The Postdigital Membrane: Imagination, Technology and Desire - Hardcover

Pepperell, Robert; Punt, Michael

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1841500429 ISBN 13: 9781841500423

Verlag: Intellect Books, 2013

Inhaltsangabe

To what extent is our time characterised by the ‘digital’? Does it announce a bright new age of technological progress, or is it not much more than a marketing tag for manufacturers? What is clear is that much of the cultural theory we have so far accumulated is showing signs of strain as it struggles to cope with the global dynamics of the ‘wired world’. This book offers a timely intellectual strategy that may help us comprehend the contradictions and apparent paradoxes of our immediate cultural climate. Using the metaphor of an organic membrane to show how things can be both separate and connected, The Postdigital Membrane explores the triad of imagination, technology and desire as they play upon each other – and us. In doing so it tries to offer fresh insights into the deeper problems of intelligence, reality and being human in order to map the emerging consciousness of the postdigital age.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Charlotte y Peter Fiell son dos autoridades en historia, teoría y crítica del diseño y han escrito más de sesenta libros sobre la materia, muchos de los cuales se han convertido en éxitos de ventas. También han impartido conferencias y cursos como profesores invitados, han comisariado exposiciones y asesorado a fabricantes, museos, salas de subastas y grandes coleccionistas privados de todo el mundo. Los Fiell han escrito numerosos libros para TASCHEN, entre los que se incluyen 1000 Chairs, Diseño del siglo XX, El diseño industrial de la A a la Z, Scandinavian Design y Diseño del siglo XXI.

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The Postdigital Membrane

Imagination, Technology and Desire

By Robert Pepperell, Michael Punt

Intellect Ltd

Copyright © 2000 Robert Pepperell and Michael Punt
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-84150-042-3

CHAPTER 1

Section One

Proposition:

Technology is the tangible expression of desire motivating human imagination to modify reality.

Why do we have technology?

Surveying history, it seems that there are at least two, often closely connected, reasons why humans develop technology. One is to accomplish some fantasised wish such as recording sound and light. Another is to decrease the amount of time and/or effort required to achieve some desirable end, such as carrying coal from one town to another in order make life easier or to increase profit. Profit is seen as desirable in itself as it leads to the accumulation of wealth, and wealth can be used to realise fantasies or reduce the amount of time and/or effort required in carrying out the tasks of life. Whilst there are many other explanations for technological change (such as extending human mental and physical abilities or overcoming the arduous burdens of nature by making things more accurate, safer, cleaner, healthier, etc.) it is consistently the case that technology has a nominated purpose — the attempt to satisfy some human desire.

Technology removes obstacles to desires

Put another way, technology removes obstacles to the satisfaction of desire. At an early age we apparently develop a sense that the world resists or constrains our behaviour and we are often denied what we want. This central aspect of the human condition can be circumvented to some extent by adapting our behaviour or surroundings so as to meet with our desires. When we want to crack open a nutshell to eat a nut and the shell is too tough we can use a rock or stick to break it. If we want to draw up water from a well with less effort then we might devise a mechanism for doing so. If we want to make yarn quicker than a hand spinner we can invent a machine to do it. These kinds of technological intervention modify aspects of reality according to our needs, in spite of the various obstacles that appear to constrain our desires. In this reciprocity of desire and technology we are always trying to resist the entropic tendency of the Universe and get more for less, without any apparent limit to how much more we want.

What we still want

In spite of (or, perhaps, because of) our considerable technical success, there are many human desires and aspirations that still resist realisation; the desire to live indefinitely, to travel through time, to have cost-free energy sources, to make contact with alien life-forms, to read other peoples minds, to create artificial beings, and so on. The fact that we have not yet devised the technical means of realising these goals does not stop us from imagining that we might in the future. Indeed, this list of phantasmagorical human dreams may be driving some of the most prestigious and highly funded scientific research programs in history — The Human Genome Project, High End Particle Acceleration, Cold Fusion, SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence), Brain Imaging and Intelligent Robotics, all of which feed an imaginary, pre-Oedipal future in which desires are fulfilled.

Why do we transform the world and ourselves?

Changing the operation of reality is not always easy. The fact that the world generally resists us, but occasionally yields to our ingenuity, encourages the imagination of the designer, the inventor, the programmer, the artist, the songwriter, the scientist or the writer to continue their exploratory struggles. Despite the obvious difficulties inherent in any creative practice, in which a high ratio of unproductive effort combines with a great probability of failure, there is an assumption that success is possible. We subscribe to the notion that the ground may 'give' at any time and a solution to an intractable obstacle to desire might be overcome. Perhaps the real questions historians of technological change should ask is not 'why do technologies change?' but 'why do we invent?' Why do we continually imagine that we can satisfy desire through strategic action?

