IMPOSSIBLE RECOLLECTIONSTHE TROUBLED IMAGINARY OF MEDIATED MEMORY

By

Giovanni TisoContact: giovanni (dot) tiso (at) gmail (dot) com Research blog: http://bat-bean-beam.blogspot.com/

A thesis submitted to the Victoria University of Wellington in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Literature

Victoria University of Wellington 2006

AbstractThis study is grounded in the belief that memory is one of the key areas of contestation in the current debates about technology and society. Its redefinition following the introduction of new technologies, the latest of which is the digital computer, has generated a landscape of dreams and anxieties that underlies complex attitudes towards which cultural products can or cannot be committed to memory, and who can or cannot have access to them. On the one hand, digitisation and the dissemination of information through networks such as the World Wide Web offer an infrastructure that appears on the verge of being able to make the sum of human knowledge available to all; on the other, the realisation of the strains, both cultural and technological, which are exerted upon this infrastructure gives way to visions of an impending breakdown of our ability to preserve, let alone transfer, this knowledge. These anxious imaginings are charted firstly along the axis that links the extremes of total recall and equally total forgetfulness, with an emphasis on the way in which these two narratives are played out against each other. A further exploration leads from the resonant notion of digitally documented life that informs so many current social practices to the idea that we might one day be able to upload our minds onto computer networks, only to find in that seemingly confident scenario another significant reservoir of anxiety, as well as a prime instance of the binary logic of exclusion that governs the construction and in part also our understanding of digital subjectivity. The figure of the excluded, undocumented person introduces in the last chapter an examination of the perceived threats to the functioning of collective memory and to its ability to fulfil the duty of remembering and passing on the most important events in our history. Finally, the study argues that the imaginary of anxiety just explored should be viewed not solely as a conservative reaction to social and technological change, but also as the means of grounding a more inclusive understanding of a society that is significantly inhabited, but not exhausted, by the digital.

AcknowledgmentsAbove all, this work benefited greatly from an ongoing conversation with Brian Opie and Linda Hardy, and it was a conversation I was privileged to be part of. I am grateful for the generosity of the folks at rec.arts.sf.written, it.cultura.fantascienza and it.cultura.libri, whose help with the initial gathering of texts was invaluable. I am similarly indebted to the very many friends who pitched in with suggestions and titles and plot summaries, but since it would be impossible to name them all I am going to limit the shout out to Marco Cultrera, who went above and beyond. Dougal McNeill, before he whisked himself off to Australia, was always there to remind me that I am a pre-post-Marxist, while Giacomo Lichtner was a great source of help and encouragement. Joseph and Lucia put it all in context (what do you mean you cant play now?). Finally, my thanks go to Victoria University, The JL Stewart Scholarship fund and the Georgetti Scholarship fund for their very generous financial support; and to Justine, for every other kind of support one could possibly wish for.

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION Alien Marks Prosthetic Memories Of Cyborgs and Butlers CHAPTER ONE PLACES OF AMNESIA Into a Digital Dark Age Migration Dissemination Bouvard and Pcuchet in Cyberspace Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction Metaphors of Memory The Soldier of the Mist Winter Sleepers Memento Remember Sammy Jankis www.otnemem.com One Frame a Day Noise The Amnesia Epidemic The Metavirus The story, Lost CHAPTER TWO - THE HORROR OF THE TOTAL LIBRARY My mind, Sir, is a garbage disposal

9 9 18 24 34 34 38 40 47 51 54 58 61 64 67 70 76 78 84 87 91 95 97

Can It Be Done? The Stickiness of the Database Perec and the Confines of the Archive Saving the Present Documented Lives The Glut of Information The Library of Babel in Cyberspace Information and Metaphor CHAPTER THREE THE NEW HOME OF MIND Recording Humans The Forever Network The Anti-Moravec Restoring the Body of the Machine Undocumented Persons CHAPTER FOUR THE TRANSMISSION OF MEMORY From Being Digital to Being Postmodern Memoricide Informatics, the Archive and the Holocaust The Great Moon Hoax Of Recovered, False, Post- and Prosthetic Memories A New Breed of Cartesian Demons Deconstructing Lilies Do You See What I See? BIBLIOGRAPHY

104 107 115 123 126 135 139 147 151 162 174 176 181 184 192 192 197 206 224 229 238 243 247 257

List of illustrationsFigure 1 Frame from the movie Memento Figure 2 Frame from the movie Memento Figure 3 Banner heading of the Memento website (www.otnemem.com) Figure 4 Screen capture of a Flash animation from the Memento website (www.otnemem.com) Figure 5 Screen capture of a Flash animation from the Memento website (www.otnemem.com) Figure 6 Screen capture of a Flash animation from the Memento website (www.otnemem.com) Figure 7 Example of machine-readable character set Figure 8 Frame from the movie The Matrix Reloaded Figure 9 Banner advertisement for ContentAudit (from http://www.contentwatch.com/ as of August 20, 2002) Figure 10 Photograph of Winston Churchill as a toddler (from www.europa-infoshop.de) Figure 11 Photograph of my grandmother, Ermes Magnoni Figure 12 Frame from the movie The Forgotten Figure 13 The Cover of Paolo Cherchi-Usais The Death of Cinema Figure 14 A computer artists impression of the Library of Babel in cyberspace (from http://www.caad.ed.ac.uk/~richard/MSc99/) Figure 15 Frame from the movie Tron Figure 16 Photograph of the National Library of Sarajevo from El Pais of October 9, 2004 (from www.elpais.es, article search El memoricidio de Sarajevo) Figure 17 The same photograph of Joseph Stalin with and without the chief of the secret police Nikolai Yezhov, from an electronic copy of Robert Conquests Inside Stalins Darkroom, published in The Los Angeles Times Book Review of January 4, 1998. 65 67 72 73 73 74 79 90 108 127 129 134 138

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Figure 18 The footprint of astronaut Buzz Aldrin on the Moon from the website of the American Patriot Friends Network (http://www.apfn.org/apfn/moon.htm) Figure 19 Example of Bert is Evil photomontage (http://files.myopera.com/bcdc/albums/35555/osama%20bin %20laden%20(bert%20is%20evil)_jpg.jpg)

