoking the word “demon”. For obvious reasons: cybernetic systems simulate conscious function without possessing it. The term “demonic” suggests both this possibility of agency-without-subjectivity and hints at the power of metamorphic becoming proper to entities of simulation. Wiener’s writings are replete with warnings about the “demonic” and “devilish” power of such cybernetic systems. Fearing that “the machine like the djinee, which can learn and make decisions on the basis of its learning, will in no way be obliged to make such decisions as we should have made, or will be acceptable to us” (HUHB 185) Wiener refers to a “demoniac sanction” (HUHB 130), and a “devilment” that scientists – “apprentice sorcerers” - “are unable to stop.” (HUHB 130) [295]

From its very beginnings, the modern(ist) science of cybernetics was haunted by the resurgence of belief structures which, in Freud’s terms, would have to be considered vestiges from the most archaic parts of the mind: beliefs he characterised as “animistic”. According to Wiener, when confronted with cybernetic machines, human beings found themselves behaving as if the systems possessed agency. Since the systems cybernetics produced behaved at least quasi-autonomously, they naturally gave rise to the belief in non-human (and non-subjective) agencies, as Wiener explains by reference to aircraft crews’ interaction with airplanes which used self-corrective cybernetic circuits: “The semi-humorous superstition of the gremlin among the aviators was probably due, as much as anything else, to the habit of dealing with a machine with a large number of built-in feedbacks which might be interpreted as friendly or hostile. For example the wings of an airplane are deliberately built in such a manner as to stabilize the plane, and their stabilization, which is of the nature of feedback [...] may easily be felt as a personality to be antagonized when the plane is forced into unusual maneuvers.”[296] Dealing with the cybernetic systems of these aircraft presented the aviators with many of the same – perceptual – clues as would interaction with another conscious being. Therefore, it was inevitable that they would posit another entity, rather than a technical system, when they were working in – or, more properly perhaps, with – the airplane. “Our consciousness of will in another person, Wiener argued, is just that sense of encountering a self-maintaining mechanism aiding or opposing our actions. By providing such a self-stabilizing resistance, the airplane acts as if it had purpose, in short, as if it were inhabited by a gremlin.”[297]

At the other end of cybernetic era, in Gibson’s near future, we find a Japanese businessman explaining to his daughter why personality-construct “cubes” are not “souls”. “[H]e’d explained that the cubes housed the recorded personalities of former executives, corporate directors. Their souls, she asked. No, he’d said. And smiled, then added that the distinction was a subtle one. ‘They are not conscious. They respond, when questioned, in a manner approximating the response of the subject. If they are ghosts, then holograms are ghosts.” (MLO 174) Given what Wiener has implied, the girl Kumiko’s confusion is a response more true to the complexities of cybernetics response than is her father’s confidence. One corollary of what Wiener says in connection with the aircraft gremlins is that the positing of personality (and of conscious mental process) is a side-effect of the perception of purposive function, which can now – as one of the first principles of cybernetics insists – be technicized. At any rate, Gibson is well aware that the development of cybernetic machines produces increasingly anomalous systems that suggest – at the very least – that the distinction between living and nonliving, between thing and entity, is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain.

Hence the return of animism, which can closely be paralleled with demonism. Which brings us back to the children Sherry Turkle discusses in her Life on the Screen, whom we encountered long ago (in our Introduction). Like Gibson’s Kumiko, these children – confronted with cybernetic systems capable, of course, of an infinitely more subtle variety of responses and interactions than were the primitive aviation systems the wartime airmen encountered – offer a complex account of their engagement with machines that defies many of the old ontological assumptions.

But we need to consider more carefully what is at stake in animist belief system, in part because Deleuze-Guattari make a point of distinguishing their machinism from animism. Significantly, this distinction is advanced during the course of a discussion of children. “Children are Spinozists,” (TP 256) Deleuze-Guattari declare. “It has been noted that for children an organ has a ‘thousand vicissitudes,’ that it is ‘difficult to localize, difficult to identity, it is in turn a bone, an engine, excrement, the baby, a hand, daddy’s heart…’ This is not at all because the organ is experienced as a part-object. It is because the organ is exactly what its elements make it according to their relation of movement and rest, and the way in which this relation combines with or splits off from that of its neighbouring elements. This is not animism, any more than it is mechanism; rather, it is universal machinism: a plane of consistency occupied by an immense abstract machine occupied by an infinite number of assemblages.” (TP 256; emphasis added) This passage is implicitly aimed against Freud (whose Little Hans they discuss in the sentences immediately preceding it); the distinction of machinism and animism is no doubt impelled by a desire to separate their position from Freud’s in “Totem and Taboo” and “The Uncanny.” But is it possible to find a version of animism compatible with Deleuze-Guattari’s machinism?

One way of cashing out what Deleuze-Guattari’s say about machinism is in terms of a dissolution of an ontology of objects. [298] What they emphasise is the irreducibility of dynamical process. It is not as if there are “objects” subject to (Spinozist) speeds and slownesses; there is only a continuum of speeds and slownesses (which are “then” apprehended as objects – by subjects). The same “object” can be part of an infinity of different machines.

Conventionally understood, animism could be seen as the complement to Freudian explanation. Here, the natural world – and, presumably, the world of cultural production - is treated as if it possessed the same features of intentionality which are supposedly unique to human beings, or – at least – to organisms.[299] Jacques Monod offers a fairly conventional definition. “Animist belief […],” in Monod’s summary, “consists essentially in a projection into inanimate nature of man’s awareness of the intensely teleonomic function of his own central nervous system. It is, in other words, the hypothesis that natural phenomena can and must be explained in the same manner, by the same ‘laws,’ as subjective human activity, conscious and purposive.” [300] Whilst animism no doubt posits a single plane inhabited by human beings, “the natural world” , and technical machines, it is to follow Freud into a kind of psychologistic reductivism to assume that this must be a matter of projection. If a single plane is genuinely being posited, it makes no sense to say that it is being “projected” by a psychological agent, precisely because the distinction between such agents and the world around them is what is at issue. Understood in this way, animism would be merely the other side to organicism, with nonorganic processes understood to function (in many ways) like the way in which organisms are understood to operate. To reconcile machinism with animism entails holding onto the concept of a single plane – Deleuze-Guattari’s “plane of consistency occupied by an immense abstract machine” – but it equally demands the abandonment of any special organic feature (which is then, supposedly, projected onto the inorganic). On the plane of consistency, there is nowhere to project from (nor to). Ron Eglash gives a more interesting account, reinforcing the connection between animist conceptions and cybernetics by emphasising the informational circuitries with which he claims animist belief systems are concerned:

Although frequently reduced to ‘fetish worship’ or ‘natural spirituality’ in western descriptions, animism is, on the contrary, typically concerned with a cultural transfer of information or energy through physical dynamics. While animist religions are still active in Africa today, this conception of animated physical form is quite ancient, and is reflected in the myths of God creating humanity from clay. In some North African traditions, certain spiritualists could create their own clay robots, ‘golems.’ Goldsmith reports golem legends going back to the fourth century B.C.E., and describes their continuing popularity in Jewish legend. Norbert Weiner, the Jewish founder of analog cybernetics, was quite influenced by this concept of information embedded in physical dynamics [...] He made several references to the golem in his writing, and reported that, even as a child he was fascinated by the idea of making a doll come alive^.[301]

Eglash’s position parallels Gibson’s, in positing connections between voodoo and contemporary cybernetic systems. But what is interesting about the children Turkle describes is that they do not so much seek to make the inanimate come alive; rather, they do not recognize that the distinction between animate and inanimate is equivalent to the distinction between entities capable of agency and those not. The issue, for the children Turkle studied, is that agency does not require life. “The most recent generation of children, who seem so willing to grant psychological status to not-alive machines, have become accustomed to objects that are both interactive and opaque. These children have learned what to expect of these objects and how to discriminate between them and what is alive. But even as children make those discriminations, they also grant new capacities and privileges to the machine world on the basis of its animation if not its life.”[302] Agency can be distributed across a plane that is indifferent to “life.” This might, once again, establish a point of connection with Spinoza, whose philosophy has no place for the distinction between life and death, but which, as we have seen above, in Deleuze-Guattari’s reconstruction, defines bodies in terms of speeds and slownesses, different quanta of animation. Turkle claims that, faced with computers, children assume that the technical system is not alive, but that it has a psychology. This is perhaps an unnecessary reterritorialization: Gothic Materialism finds the concepts of agency and entity much more congenial. Agency implies a capacity for response, but has no necessary suggestion of any interiority, or conscious reflection. The emergent mythos of demonism in Gibson’s cyberspace depends upon the notion of entities with which one can trade. “The new jockeys, they make deals with things.” (CZ 169) This emphasis on trade with an entity that is really different (not a pyschologistic projection) recapitulates, then, the relationship between Baudrillard’s “primitive double” and the shadow: it is a matter of a real relationship with something exterior.

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[291] Kant, The Critique of Judgement, trans. Werner S. Pluhar, Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987, 333

[292] A formula Baudrillard plays out perhaps most exhaustively in The Transparency of Evil.

[293] Since, from his point of view, the whole contemporary scene is complicit with this dreary scenario, Baudrillard’s escape is into the past: he scans the cybernetic iron cage from the perspective of a simulated primitive gaze. It is this POV – enabling him to contrast the cold circuits of cyberculture with the frenzied rites of symbolic exchange – that gives a purchase to his critique.

[294] In a sense, the opposition itself presupposes a set of monotheistic assumptions, whereby singularity and multiplicity are necessarily thought of as contradictory; whereas what voodoo – which does not oppose, so much as absorb Christianity – has in common with Deleuze-Guattari is an intuition that singularity (which is not unity) is not different from multiplicity (which is not an aggregation of unities).

[295] Note also the positing of the “Maxwell Demon” which Cybernetics was keen to refute. (HUHB 28-30) Wiener also makes a distinction between two types of “devil” the scientist is “fighting”: the “Augustinian” and the “Manichean”. (HUHB, 34-35, 190).

[296] Wiener, “Operationalism - Old and New” (1945), box 11, folder 570, Norbert Wiener Papers, collection MC-22, Institute Archives and Special Collection, Massachussets Institute of Technology Archives, Cambridge, Mass., quoted in Peter Gallsion, “The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision”, 246

[297] Gallison, 246. Gibson amusingly updates this in Mona Lisa Overdrive, by having a whole house – Continuity – becoming an interactive presence.

[298] The differentiation of their Spinozism from a Kleinian conceptualization of “part-objects” has more to do with a problem with the concept of objects than of the concept of parts – although the notion of “parts” is ambiguous. If the concept of parts designates a components of a fragmented unity, then clearly it is in radical opposition to Deleuze-Guattari’s concept of multiplicity. See “The Whole and its Parts”, AO 42, for a discussion of this.

[299] Hence the so-called “omnipotence of thoughts.”

[300] Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity: An Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology, trans. Austryn Wainhouse, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997, 30

[301] Eglash, “African Influences in Cybernetics”, in Gray, Chris Hables (ed), The Cyborg Handbook, New York/London: Routledge, 1995, 22-23

[302] Turkle, Life on the Screen, 83, emphasis added