The imaginative imperative

The human imagination can see things that are not there, which is both a gift and a curse. It is a gift because it allows us to escape from harsh reality into congenial fantasy and a curse because it can create dissatisfaction with the present by projecting the possibility of something better than we have. The white elephant of our imagination can summon up ideal conditions, generating utopian possibilities we try to realise, but can also lead us to fantasise the most chilling horrors that might befall us. As the body of science fiction literature clearly demonstrates, we are trying to keep up with technological developments we have already been told to expect whilst, simultaneously, living with nightmare expectations of their future failure. Cheap air-travel, disease-resistant crops and interstellar communication are all now realities where once they were dreams. But they also become the stuff of disaster stories, activist resistance and Hollywood plots.

"If the software doesn't meet the spec the spec is wrong" Technological development only seems strategic with hindsight. Engineers, and more recently computer programmers, often solve problems by deliberately changing the underlying conception of a device. They call this kind of thing a kluge (from the German, klug: clever). Some complex technologies such as the personal computer are a bricollage of kluges; technologies that initially meant one thing are reinterpreted to mean another. On the Personal Computer, the typewriter keyboard does not become the impersonal intermediate stage between hand and print, but the interface for any number of operations that personalise the textual utterance. Similarly, television technology devised to satisfy the desire for telepresence becomes a localised output device in the screen. These new meanings are brought together by contingency to produce a device that satisfies a completely different set of human demands, while retaining an occult shadow of former imperatives. It should not be surprising, therefore, that within three decades, the humdrum calculating device becomes the dominant means of global interaction. The ductility of technological meanings echoes the malleability of the human imagination, and the persistence of desire subject to Universal Laws. (see note 1).

Myths of order from confusion

Given this confluence of past and present imperatives, one begins to suspect technological artefacts might function in a similar way to historical myths in that they serve as rationalising models for those cultures that produce them. The confusion and complexity of actual events is reduced as we consider only those pieces of information that are accountable. Present realities (artefacts or social conditions) are regarded, retrospectively, as the inevitable outcome of an imagined past. In which case, technology's culturally determining role is not only in the feats of data processing or earth-moving that it helps us achieve but also in the ideas it generates about itself, and us.

Speaking as the Machine demands

Some time ago somebody asked a group of scholars in an internet news group (note we say scholars) what John Travolta was reading in Pulp Fiction; these are some of the replies:

'From my hazy recollection, Vince was reading Modesty Blaise while sitting on the toilet and in another scene too I think.'

There were a number of other similar answers:

Vincent Vega (John Travolta) reads _Modesty Blaise_ when he's sitting on the John, both times. Here is the bibliographic info: AUTHOR: O'Donnell, Peter, 1921-, TITLE: Modesty Blaise, EDITION: [Book Club ed.] PLACE: Garden City, N.Y. : PUBLISHER: Doubleday, YEAR: 1965, PUB TYPE: Book FORMAT: 252 p. ; 22 cm.|

There was a 1966 British movie of Modesty Blaise directed by Joseph Losey. PULP FICTION is a celebration of pop, and MB was at the tops of the pop, so to speak. Since there are so many nods in PF to various popular culture and film I wonder if this is just one more. Does anyone else see more to it? Vince is recently returned from three years in Europe, where Modesty Blaise was widely popular as both a book and a comic strip.

Since someone asked, I've got some thoughts about the 'Modesty Blaise' book in Vincent's hands. Her picture on the cover shows a brunette pageboy hairstyle similar to Mia's, to Butch's girlfriend and the taxi driver. All but Mia also have strong connotations of foreign femme-ness. In the case of the girlfriend, there is the amazing shot of her superimposed on the war film on TV, with an enemy (Vietnamese?) soldier pointing his gun right at her. This evokes Butch's father's failure in Vietnam, and maybe Butch's desire to perform a heroic rescue and right that failure (which he achieves, with a samurai sword yet, soon enough).

Regarding PULP FICTION, I'm not positive but I think the John Travolta character was reading 'Being and Nothingness', a huge treatise on Existentialism by Jean-Paul Sartre.

A number of things stand out from these responses. First they are all from film scholars in respectable departments (not Pulp Fiction freaks or cult-movie train-spotters). Second, the usual restrained tones of scholarship and academia have been overtaken by the energetic, vital prose style and creative speculation which is the essence of electronic communications. Finally, these scholars are well trained to answer to their questions definitively by looking at the script, or even emailing Quentin Tarentino. In fact, one would think that it is a matter of professional pride that they should. There are at least two reasons why this did not occur to anyone. In the first place the dubious authority of the author as the final arbiter of meaning is so much part of modern academia that even in the case of the Tarentino — the paradigmatic auteur of the mid-nineties — his evidence is thought to be no more valuable than the reader's (even when it obviously is). But more important perhaps is that the point of the question was not primarily to obtain a definitive answer but to reinvigorate the movie after it was over. Not only does email technology spawn a new kind of discourse, it also propagates extended loops of desire that amplify the shared pleasure of the movie.