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Introduction

Alien MarksSince the dawn of culture, wielding a novel tool has always signified a sense of greater power eroded by an anxiety. Thus in the myth of Prometheus, as narrated by Hesiod in Works and Days, the Titans gift to the mortals of the secret of fire leads to the unleashing among them of a plague of a much larger scale, the opening of Pandoras box. As a result, the uncomplicated life of recreation and abundance enjoyed by the pre-technological humans is upturned, and they are plunged into an existence dominated by scarcity and toil. From the point of view of todays highly industrialised (if not altogether postindustrial) West, this parable is of course deeply counterintuitive: is not technology designed on the contrary to cure Pandoras evils, to liberate us from want and help ease our labour? Is not the very knowledge that had us banished from Eden the value that we pursue in our attempts to create a better habitat for ourselves, the horizon fixed on the dream of building a New Jerusalem, or a socialist utopia? Perhaps. But to this day the modern myth is traversed by the older and highly resilient counter-myth. At the root of this enduring dissonance is the problem of perceived boundaries. Any new technology which enters into a relationship with the body questions previous conceptions of where the limits of the human lie. The blind mans cane, following Descartes famous analogy in his Dioptrics (1637), is perhaps the most classic example of how an inert tool can be thought of as an extension of the organic body, leading Gregory Bateson to ask, in Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972), if we should not properly 9

consider the cane part of the person who carries it. A dramatically growing sense of the high degree of reciprocal permeation between the human and the technological domains has helped make the cyborg one of the central characters of contemporary cultural narratives, ushering in what Katherine Hayles has termed the age of the posthuman. And nowhere is the problem of boundaries more keenly felt and yet more difficult to locate than in those technologies that are designed to amplify the mind, instead of the muscle. After all cyborg bodies would be nothing without cyborg minds, cyborg identities. And this, again, is nothing especially new. As Erik Davis writes,[f]rom the moment that humans began etching grooves into ancient wizard bones to mark the cycles of the moon, the process of encoding thought and experience into a vehicle of expression has influenced the changing nature of the self. Information technology tweaks our perceptions, communicates our picture of the world to one another, and constructs remarkable and sometimes insidious forms of control over the cultural stories that shape our sense of the world1.

Plato had already framed the problem in precisely these terms. He understood that the great information technology of his time, writing, would not simply extend the mind, but enter with it into what nowadays we would call a feedback loop, changing it in subtle and largely unforeseeable ways. Most famously, in the Phaedrus he has Socrates recount the story of the meeting between king Thamus and the Egyptian god Theuth, inventor of many arts, including writing, whose virtue in his view would be to make the Egyptians wiser and improve their memory (274e). To which Thamus replied:Most scientific Theuth, one man has the ability to beget the elements of a science, but it belongs to a different person to be able to judge what measure of harm and benefit it contains for those who are going to make use of it; so now you, as the father of letters, have been led by your affection for them to describe them as having the opposite of their real effect. For your invention will produce forgetfulness in the souls of those

Erik Davis, TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information (London: Serpents Tail, 1999), p. 4.

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who have learned it, through lack of practice of using their memory, as through the reliance on writing they are reminded from outside by alien marks, not from inside, themselves by themselves: you have discovered an elixir not of memory, but of reminding. To your students you give the appearance of wisdom, not the reality of it; having heard much, in the absence of teaching, they will appear to know much when for the most part they know nothing, and they will be difficult to get along with, because they have acquired the appearance of wisdom instead of wisdom itself. (274e-275b)2

This overtly cautionary tale rests on a strong affirmation of where the proper boundaries of the human should lie. To call the written word an alien mark3 implies that the spoken word is natural, organic, embedded in the mind; whereas the written word is artificial, external, separated from the body. Choosing to draw the line between nature and technology at the point when word is written, rather than uttered, enables Plato to fix in time a precybernetic state worthy of being preserved, defended against the threat of contamination by this alien and alienating practice. Memory in particular, a key to cognition and the construction of the self, is seen as the exposed, contested area where the contamination would take place. Fast forward to July 1945 and to the publication of As We May Think, the essay in which Roosevelts chief scientific advisor, Vannevar Bush, laid the conceptual foundations of what would eventually become the World Wide Web. Writing on the eve of Hiroshima, Bush believed that the global scientific community would soon be liberated from the bounds of military secrecy and in need of an environment that could facilitate the timely, effective and free interchange of ideas. The individual documents involved in this traffic, mostly textual4, would be fed by each user into a workstation,

2

Plato, Phaedrus, translation by C.J. Rowe (Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 1984)

A direct translation of the original . (My thanks to Giacomo Lichtner for his help with the Greek source.) Bush gave the memex some multimedia capabilities it could store pictures and diagrams as well as text but did not make provisions for the inclusion of audiovisual information.4

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the memex, enabling them to be compressed optically on improved microfilms and marked so as to establish connections within single documents and between one document and another (or many others). Over time, these connections would grow and generate an intricate system of associations, or web of trails, analogous in operation and complexity according to Bush to the process of memory formation and retrieval in the human mind. While this idea would not be realised in practice until the nineteen-eighties, when Ted Nelson who counted Bush among his main influences developed a working prototype of this hypertextual information environment on a digital computer, Bush saw the eventual fruit of his intuition in prescient detail:Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready-made with a mesh of associative trails running through them []. The lawyer has at his touch the associated opinions and decisions of his whole experience, and of the experience of friends and authorities. The patent attorney has on call the millions of issued patents, with familiar trails to every point of his clients interest. The physician, puzzled by its patients reactions, strikes the trail established in studying an earlier similar case, and runs rapidly through analogous case histories, with side references to the classics for the pertinent anatomy and histology. The chemist, struggling with the synthesis of an organic compound, has all the chemical literature before him in his laboratory, with trails following the analogies of compounds, and side trails to their physical and chemical behavior.5

The webs of useful, meaningful knowledge spun in Bushs imagining provide a direct counterpoint to Platos bleak vision of the future of a humanity decerebrated by writing. These diametrically opposite pictures, both predicated on the centrality of memory, are reflected in Bushs refusal to patrol the boundary between the human and the technological domains. Not only does he regard the memex as functionally equivalent to the humanHowever, his comments quoted on page 13 about intercepting the sensory flow imply that he regarded this limit as inherent in the (optical) technology at his disposal. Vannevar Bush, As We May Think, Atlantic Monthly (July 1945), pp. 101-108. This is the version of the article quoted throughout the chapter and available electronically at http://sloan.stanford.edu/mousesite/Secondary/Bush.html.5

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mind, an enlarged intimate supplement to [] memory, but he even envisages that the technology could one day become one with our organic instruments of sensation and cognition, eliding the boundaries altogether. All our steps in creating or absorbing material of the record, he writes,proceed through one of the senses the tactile when we touch keys, the oral when we speak or listen, the visual when we read. Is it not possible that some day the path may be established more directly? The impulses which flow in the arm nerves of a typist convey to her fingers the translated information which reaches her eye or ear, in order that the fingers may be caused to strike the proper keys. Might not these currents be intercepted, either in the original form in which information is conveyed to the brain, or in the marvelously metamorphosed form in which they then proceed to the hand?

Implicit in this elision of boundaries is that memory consists in the storage of the datastream that our senses are exposed to, rather than in a complex process of interpretation of experience followed by digestion, manipulation and revision not to mention obfuscation and repression as the theories influenced by Freud would rather propose. Having reduced memory to a few bare constituents suited to be mechanically transmitted and reproduced, Bush was able to externalise the workings of the mind into an opticalmechanical apparatus without having to worry as Plato did that the value of the knowledge that this apparatus would channel might be in any way degraded6. *** With the benefit of twenty-four centuries of hindsight, it would be tempting to claim outright that Bush was right, and Plato was wrong. ITs have been a key engine of progress and culture for as long as anybody can remember, and it is in fact almost solely thanks to them that cultural and social memory6

For a more detailed analysis of the analogy between the memex and human memory in Bushs essay, see Chris Locke, Digital Memory and the Problem of Forgetting, in Susannah Radstone (ed.), Memory and Methodology, (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2000), pp. 25-36.

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on such a scale is even possible. Some, like neuropsychologist and cognitive scientist Merlin Donald (of whom more below), even include external forms of memory encoding in the definition of what constitutes our species, homo sapiens sapiens7, while Walter Ong put it perhaps most succinctly when he wrote that Technologies are artificial, but [] artificiality is natural to human beings8. Besides we know that Plato must have felt ambivalent, at best, about the position he articulated through Thamus. On the one hand, as Jay David Bolter reminds us, he considered the alphabet itself a techne 9. On the other, if he really aligned himself so strongly against the new technology as not only the Phaedrus but also the Seventh Letter articulate he would presumably have opted, like Socrates before him, to shun it altogether and formulate and disseminate his philosophy through speech alone. In his Preface to Plato, Eric Havelock follows this contradiction all the way to the surprising and contrary conclusion that it conceals a strong rejection on Platos part of oral poetry in favour of literate philosophy10, a position that Havelock locates at the conclusion of The Republic. According to Jay David Bolters interpretation, on the other hand, Plato was acutely aware of the tension between oral and written discourse, and this led him to createa genre of writing that both embodies and profits from that tension. Platos dialogues combine the permanence of writing with the apparent flexibility of conversation. Each is the record of an impossibly artful philosophical discussion, and whatever its proposed subject, each dialogue is also about the difference between philosophy as conversation and philosophy as writing. (p. 110)

7 Or should it be Homo Sapiens Sapiens Cyber? Cf. Joo Pedro de Magalhes essay by that name at http://author.senescence.info/thoughts/hcyber.html. 8

Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy The Technologizing of the Word, (London and New York: Methuen, 1982), pp. 83-84.

9

Jay David Bolter, Writing Space The Computer, Hypertext and the History of Writing (Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1991), p. 35. Eric Havelock, Preface to Plato (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1963).

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It is tempting to side with Bolter and give some credit to Plato in this. In his speech Thamus makes an impassionate defence of the primacy of the acts of memory performed by the mind over those mediated by technology, but if we turn to some of the metaphors regarding memory found elsewhere in Platos work, we find a range of different perspectives on the embeddedness of technology in mental processes. In particular in the Theaetetus, 191a200d, Plato has Socrates put forward two images: in one of them memory and its content, knowledge, are respectively an aviary and the birds inside it; in the other, the mental storage is a block of wax in which memories are etched, some deeply, others only superficially. According to the first model, one might attempt to recall a given piece of information, represented by a bird, but in trying to grasp it seize upon the wrong one, because of the chaotic movements of the birds inside the cage; in the second model, accurate memories are distinguished from vague or wholly forgotten ones by the different kinds of impressions made by the original perceptions. While the idea of the aviary ties in with the idea of techne in the sense of an organised human activity, ornithology, the second model is among the first in a long line of important analogies (whose lineage would include Aristotles clean slate and Freuds mystic writing pad) in which the activities of the mind, and the encoding of experience in particular, are associated with pictorial technologies and writing. By drawing the analogy, Plato undermines the demarcation proposed in the Phaedrus and projects human memory into an external space of interaction, the space of society and technology. But if Thamus view is so mired in ambiguity, what is it that still draws so many to it? Besides the quite specific domain of the Derridean critique in Platos Pharmacy, which goes to the heart of the impossibility of definitively locating where the inside ends and the outside begins, what strikes contemporary critics appears to be not so much Thamus conclusion, a hopeless invective against writing that was implicitly defused by Plato at the very moment when he chose to write it down, but rather his articulation

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of the transformative power of technology, a power that goes beyond the predictive ability of the god of invention itself. Thus in Technopoly cultural critic Neil Postman regards the parable as a key to the understanding of the power of technologies to cause shifts in the meanings of words in this case, chiefly of the word memory that are prelude to subtle but powerful reconfigurations of the societies in which these technologies are deployed; while Walter Ong, in Orality and Literacy, proposes that what makes Thamus position so resonant is its remarkable resemblance to the most common arguments against the uncritical acceptance of digital computing today. What has enabled literate cultures to cease to regard writing as an alien practice, claims Ong following Havelock, is that they deeply interiorized11 the technology, made it so much part of themselves that they ceased to regard it as such, in the same way that Thamus appears to have interiorised speech to the point of thinking it natural, relocating the boundary to suit. At the same time as he claims that computerization is the dominant inflection of contemporary social life12, Darren Tofts also argues with Ong that its interiorisation is far from complete, which would explain why the boundaries which are being reconfigured in the process appear to be much more fiercely contested than the language used by the marketers of the digital would suggest. Hybridity, in place of the either/or logic of the myth of Thamus, emerges both as a powerfully anxiogenic symbol of loss of control and mastery of the human over the inhuman and non-human domains, and through the aggressively resonant imagery of Donna Haraways Cyborg Manifesto as the more-than-outside chance that the age might in fact be presenting us with the means of crafting a new language in which to frame emancipatory political projects. Significantly, in that it connects with the imaginary of anxiety I am going to discuss in the next few

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Ong, Orality and Literacy, p. 81.

Darren Tofts and Murray McKeich, Memory Trade A Prehistory of Cyberculture (North Ryde: Interface, 1998), p. 18.

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chapters, Haraways cyborgs are the product of profound cultural trauma, imploded germinal entities, densely packed condensations of worlds, shocked into being from the force of the implosion of the natural and the artificial, nature and culture, subject and object, machine and organic body, money and lives, narrative and reality13. These quintessentially posthuman creatures of the imaginary are unleashed at such times of implosive reconfiguration, when we look at ourselves and ask what it is that we see, and one of their functions is to sensitise us, make us aware of the otherwise self-effacing intervention of new media and technologies on culture. But they also ask to be creatively appropriated as dense symbolic instruments of reinvention of the self (more specifically, of the female self) and of the social, in a move that has the potential to placate by offering a possibly more productive alternative the fear of otherness that is still an important feature of our contemporary encounters with technology14. The principal line of argument of this dissertation is that memory, the faculty whose technologically mediated transformation worried Plato as much as it exhilarated Bush, has become a crucial battleground in the highly charged process of rethinking boundaries in the age of digital computing, for it bears the full transformative power of the technology and is implicated at the same time in the unsettling of the pairs enumerated by Haraway natural and artificial, subject and object, narrative and reality whose reciprocal interactions are called into question whenever a new invention engages the culture so profoundly. Much recent work in cultural theory has been devoted to the important task of highlighting the entanglement of these terms, the refusal of each pair to organise around a stable binary axis. By exploring the narratives that offer a resistance or articulate a set of fearsDonna Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouse (New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 14. For a chronicle of the cultural import of Haraways manifesto, see Zo Sofolulis, Cyberquake: Haraways Manifesto, in Prefiguring Cyberculture: An Intellectual History, edited by Darren Tofts, Annemarie Jonson and Alessio Cavallaro (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), pp. 84-103.14 13

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with respect to the computerisation (and more generally the mediation) of memory, I am going to map an imaginary that is rather less hopeful than Haraways, but that nonetheless identifies a set of significant problems and excluded subjects that our theories are duty-bound not to ignore.

Prosthetic Memories

This is not like TV only better. This is life, a piece of somebodys life straight from the cerebral cortex... I mean, youre there, youre seeing it, youre doing it. Lenny (Ralph Fiennes) in the movie Strange Days

For Plato, as is evidenced in the Meno, to seek the truth meant to un-forget, to recall the things known by the soul before being turned from pure form into a material instantiation. To know was then to re-learn things once known; to be struck by beauty an act of remembrance of the beauty once beheld. Memory was therefore for Plato the key to cognition and to the work of the philosopher. But memory in Greek and Roman antiquity, as indeed in many oral or early literate cultures, was also a precious faculty to be carefully exercised: a crucial component of ones ability to participate in debates, tell and understand stories, function in complex social environments. The Rhetorica ad Herennium, an anonymous Latin work from the first century B.C. which used to be attributed to Cicero, lays out the tenets of a mnemonic system based on the loci, places to be imagined in meticulous detail and adorned with symbolic objects designed to stand for, say, parts of a speech to be delivered. At the appropriate time, the person giving the speech would re-enter the memory palace and pick up the mnemonic objects one by one, in their original order, triggering the desired recall. Albeit internalised and not reliant on external media, at the same time as it takes advantage of the concreteness of physical objects, this art of memory to

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borrow the title of Frances Yates seminal study on the subject could appropriately be called a technology, insofar as the Greek root techne, as Bolter again points out could be an art or a craft, a set of rules, system or methods of making or doing, whether of the useful arts, or of the fine arts15. The distinction matters here because it further complicates the task of locating the boundaries. If language needed to be invented, then it is artificial, no matter how innate the mental modules which enable Homo Sapiens Sapiens to acquire it may be16. Furthermore, as everyday experience in highly symbolic societies comes to be couched more and more in language and other forms of symbolic representation, the content of ones mental repository could also be said to be a function of the same class of instruments of representation that generate photographs and police reports, documentary films, abstract painting and so forth. I will return to the problems inherent in defining what constitutes direct, lived experience later in this introduction. For now, I want to remark that in spite of how sensitive the culture has become regarding the embeddedness of media technologies in the processes that go on inside the mind, the distinction between inside and outside, between what is human and what is artificial, has not ceased to have meaning and is obstinately pursued in the face of the difficulties I have just described. As Katherine Hayles observes in My Mother Was a Computer, [b]oundaries are both permeable and meaningful; humans are distinct from intelligent machines even while the two are [sic] become increasingly entwined17. It is within this dynamic of entanglement and severance that in this dissertation I am going to write about mediated memories at the same time as I argue that the exact nature

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Bolter, Writing Space, p. 35.

16 Steven Pinker reminds us that Darwin regarded language ability as an instinctive tendency to acquire an art. Quoted in Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: The New Science of Language and Mind (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1995), p. 7.

N. Katherine Hayles, My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjectivity and Literary Texts (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005), p. 242.

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and precise coordinates of the mediation do not obey fixed structural laws, but are subject to a continuous and shifting process of negotiation. An exemplary discipline in which this always arduous and sometimes anxious work of demarcation is carried out is evolutionary psychology, for whose practitioners the problem of how to articulate the split between genes and social characteristics, nature and nurture is a crucial matter in any attempt to describe the modalities of our transformations as a species. An example that puts a particular emphasis on memory is Merlin Donalds Origins of the Modern Mind, a broad interdisciplinary study which attempts to bring together the biological and technological factors involved in the cognitive evolution of humankind. Donalds theory highlights three cultural stages, corresponding to different steps in the cognitive and especially mnemonic development of our evolutionary ancestors: the episodic culture of primates, who could only retain memories of specific events; the mimetic culture of Homo erectus, a species capable of intentional generative representational language, in the form of gestures and mime; and finally the theoretic culture of late Homo Sapiens Sapiens, made possible by the invention of symbolic language and propelled by external forms of memory storage. What was truly new in the third transition, writes Donald, was not so much the nature of basic visuocognitive operations as the very fact of plugging into, and becoming a part of, an external symbolic system18. The ensuing discussion gets to the heart of the problem of how, and if, we should distinguish between biological and artificial memory. While Donald maintains a separation between internal memories (those that reside inside the brain) and external ones (memories that reside in a number of different external stores, including visual and electronic storage systems, as well as culturally transmitted memories that reside in other individuals), he makes a crucial claim regarding the nature of the pictorial and written symbolic exchange: Visuosymbolic invention is inherently a method of external

Merlin Donald. Origins of the Modern Mind (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), p. 274.

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memory storage. As long as future recipients possess the code for a given set of graphic symbols, the knowledge stored in the symbols is available, transmitted culturally across time and space. This change, in the terms of modern information technology, constitutes a hardware change, albeit a nonbiological hardware change (p. 308). Donald weaves this computer metaphor together with Leibnizs notion of the monad in order to argue that external memory systems enable individual minds to form networks which effectively expand the cognitive power of each participant, to an extent that the earlier oral networks could not achieve. The networked minds of literate individuals, according to Donald, share a common memory system; and as the data base in that system expands far beyond the mastery of any single individual, the system becomes by far the greatest determining factor in the cognitions of individuals (p. 311). To this shift corresponds, as Thamus had envisaged, a shift in the locus of performative memory, and hence of reasoning itself, but one that results in an enhancement rather than a weakening of the biological counterpart: Humans do not think complex thoughts exclusively in working memory, at least not in working memory as traditionally defined; it is far too limited and unstable. In modern human culture, people engaged in a major thought project virtually always employ external symbolic material, displayed in the EXMF [External Memory Field], as their true working memory (p. 311). The development of this process of externally encoded cognitive exchange and discovery (p. 343) is an innovation that in Donalds view surpasses the invention of the alphabet itself, and that he attributes precisely to the Greeks. These, according to Donald, are the origins of the modern mind, the apex of the parallel evolution of humans and human-made information processing tools. The resulting picture is quite orderly, the subdivision more or less aligned to the one proposed by Plato. It is intelligible to us, for it speaks to the intuitive knowledge that such a demarcation might exist. But when

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Donald moves on from the landscape of the origins, and consequently has to delve more deeply into the particularities of his architecture, he finds that the boundaries are no longer fixed. Over time, the interaction between internal and external mnemonic elements has produced a feedback loop, scrambling the divide. Visuographic invention and the resulting growth of external symbolic memory media have altered the nature of working memory and the role of biological memory in humans (p. 358). As a result, the modern mind has become a hybrid, and the individual mind has long since ceased to be definable in a meaningful way within its confining biological membrane (p. 359). In a seemingly peculiar act of theoretical hara-kiri, a hypothesis predicated on the existence of a boundary has generated a theory that negates that very boundary. When it comes to this kind of exercise, however, demarcations that undercut their own conditions of possibility are the norm rather than the exception. Take for instance Alison Landsbergs definition of prosthetic memories, that is to say, memories which do not come from a persons lived experience in any real sense19, and the slippery related notion of memory of the unexperienced. Except in a very literal, and as yet science-fictional, sense Landsbergs initial example is a 1908 Edison film, The Thieving Hand, in which a prosthetic arm which used to belong to a thief keeps stealing after having been passed on to someone else how can someones memory not be part of that persons lived experience? I was certainly alive last night as I sat in front of my TV, watching a documentary on the habits of ancient Egyptians, and yet Landsberg claims precisely that [b]ecause the mass media fundamentally alter our notion of what counts as experience, they might be a privileged arena for the production and circulation of prosthetic memories (p. 176). Couched in the metaphor is an awareness that while the distinction between the experienced and the unexperienced, the

Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic memory: Total recall and Blade runner, in Cyberspace/Cyberbodies/Cyberpunk: Cultures of Technological Embodiment, edited by Mike Featherstone and Roger Burrows (London: Sage, 1995), p. 175.

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authentic and the inauthentic, the simulated and the real may be ultimately meaningless, or impossible to draw conceptual labels such as Landsbergs can still help to focus ones thinking on the strongly perceived sense that there is a difference, if only of a matter of degree, in the experiential content of our memories, a modulation in the (geographical, temporal, cultural) distance between the subject who does the remembering and the event that is remembered. Much the same judgment is applied by Andreas Huyssen to his own notion of imagined memory. This, writes Husseyn, is problematic to the extent that all memory is imagined, and yet allows us to distinguish memories grounded in lived experience from memories pillaged from the archive and mass-marketed for fast consumption20. The work of these critics shows again that, in spite of the impossibility of locating an actual boundary line, it is still helpful to think along the lines of an internal / external dichotomy, or to focus ones thinking by means of a metaphorical tool such as the prosthesis, when the aim is to make sense of something as profoundly opaque and intricate as the relationship between biological memory and memory technologies. A possible way of analysing the various attempts to articulate this relationship would be in fact according to the different degrees of permeation they propose in relation to each area of demarcation, no matter how tentative or provisional. For Theuth, for instance, writing is an extension of memory, a way of enhancing the mind. For Thamus, on the contrary, it is an alien and alienating device which burdens memory, and will ultimately cripple it. In the interstice is a kind of membrane, to use Donalds richly suggestive word, variously defined and adjusted according to how one chooses to conceptualise the inside versus the outside. Joining in the metaphorical fun, we could say that Platos view as it emerges from the Phaedrus is that speech has passed through the membrane osmotically, without piercing it, and has become an organic

Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Media, Politics, Amnesia, Public Culture 12.1 (2000), p. 27.

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component of the rational mind21. Writing, on the other hand, is a material practice whose implements threaten to hack through the membrane and damage natural memory. Theuth proposes rather a prosthetic relationship: the mind reaches out to manipulate writing, and be manipulated by it, and the membrane readjusts itself around the interface, without tearing. Writing is still on the outside, it is only symbolic language that filters through; but this conceptualisation allows for a point of interface and the possibility that technology and the human might coexist productively and enrich one another. It is the model of the Donalds and the Bushes, and in spite of its apparent optimism as we shall see it does generate monsters of its own.

Of Cyborgs and ButlersWhen we say that computer user plus computer equals a cyborg, we are also stretching the membrane to envelop the machine, and questioning the nature of the boundary22. Science-fiction is one of the most fertile locations for articulating the discourse around the interaction between technology, society and culture, and offers a rich variety of perspectives on the varying degrees of permeation between the mind and memory technologies from

21 A discussion of the extent to which biological memory depends on the internalised medium of language should include a mention of the person known to psychology as Brother John, a sufferer of paroxysmal aphasia brought about by sporadic epileptic seizures. During the attacks Brother John effectively lost the gift of language, and yet managed to develop ways to cope with complex situations (most notably, his arrival at a Swiss resort during an overseas trip), suggesting that sophisticated procedural thinking, even in a highly symbolic society, can be carried out at least in part independently of language. Crucially, Brother John also appeared to remember the events that occurred to him at the peak of each attack in such a way that he was able later to describe them through language. See Andre Roche Lecours and Yves Joanette , Linguisitic and Other Psychological Aspects of Paroxysmal Aphasia, Brain and Language 10 (1980), pp. 1-23.

Writing in 1990, at a time when computer viruses were a relatively novel concept and scientists debated whether exposure to computer monitors and electronic machinery might cause changes at the level of the DNA among users, Mark Poster proposed that a symbiotic merger between human and machine might literally be occurring, one that threatens the stability of our sense of boundary of the human body in the world. What may be happening is that human beings create computers and then computers create a new species of humans. Mark Poster, The Mode of Information (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), p. 4.

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prosthesis to implant, from useful means of augmentation to effective weapon of annihilation. Philip K. Dicks stories of memory manipulation, to be examined in greater detail in the fourth chapter, constitute a prime demonstration of the degree of complexity attained by this branch of narrative fiction in treating changes at the level of the psyche driven by new technologies. Dick is not interested in the detail of the specific mechanisms by which memories are manufactured, implanted and exchanged, but rather in the reconfiguration of the self and society that these machineries enable. In his fictions the membrane has all but disappeared, and mnemonic identity flows freely inside and outside of bodies. This is true for instance of the novel Ubik, in which imaginary worlds are consensually created by the brains of people whose bodies are dead, but whose minds are kept in a frozen state from which they can from time to time be briefly recalled. Here the apparatus which keeps the brains alive inadvertently creates a medium for them to travel through, communicate and even mesh with one another, so that at the end the boundaries between each mind and the machine are hopelessly breached. Other authors, rather than proposing a radical configuration of the self in the Platonic vein, envisage more strictly functional and supplementary roles for memory technologies which follow a trajectory closer to Bushs vision. One such function is the repository, for instance in John Varleys Overdrawn at the Memory Bank and in Walter Jon Williams Voice of the Whirlwind, where devices are invented that allow the mind to be backed up and eventually restored into a new body as a way of cheating death. A variant of this pattern occurs in William Gibsons short story The Winter Market and in Vernor Vinges novella True Names, where the backing up occurs in cyberspace. Again, a more extensive treatment of these ideas, in and out of fiction proper, will be carried out in chapter three in a separate discussion of cyberspace and digital transcendence.

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A further coupling of biological and artificial memory is achieved through another standard sci-fi issue, the implanted memory chip; this is generally not a carrier of pre-existing information, but an extension of the clean slate, a storage space enmeshed in the brain. Except that things do not always work as advertised. In Gibsons short story Johnny Mnemonic, for instance, the set-up offers a delicious irony, in that the chip does not even communicate with the brain, but rather inhabits it like a parasite; it is, in a very literal way, on the inside, and yet remains stubbornly alien. I had hundreds of megabytes stashed in my head on an idiot/savant basis, information I had no conscious access to23, says Johnny, a data courier, in a quip that captures the peculiar alienation of the mind coping with a proliferation of digital streams. Here too, as in Dick, technological pollination happens crossways, a process Johnny is very aware of: Were an information economy. They teach you that in school. What they dont tell you is that its impossible to move, to live, to operate at any level without leaving traces, bits, seemingly meaningless fragments of personal information. Fragments that can be retrieved, amplified... (p. 130). This inverse flow complicates the task of locating the boundary, by switching the perspective to the point that the human can be perceived as an extension of the machine, rather than vice-versa. This is an idea that is not entirely novel: writing in the pioneering days of computer communication, J.C.R. Licklider referred for instance to humanly extended machines, giving the example of a large information and control system in which the human operators are responsible mainly for functions that it proved infeasible to automate24. But it is in the last, informationally charged fin de siecle that it has found its deepest instantiations to date, culminating in the granting of US patent 6,754,472 Method and apparatus

William Gibson, Johnny Mnemonic. In Burning Chrome (London: Harper Collins, 2000), p. 15.24

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Quoted in Rhodes, Visions of Technology, p. 214.

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for transmitting power and data using the human body which gives to the Microsoft Corporation exclusive rights to the applications aimed at using the human body not as a sender or recipient of information, but as a conductive medium25. Even when loss of control is not inscribed quite as intimately in the makeup of the cyborg, things can and will go wrong in ways that highlight how problematic boundary-crossing is. In Lois McMaster Bujolds Miles Vorkosigan novels, for instance, chief of imperial security Simon Illyan appears at first to carry his memory chip with self-assured nonchalance, and employs his truly eidetic memory in overseeing many a successful mission. The tables turn against him, however, in the novel entitled Memory. Here we learn, first of all, that the successful installation of the chip had come at a human cost during the experimentation phase, when 90% of the trialists had developed iatrogenic schizophrenia26; later, the chip is used as a carrier for a virus meant to kill Simon or at least disable him permanently. A character explains the nature of the attack:[T]he problems not in Illyans brain, its in the damned chip. Its doing uncontrolled data dumps. About every five minutes it floods his mind with a new set of crystal-sharp memories from random times in the past. The effect is . . . hideous. Cause unknown, they cant fix it, removal will destroy the data still on it. Leaving it in will destroy Illyan.27

Williams et al., abstract of US Patent number 6,754,472 Method and apparatus for transmitting power and data using the human body. The full text of the patent is accessible on a number of archives, for instance by entering its progressive number in the search facility at http://patft.uspto.gov. There are indeed a number of examples in current fiction of great mnemonic powers coming, like prescience in classical mythology, at the expense of something else, usually sanity as in this case or ones self knowledge, as for the characters of Commander Data in Star Trek: The Next Generation and John Doe in the TV series by the same name. For the character of Latro in Gene Wolfes Soldier of the Mist, conversely, the ability to communicate with the gods comes at the expense of the ability to remember (this novel will be examined in Chapter One).27 26

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Lois McMaster Bujold, Memory (New York: Baen Books, 1996), p. 246.

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This is but a slightly less metaphorical way of framing the warning of Thamus against the corrupting power of technology. One that operates on a cultural level, via informational overload, and on a physical level, insinuating itself into the thick meshing of brain matter and silicon implant via a bioengineered apoptotic prokaryote designed specifically to eat neurochip proteins (p. 336). In other words, via a synthesis of the biological virus and the computer virus, the perfect means of attacking the cyborg body. In these narratives, the removal of mnemonic prostheses is often associated with death, a total loss of pre-existing function, or at best intense physical pain; as if to say that the traumatic coupling of the human and the machinic has to be mirrored by an even more traumatic separation, underscoring the impossibility of switching the direction of progress. Pandoras box, once opened, cannot be sealed again. In the case of Andrew Worth, the protagonist of Greg Egans Distress, the forceful separation is described in terms suggestive of a grotesque birth in reverse:I wrapped the fiber around my hand and started hauling the memory chips out of my gut. The wound left by the optical port was too small, but the chips capsule-shaped protective casings forced it open, and they emerged into the light one by one, like the gleaming segments of some strange cybernetic parasite which was fighting hard to stay inside its host. The farmers backed away, alarmed and confused. The louder I bellowed, the more it dulled the pain. The processor emerged last, the buried head of the worm, trailing a fine gold cable which led to my spinal cord, and the nerve taps in my brain. I snapped it off where it vanished into the chip, then rose to my feet, bent double, a fist pressed against the ragged hole.28

This tearing asunder mirrors the moment of insertion of the technological appendage into the bio-port which at times is highly carnal and sensualised, as in the movie eXistenZ (1999, dir. David Cronenberg), and at28

Greg Egan, Distress (New York: HarperPrism, 1998), p. 340.

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times overtly reminiscent of an act of rape, as in The Matrix (1999, dir. Larry and Andy Wachowski) and offers a remarkable contrast with the sanitised, streamlined couplings portrayed in the glossy world of the marketers of the digital. Here the end-user, a self-confident, empowered individual who derives power and/or pleasure from his or her technoappendages without fear of pain or loss, is the protagonist of a starkly different brand of fiction. Its overarching philosophy, brilliantly encapsulated in Nicholas Negropontes Being Digital (1995), is unashamedly utilitarian in nature, and surprisingly timid in its imaginings. In spite of grandiose pronouncements such as the one implicit in Negropontes title, which promises nothing less than a rewriting in binary language of what it means to be human, these narratives reduce technology to an inert tool, an engine of change but merely of lifestyle, advancing the reductionist notion that our lives will carry on just as they do now, only a lot more so. In the digital age, everything will be amplified, and we will all lead super-lives with the infinite resources of the world constantly at our fingertips. This is Negroponte at his most lyrical:Early in the next millennium your right and left cuff links or earrings may communicate with each other by low-orbiting satellites and have more computer power than your present PC. Your telephone wont ring indiscriminately; it will receive, sort and perhaps respond to your incoming calls like a well-trained English butler. Mass media will be redefined by systems for transmitting and receiving personalized information and entertainment. Schools will change to become more like museums and playgrounds for children to assemble ideas and socialize with other children all over the world. The digital planet will look and feel like the head of a pin.29

Leaving aside why one might actually want ones cufflinks or earrings to communicate with each other, let alone via low-orbiting satellites, the revealing key to this passage is the reference to that old, amiable fictional character, the English butler. This eminently reassuring figure, perfect

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Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital (New York: Knopf, 1995), p. 6.

