Reading Notes: Botting, "Of Meat And The Matrix"
Human history about to end and be replaced with the history of the machine? We are most likely a simulation being used by robots as a living history museum? Author says that's awfully optimistic, why waste the processing power. (Best argument against that I've heard in a while.) In that version of the future, all of human needs would be met except the desire for recognition.
Virilio claims "In the very near future, our history will happen in universal time, itself the outcome of instantaneity --- and there only."
Here comes the author to say "history has always been driven by machinic systems."
"Synthanatos" as the death that becomes irrelevant as the machine-subject goes about its business?
"Excess is no longer linked to lack, but signifies a positive process which undermines paternal authority and disentangles the father's metaphors to weave the multiple and mobile connections that signal the end of Man and the emergence of the new woman-cum-machine. Can't you see she's coming?" That subtle dig at Plant is amazing.
Photographic relation as a navel --- navel-gazing as looking at history --- heh. Terminator movie as origin myth!
Whoah this paper cites _Rudy Rucker_. Maybe hanging out with scifi nerds will be useful to me after all. :P Wetware is the book in question, I should look it up in my Copious Free Time, the presence/absence of navels and human bodies with robot parentage sound pretty interesting. (Lyotard was suggesting sexual difference would be necessary for artificial intelligence; Rucker's plot in this book at least seems to agree. I find Botting's take on it a little problematic but I'm gonna move on.)
Lacan says "the true formula of atheism" is that "God is unconscious?" That's something to chew on.
"Every bopper tried to avoid any taint of the human notion of self." This sounds astonishingly like something Rik would say, and also ties into all of this D&G froofcore "there is no subject" stuff.
Merge, openness to the Other, death --- Kristeva's abjection?? Oooh, or BODY WITHOUT ORGANS.
"meat" and "machine" as slurs.
Angela Carter, now? The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr. Hoffman --- well this essay is giving me interesting stuff to read in the future if nothing else.
Neuromancer and disability? Maybe, from what I'm reading here? I dunno, I haven't read the primary source.
"Sex... never lies far from descriptions of the ecstasies of future technological transcendence, no matter how incorporeal it appears to be." Matrix as masturbatory fantasy of returning to the womb? Socket in the back of your head as artificial navel?
Networking vs. weaving (pg172) interesting. ...replicunts? o.0
"As a bodily metaphor, the navel signals a resistance to psychoanalysis and remains 'loaded with the connotations of gender' but it cannot be reduced to one sex, a 'democratic' figure, a 'tribute not only to an antiphallic semiotic but also to an antiphallic genderness that does not assign women a second-rate position' (Bal 1991)."
Barthes described text as weave and network? Neat, that's not too surprising, but it means there's good Barthes I haven't read yet. :)
Virilio sees research on cyberspace as research on God and (my word) apotheosis.
There's a great analysis of Blade Runner with regard to Barthes and Lacan in here that I am not going to take notes on to the extent that it deserves. If I have seen Blade Runner and read Camera Lucida, I should come back here.
Virilio on substitution versus Baudrillard's simulation; a split into two worlds, virtual and actual. My brain is kind of turning to mush, conveniently I am near the end.
Page 204 has Zizek on virtual sex: "The true horror evinced by virtual sex is not simply the loss of real sex, but the disclosure that this real sex never existed in the first place, that sex always-already was virtual."
This entry was originally posted at http://rax.dreamwidth.org/52488.html.
Virilio claims "In the very near future, our history will happen in universal time, itself the outcome of instantaneity --- and there only."
Here comes the author to say "history has always been driven by machinic systems."
"Synthanatos" as the death that becomes irrelevant as the machine-subject goes about its business?
"Excess is no longer linked to lack, but signifies a positive process which undermines paternal authority and disentangles the father's metaphors to weave the multiple and mobile connections that signal the end of Man and the emergence of the new woman-cum-machine. Can't you see she's coming?" That subtle dig at Plant is amazing.
Photographic relation as a navel --- navel-gazing as looking at history --- heh. Terminator movie as origin myth!
Whoah this paper cites _Rudy Rucker_. Maybe hanging out with scifi nerds will be useful to me after all. :P Wetware is the book in question, I should look it up in my Copious Free Time, the presence/absence of navels and human bodies with robot parentage sound pretty interesting. (Lyotard was suggesting sexual difference would be necessary for artificial intelligence; Rucker's plot in this book at least seems to agree. I find Botting's take on it a little problematic but I'm gonna move on.)
Lacan says "the true formula of atheism" is that "God is unconscious?" That's something to chew on.
"Every bopper tried to avoid any taint of the human notion of self." This sounds astonishingly like something Rik would say, and also ties into all of this D&G froofcore "there is no subject" stuff.
Merge, openness to the Other, death --- Kristeva's abjection?? Oooh, or BODY WITHOUT ORGANS.
"meat" and "machine" as slurs.
Angela Carter, now? The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr. Hoffman --- well this essay is giving me interesting stuff to read in the future if nothing else.
Neuromancer and disability? Maybe, from what I'm reading here? I dunno, I haven't read the primary source.
"Sex... never lies far from descriptions of the ecstasies of future technological transcendence, no matter how incorporeal it appears to be." Matrix as masturbatory fantasy of returning to the womb? Socket in the back of your head as artificial navel?
Networking vs. weaving (pg172) interesting. ...replicunts? o.0
"As a bodily metaphor, the navel signals a resistance to psychoanalysis and remains 'loaded with the connotations of gender' but it cannot be reduced to one sex, a 'democratic' figure, a 'tribute not only to an antiphallic semiotic but also to an antiphallic genderness that does not assign women a second-rate position' (Bal 1991)."
Barthes described text as weave and network? Neat, that's not too surprising, but it means there's good Barthes I haven't read yet. :)
Virilio sees research on cyberspace as research on God and (my word) apotheosis.
There's a great analysis of Blade Runner with regard to Barthes and Lacan in here that I am not going to take notes on to the extent that it deserves. If I have seen Blade Runner and read Camera Lucida, I should come back here.
Virilio on substitution versus Baudrillard's simulation; a split into two worlds, virtual and actual. My brain is kind of turning to mush, conveniently I am near the end.
Page 204 has Zizek on virtual sex: "The true horror evinced by virtual sex is not simply the loss of real sex, but the disclosure that this real sex never existed in the first place, that sex always-already was virtual."
This entry was originally posted at http://rax.dreamwidth.org/52488.html.