Generating dissonant patterns of interferenc

We can start to appreciate that something extremely complex has to be factored into the question of desire and its relation to technology. Many bulletin boards and newsgroups (such as the one cited above) are electronic hybrids of a number of communication genres most favoured by so-called 'subcultures'. Using a potent mix of rhetorical styles, contributors to the ubiquitous conspiracy theory boards, for example, routinely speculate on events as wide ranging as the death of JFK, Princess Diana and contaminated breakfast cereal. Although conspiracy theory sites might not be the place to discover truths about any particular incidents, they are rich terrain for the cultural analyst. Their vigorous prose and imaginative invention perfectly express the mood reflected in many recent cinema releases. According to Lavery, Hague and Cartwright, the responsibility for this mood lies with what is perceived as a loss of psychological control induced by the digitisation of bureaucratic power and the efficiency of the news media. Baroque narratives, which invest the extraterrestrial and supernatural with credibility, they argue, are attempts regain some control of unexplained events by giving order to the chaos of information. That some appear on electronic bulletin boards, or in chat rooms, is paradoxical since nowhere is this chaos more apparent than on the internet. Nonetheless, the megabytes of text on the conspiracy theory boards creatively weave logical explanations using newspaper reports, forensic evidence and imagination fed by movie plots. What becomes apparent is the dissonant interference patterns generated by desire, imagination and technology as they relentlessly play upon each other.

Harmonising imaginations

The use of the bulletin board to make sense of contradictory ideas goes some way to explaining why, throughout the recent history of technological change, the dominance of one particular device over others is not solely decided by technical efficiency. More often than not it is a negotiation between the parties involved over whose mechanical representation most closely matches a shared mental model, or which permits a shared model to emerge. Generally, technological solutions that are innovated as products are those which match the imagination of both the engineer and the client. This process is dependent on all parties sharing a similar perception of the world as it currently is, and transferring some technologically modified version of this perception into a harmonious image of the future. In short, all new technologies acquire mutual intelligibility in the process of being adopted. In a telling contemporary example, Eugene Ferguson in Engineering in the Mind's Eye points out that the Pentagon's agreement to invest in manned space flight first required that senior figures in the government had a shared idea of what might be the eventual outcome. According to Ferguson, to achieve this, Eisenhower screened Disney cartoons to the military High Command.

Indulging one's desires in the hope of satisfying them is like trying to extinguish a fire by pouring petrol over it.

The counterpoint between human behaviour and technological artefact produces a further complex resonance. Almost simultaneously with satisfying human wants, technology acts to stimulate them by encouraging additional desires. We would not want a VCR if such machines did not exist just as we do not want things now which we will probably buy at some time in the future when they are invented. Because we have washing machines, cookers and central heating we can wash our clothes, prepare our food and heat ourselves more quickly and with less effort than if we did not have them. As a consequence, we have more time and energy left over to do more things and we want more things to fill that spare time. As we get used to doing things with less expenditure of time and effort we ask why other things that require time and effort can't be done more efficiently. For example, why should we have to going shopping for food or go out to rent videos or to see a film at the cinema — couldn't these chores also be automated? One could summarise this state of affairs by saying 'more things demand more things'. To give a useful economic example: because it is possible to produce yarn mechanically at 100 times the rate of a manual spinner the general demand for yarn rises as the cost per yard falls and new products and design features (like t-shirts and extravagant pleats) are devised which consume cheaper yarn. Needs that never existed before are created as a consequence of our imaginative interaction with inventions which, in themselves, stimulate our insatiable capacity for more things. What permutation of human needs were served by the introduction of 'Fluffy Bunny' slippers, mock-Tudor windows or moustache wax?

Out of time

Such is the momentum generated by the general consumption of products that even objects for which there is no apparent demand seem to emerge. The transition from invention to innovation (from prototype to product) is not an immediate but a lengthy, haphazard process in which the original meaning of the invention cannot be guaranteed. Certainly in the nineteenth century, new technologies met the world more like frail damp butterflies emerging from cocoons vulnerable to environment and predator rather than a charging locomotive. On average, it took around eleven years for an invention to acquire a consensual public meaning. In the case of the Gillette razor it was 43 years before the idea of a safe shave seemed to be a good one and the safety razor caught on. Many inventions were patented without obvious application, to lay un-exploited only to be reinvented sometime later. In 1865, for example, Alexander Parkes launched a flexible transparent material using cellulose that he called Parkesine. It had no significant use and was lost only to resurface thirty years later, this time being called Celluloid — the material which most histories claim the world was waiting for before moving image photography itself could be invented. This suggests that, in the story of technology, the interleaving between demand and supply is erratic rather than, as is often implied by orderly accounts, symmetrical.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Postdigital Membrane by Robert Pepperell, Michael Punt. Copyright © 2000 Robert Pepperell and Michael Punt. Excerpted by permission of Intellect Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Intellect Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2013
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1841500429
• ISBN 13: 9781841500423
• Einband: Tapa dura
• Anzahl der Seiten: 200
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar