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# Bodies in code  interfaces with digital media

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By articulating space and love, myth and physics open an alternative relationship to the house, one rooted less in its blanket resistance to recording (its "digital autonomy") than in the concrete demands it makes on understanding. According to Zampanò, recognition of the imbrication of physics and myth is essential to the task posed to the novel's reader: "In order to even dimly comprehend the shape of the Navidson house it is ... critical to recognize how the laws of physics in tandem with echo's mythic inheritance serve to enhance echo's interpretive strength"(47).

Indeed, as the text's exemplar for the strength of a bodily hermeneutics, echo forms a model for managing the impossible labyrinth of the house and thereby repudiates the supposed "descriptive limitations" that preface the analysis of the house as labyrinth. If the restriction of the echo "to large spaces" initially seems to restrict its capacity (as compared with a recording technology like film) to “consider how distances within the Navidson house are radically distorted" (109), following the analysis of the house as impossible labyrinth, where orthographic mediation is shown to be inadequate in principle, it is precisely this kind of restriction—insofar as it forms a correlate of embodied understanding—that is shown to be most necessary.

In what sense, then, can we understand echo to be the precondition for the description of space? Zampanò's analysis of the physics of sound explains how echo “defines," "limits," and “temporarily inhabits” space (46): the sonic phenomenon of echo transpires through the conjunction of distance and time. What matters most, as Zampanò reminds us, is “a sound's delay":

The human ear cannot distinguish one sound wave from the same sound wave if it returns in less than 50 milliseconds. Therefore for anyone to hear a reverberation requires a certain amount of space. At 68 degrees Fahrenheit sound travels at approximately 1,130 ft per second. A reflective surface must stand at least 56½ ft away in order for a person to detect the doubling of her voice. (50)

The production of echo, the doubling of sound—sound's différance— requires that certain empirical conditions be met: the space inhabited by sound must be neither too small nor too large (there is no echo in a space of infinite dimensions just as there is none in a vacuum). Otherwise put, the sonic phenomenon must be calibrated to the thresholds and constraints of embodied hearing—hearing as it occurs in a concrete context and through a concrete apparatus.

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These imperatives inform the double synaesthetic transformation of hearing at issue in Zampanò's analysis. To describe the “descriptive ability of the audible," Zampanò offers the following formula:

$$
\mathrm { S o u n d + T i m e = A c o u s t i c \ L i g h t }\tag{47}
$$

As a medium for measuring space, sound provides an acoustic analogy for light: like light, it is omnispatial and pervasive. For this reason, concludes Zampanò, "speaking can result in a form ofseeing" (47).

Following a contrast with animals that, we are told, use sound to create acoustic images and “see" the shape of sound, Zampanò modifies this formula. More accurate to the mode of imaging of the human eye, which is neither active nor passive and which merely requires an object to be illuminated, is the following formula:

$$
\mathrm { S o u n d + T i m e = A c o u s t i c \ T o u c h }\tag{47}
$$

Sound measures distance and thus approximates the function of vision by translating distance into touch, by opening a bodily modality in which seeing is feeling. That is why, “to hear an echo, regardless of whether eyes are open or closed, is to have already seen’ a sizable space” (50).

To grasp how this synaesthetic transformation and reembodiment of vision reconfigures the task of reading, we must turn to the mythological history. Myth, Zampanò notes, testifies to the insurgency of Echo who, despite suffering “total negation” of body and “near negation of voice," still manages “to subvert the gods' ruling." In so doing, Echo offers herself as a model for the reader, who is, after all, faced with the task of inhabiting an impossible spatial object, an object whose impossibility is a function of the disembodied logic of digital replication. Her example introduces the principle for the conversion that reading must effect; as Zampanò stresses, "her repetitions are far from digital, much closer to analog. Echo colors the words with faint traces of sorrow (the Narcissus myth) or accusation (the Pan myth) never present in the original" (41, emphasis added). Like Echo, the reader must breathe life into the orthographic, transforming it from an exact inscription of the past into the catalyst for the new, the unpredictable, the future.

Indeed, Echo furnishes an example of how—to adopt the language of information theory—information is turned into meaning: "Her voice has life. It possesses a quality not present in the original, revealing how a nymph can return a different and more meaningful story, in spite of telling the same story” (42). Just like Pierre Menard's echo of Don Quixote in the famous Borges story to which Zampanò compares it, the ‘exquisite variation" introduced by Echo marks the difference between information in a purely technical sense and information as intrinsically imbued with embodied meaning.

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British cyberneticist Donald MacKay first introduced this important difference in his attempt to supplement Claude Shannon's mathematical theory of information with a theory of meaning. According to MacKay, there are two constituents of a unit of information: selection and construction. Selection corresponds to Shannon's technical conception of information and designates the probability of a message's likelihood, given the formal repertoire of choices.xxii Construction, on the other hand, specifies a larger context for selection—namely, the behavioral state of the receiver—by which MacKay means not simply cognitive predispositions but “visceral responses and hormonal secretions"—that is, the most primitive embodied faculties.xxiii,8 For MacKay, information cannot be divorced from meaning because selection necessarily occurs in dirty, real-world situations in which embodied tendencies contaminate and thus actively contribute to the production of information.

MacKay's differentiation of meaning from the (purely technical) informational value of a message helps to flesh out the difference Zampanò has built into the phenomenon of the echo: the difference of reptition. By correlating meaning with the recipient's particular behavioral state rather than an observable change in his or her behavior, MacKay's theory encompasses situations involving the repetition of a message. Despite lacking informational value, a repeated message retains its meaning because this simply is the behavioral state it specifies, regardless of whether the receiver is already in that state.

By allegorizing this correlation of information with meaning, the myth of Echo operates an epochē of the phonocentric exactly opposite to that informing orthographic recording. Rather than preserving the past as a trace of the unlived (the past not lived by me), it serves to open the present moment of enunciation onto its uncanny doubling, to discover within it the possibility for an analog echoing that does not so much preserve the trace of the past as carry its force into the future in a way as unpredictable and singular as this or that reader's set of embodied predispositions.

A novel of ceaseless repetition across media, of mediation as repetition, House of Leaves ultimately proffers a model of reading as analog echoing. The exemplary instance of this model is Truant's "first reading" of the text. That is why, in a footnote added to Zampanò's discussion of echo, Truant recounts his self-transformation as an experience of the double synaesthetic crossing effected by the institution of echo as the mythico-physical condition of possibility for hearing. Musing on the “intensely personal nature" of Zampanò's consideration of echo in the orientation of the blind, Truant goes on to recount his own expanded and heightened visual capacities:

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But I saw a strange glimmer everywhere, confined to the sharp oscillations of yellow & blue, as if my retinal view suddenly included along with the reflective blessings of light, an unearthly collusion with scent & sound, registering all possibilities of harm, every threat, every move, even with all that grinning and meeting and din. (49)

This synaesthetic transfiguration gives Truant the possibility to hear and see in a noisy environment where, we are told, he and his friend Lude were prevented “from hearing correctly" and where Lude in particular remained“blind."

Truant's modeling of his response on the analogics of echo anticipates later sections of the book in which he is led to postulate his symbiotic relationship with Zampanò's narrative. In the most striking of these, Truant depicts himself as the nurturer and provider for the text, the source without which it would not exist:

I wash the sweat off my face, do my best to suppress a shiver, can't, return to the body, spread out across the table like papers—and let me tell you there's more than just The Navidson Record lying there— bloodless and still but not at all dead, calling me to it, needing me now like a child, depending on me despite its age. After all, I'm its source, the one who feeds it, nurses it back to health—but not life, I fear— bones of bond paper, transfusions of ink, genetic encryption in xerox; monstrous, maybe inaccurate correlates, but nonetheless there. And necessary to animate it all? For is that not an ultimate, the ultimate goal? Not some heaven sent blast of electricity but me, and not me unto me, but me onto it, if those two things are really at all different, which is still to say—to state the obvious—without me it would perish. (326)

Almost immediately however-in yet another testament to the text's media self-reflexivity--this thought is abruptly turned around:

There's something else.

More and more often, I've been overcome by the strangest feeling that I've gotten it turned around, by which I mean to say—to state the not-so-obvious—without it I would perish. A moment comes where suddenly everything seems impossibly far and confused, my sense of self derealized & depersonalized, the disorientation so severe I actually believe—and let me tell you it is an intensely strange instance of belief—that this terrible sense of relatedness to Zampano's work implies something that just can't be, namely that this thing has created me; not me only it, but not it only me, where I am nothing more than the matter of some other voice, intruding through the folds of what even now lies there agape, possessing me with histories I should never recognize as my own; inventing me, defining me, directing me until finally every association I can claim as my own ... is relegated to nothing; forcing me to face the most terrible suspicion of all, that all of this has just been made up and what's worse, not made up by me or even for that matter Zampanò.

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Though by whom I have no idea. (326)

Here then is the traditional equation of novel and body, now reconfigured for a media—or more precisely, a postorthographic—age. In place of the epistemological frisson generated by the mise-en-abîme of, for example, Borges'“Garden of Forking Paths," here we encounter a thorough recursivity between text and body. It literally makes no difference which is the container and which the contained because, in either case, the fictional narrative garners its “reality effect" through the reality affects it stimulates its readers to produce.

From this subtle reconfiguration of postmodern reflexivity, we can draw two important conclusions. First, Truant's transformation figures the response of every reader, showing how it encompasses the entirety of the bodily processing involved in reading the text and also how it is, necessarily, nondocumentable, utterly singular. Second, Truant's experience locates the correlation of the novel and the body outside the frame of the novel traditionally considered, thereby transforming it into something like an index of the creativity of embodied reading. Just as the novel undergoes bodily deformation as a result of its confrontation with recording media, so too does the reader undergo an embodied transformation which, in this most curious of mediations, manages to stand in for the referential absence at the core of the novel and thereby to confer reality on the physically, materially—and perhaps even logically—impossible fictional world it projects.

By enthusiastically shedding all aspirations to autonomy—aspirations that characterize the realist novel per se—House of Leaves comprises a veritable script for producing bodies-in-code. Although it is certainly constrained by the text's language (which provides a source for selectivity), reading as the production of bodies-in-code requires creativity from every one of its actual, flesh-and-blood readers. The source for the difference of repetition, for the analogics of echo, such creativity must stem directly from—and must necessarily capture, though in a nonorthothetic manner—the singular embodiment of each and every reader. That is why, in a final layer of mediation, the act of reading House of Leaves generates a potentially infinite proliferation of singular bodies-in-code

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Notes

INTRODUCTION

i. Bach y Rita's work focuses on tactile prostheses for the blind and specifically on remapping vision through stimulation of the tongue. Krueger's work will be discussed later.

ii. “The brain is a media junkie” and "it wants the good stuff," notes venture capitalist Dan Mapes (Krantz, 24).

iii. Obviously, what Krueger means by “immersion" is a far cry from the picture of a passive media consumer dreamed of by today's media industries. Immersion here is something of a minimal condition for the establishment of a perceptuomotor circuit and, thus, for embodied human agency.

iv. What is crucial to obtaining agency in such environments, as Krueger clearly saw as early as 1974, is the capacity to interact with people in your environment exactly as you normally would. This would not be [possible] if you were wearing contemporary data goggles. This [difference] is important because most people have a variety of responsibilities and perform many different tasks. Only a few might be full-time artificial reality personnel. The rest would have to choose, moment by moment, whether to operate in an artificial reality or in the real world. [But] in fact, they will often want to be able to operate in both simultaneously. (Krueger 1993, 155)

v. According to Massumi:

Digital processing as such doesn't possibilize let alone virtualize. The digital is already exhaustively possibilistic. It can, it turns out, potentialize, but only indirectly, through the experiential relays the reception of its outcomes set in motion. Those relays may even more indirectly seed as yet uncoded possibilities: inventions.... Whatever inventiveness comes about, it is a result not of coding itself but of its detour into the analog. The processing may be digital—but the analog is the process. The virtuality involved, and any new possibility that may arise, is entirely bound up with the potentializing relay. It is not contained in the code. (Brian Massumi, “On the Superiority of the Analog," in Massumi 2002, 141-142).

253

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vi. This, incidentally, is the way in which Lev Manovich interprets the phenomenon of digitization generally. See Manovich, 2000, Chapter 1.

vii. Bernard Stiegler is the thinker of the technical element of the sensible-transcendental and of the invagination of the empirical and the transcendental in the wake of technics. See Stiegler, 1998.

viii. Stiegler's critical reading of Leroi-Gourhan's empiricism engages the difficulties generated by such a concept of the origin. See Stiegler 1998, Part I, Chapter 3.

ix. It is not incidental that Lacan's analysis of the gaze, of object a as the gaze, identified radio and television as institutional supports for the gaze.

x. Ruyer's subjectivities form a complement to Leibniz's "little perceptions." I discuss Ruyer at length in New Philosophy for New Media, Chapter 5.

xi. Commenting on the concept of "reversed epiphenomenalism," Michel Piclin clarifies Ruyer's perspective:

The duality of the body and the spirit is illusory, Ruyer tells us, because our relation to the body is not of the order of having, but of the order of being: we do not have a body, we are an organism. The body is the organism seen by others; ... the organism, the body felt from within" (Piclin 1992, 161x).

xii. This priority can be seen clearly in the complexity of the observation (description) of an autopoietic organism (phenomenological unity):

Since it is a defining feature of an autopoietic system that it should specify its own boundaries, a proper recognition of an autopoietic system as a unity requires that the observer perform an operation of distinction that defines the limits of the system in the same domain in which it specifies them through its autopoiesis. If this is not the case, he does not observe the autopoietic system as a unity .. (Maturana and Varela 1980, 109).

NOTES

254

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In effect, Maturana and Varela distinguish two types of observation: one in which the autopoiesis complements the organism because it adopts the perspective of the organism and another that is allopoietic because it adopts a perspective external to the organism. Thus, to treat an autopoietic machine as autopoietic (and not as allopoietic), an observer must distinguish system from environment in a manner which coincides with the system's self-specified boundaries. Obviously, this necessarily also holds for the system observing itself.

xiii. I analyze this technophobia—the reduction of technology to a figure of thinking—at length in Embodying Technesis: Technology beyond Writing. The critique of Western metaphysical discourse for reducing technology lies at the heart of Stiegler's multivolume Technics and Time project (see volume 1, cited earlier).

xiv. I say "in the final instance" because Butler does as much as is possible to think the materialization of the body—that is, to think agency as materialization. Perhaps we could say that Butler's theory of gender performativity is the constructivist theory least guilty of externalism, with the important point being that it still is externalist. As I see it now, the commitment to externalism is a consequence of Butler's adherence to the Hegelian-Lacanian tradition of selfrecognition, which privileges the visual and the objectifying role of the gaze. In this sense, my effort to develop a theory of embodiment using the resources of autopoietic theory (specifically, the privilege of the operational perspective) can be seen as an effort to counter the Lacanian hold (which is exercised even in the case of a critic, like Butler, who is otherwise critical) on thinking identity in our world today.

xv. "Without fragility, the body not only loses its sensibility, but also its capacity to apprehend the other in its own body. An infallible body is not only the translation of an omnipotence without default, it is perhaps also the refusal of the other in its specificity" (41).

xvi. Hayles, for instance, includes the instrumentalization of the body as the "first medium" as one of the four leitmotifs of the posthuman. See Hayles 1999, Introduction.

xvii. See Varela, "Organism: A Meshwork of Selfless Selves," (Varela 1991), for a delineation of the five primary levels of "selfhood." The term "individuation" comes from Gilbert Simondon, as does the concept of "excess"; Simondon's theory of individuation and of the preindividual basis for individuation as an ongoing process cosubstantial with living will become important for my analysis in Chapter 1.

NOTES

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xviii. When they note that “the interactive behavior of the observer as it is observed in the exhibition process is an integral part of the work' (“Images of the Body in the House of Illusion," in Art @ Science, 8), Fleishmann and Strauss recognize a recursive experiential dimension of the two works that, even if it remains too empirical, nonetheless opens the path toward this understanding.

CHAPTER 1

Krueger notes: "My term artificial reality' referred to this metaphor as much as to any particular means of implementing it. I deliberately made the term provocative and liked the fact that it was an oxymoron" (Turner).

ii. When Krueger observes that the term "artificial reality" was "more loaded [when he started] than it is now," he underscores his explicit and intentional desire to confront the flat-footed humanism of the art world whose "default position was outright hostility towards technology" and which associated technology with dehumanization. Now that the tides have shifted, we must lay stress elsewhere by insisting that the "artificial" does not stand in opposition to the "natural”" and indeed forms an “originary" element of the natural. This is precisely what is at stake in Krueger's position as new media art pioneer.

iii. Krueger is clear concerning his endorsement of technogenesis as "originary" and its consequences for humanism: "I view technology as the essence of our humanity. An empty hand signals that our anatomy is incomplete until we pick up a tool. In addition, I consider technology an inevitable consequence of the laws of physics and therefore as natural as the birds and the bees" (Turner).

iv. Söke Dinkla characterizes the environment as one that puts into question assumptions governing everyday interaction:

The Glowflow-environment irritates habitual spatial perception using visual and auditory means. While the sense of vision—essentially responsible for orientation in space—is disturbed through the experience of the light-emitting tubes, irritation of hearing also occurs through nearly unlocalizable noises. The result is a room with apparently autonomous qualities, one with a life of its own, that counteracts everyday experience and that manifests above all in the sensorium of the visitor. Aside from these experiences, which vary greatly from one another in subjective terms, Glowflow offers no habitual possibilities to make meaning. It is in a certain sense empty of contents. (66)

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