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antithesis to the cyborg, is the marketers answer to the dark imaginings coming from quarters such as science-fiction and belligerent critics of technoscience such as Donna Haraway. His subservience and discretion, not to mention his ability to render himself invisible when the master requires it30, reassure us that the integrity of our individual identities will never be threatened, even by those consumer products, such as the personal digital assistant, that are specifically designed to deal with the intimate details of our day-to-day lives. By way of further contrast, what little information reaches the general public regarding IT advances that are not aimed at immediate consumption offers instead a glimpse of a research community that is unabashedly serious about blowing apart once and for all, some 5,000 years after the invention of writing, what remains of the distinction between internal and external memory. Two stories circulated in the media over the last couple of years suggest that the American military, for one, may be intent on doing just that. Among the projects currently funded by DARPA, the defence research agency that helped build the Internet, are the development of LifeLog, a device for capturing concurrently the most disparate streams of personal data from body temperature to sensory inputs and of a microscopic memory chip, the size of a human cell31. The aims of these inventions are downright murky or vague at best one of the stated purposes of LifeLog is to serve as a tool to study human behaviour (whatever that may mean), while the chip is said to have a variety of applications, including its inoculation in the blood stream for medical purposes. But nowhere does one get the feeling that a meaningful public debate might be underway regarding the staggering Orwellian vistas that these advances open up. As in the caseAccording to Negroponte, the principal aim of the developers working at the Media Lab in those days was to make the interface go away (Being Digital, p. 93). Cf. Michael J. Sniffen, Pentagon tool records every breath, Australian IT (http://australianit.news.com.au/articles/0,7204,6536889%5e15841%5e%5enbv%5e,00.htm l) and David Derbyshire, Chip is 400th the size of grain of salt, The Daily Telegraph Online, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2003/02/15/wsci315.xml, filed on February 15, 2002.31 30

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of the shift from the industrial to the postindustrial society, so in the case of the shift from the analogue to the digital or as Mark Poster would rather put it from the mode of production to the mode of information, the dominant view is that a massive transformation is underway (or has in fact already occurred), fuelled by the juggernaut of economic and technological progress, and that it can at best be described and analysed, perhaps even critiqued and creatively inhabited, but certainly not halted, much less reversed. I think there is an implicit risk, in studying science-fiction narratives, or cyberculture, or the works of futurologists or all these things at once, of being drawn into thinking that future ways of constructing subjectivity and conceiving of individual and collective memory will take the shape that the people who engage in these modes of enquiry and who are located decidedly at the forefront of the digital revolution are feverishly imagining and to some extent enacting. I resist the strong periodisations of some of the most sophisticated theoreticians, such as Poster, not because I do not think that there is such a thing as digital subjectivity or memory, but because in the process of attempting to argue that each constitutes a clean break the critic can overlook not only their genealogy but also the forces of resistance, the social inertia that works against the wholesale substitution of new modes for the old ones. What one can lose sight of is the tension, the friction generated where the enthusiastic and often creative adoption of new tools meets the reluctance, or the outright refusal (or inability) to take part. But these contrary forces do exist, and can be seen reflected in the marked anxiety that circulates in the culture regarding the effects (or, as it is often said and written in a metaphor that is itself anxiogenic, the impact32) of these technologies on both individual and collective memory. It is an anxiety that stretches from amnesia to hypermnesia, from the collapse of the

For a critique of this ballistic metaphor, see the first chapter of Pierre Lvys Cyberculture, translated by Robert Bononno (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001).

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structures of signification to a total informational overload; that looks with horror at the time when the digital age might eventually halt our analogue history altogether, signalling the transition of humanity to another order of being; and that despairs of even being able to hold the self together within the boundaries of personal memory, fearing the trade in false memories and the construction of false identities. Structure of the work In this dissertation I will explore the imaginary of anxiety I have just outlined in what I believe to be its key dimensions. The principal of these spans the axis from the collapse of memory to its paralysing excess, and is the subject of the next two chapters, where I will tell two opposite stories that unexpectedly reach the same endpoint. At one pole is the first of these stories, which finds in the amnesiac Leonard Shelby its everyman, describes a society that knows nothing, whose ability to remember to turn experience into lasting knowledge has been obliterated; at the opposite pole is the second story, encapsulated by the character of Funes the Memorius and inhabiting the Library of Babel, which describes a society that knows everything, can retain every single bit of record, but cannot formulate thoughts for precisely that reason. These paradigmatic and contrasting fears lead to the same end result, a paralysis of the mind, and I will comment on this convergence. Elaborating on the notion of too much memory, and yet constituting a second dimension requiring separate treatment, is the subject of chapter three and perhaps the most exalted of digital narratives: the one that proposes that we might one day all become computer dwellers, there to find an end to disease and want, as well the means to immortality. However, under this optimistic veneer too we shall discover a festering anxiety, the sinking feeling that while that future might be the future of humanity, it will not be we who will inhabit it, for we will have had to forget too much about

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what constitutes the human, and the social in particular, in order to prepare ourselves for the transition. Finally, in the fourth and concluding chapter I will explore the social exchange of memory as the last key dimension of anxiety: for it is by means of their dysfunctional transmission that memories can be implanted, falsified, or wilfully erased, and identities can be stolen; but it is also in the social that the negotiations which are destined to shape our analogue and digital futures are taking place. In this regard the memory exchange that takes place in the social also produces the means to cut through the disquiet that permeates the culture, and offers a number of vantage points from which to critically regard the nexus of memory and humanity in the digital age. I plan therefore to conclude my analysis by proposing that the imagery of anxiety and resistance to the digital mediation of memory can be viewed like Platos cautionary tale both as a reflection of the problematic process of coming to terms with profound change and redrawing of boundaries, and as an implicit attempt to claw back some ground from the more enthusiastic proponents and theoreticians of the digital, asking that the new modes of subjectivity and memory be viewed from a broader, more inclusive perspective than theirs alone.

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Chapter One Places of Amnesia

Into a Digital Dark Age

Digital information lasts forever or five years, whatever comes first. Jeff Rothenberg

Historians will consider this a dark age. Science historians can read Galileos technical correspondence from the 1590s but not Marvin Minskys from the 1960s. Stewart Brand

Issues of digital preservation, previously the domain of the many experts and professionals who debated them with great intensity throughout the 1990s, have more recently gone mainstream. How to store and preserve digital cultural artifacts, as well as whether and within what kind of frameworks we should digitise our analogue heritage, are questions that have entered the arena of public debate and political action, often with some urgency. The sets of problems involved are partly familiar to non-specialists in that possessing a personal computer, as very many of us do, pretty much guarantees that at some stage we shall lose some personal information, quite possibly something that is dear to us or that it is difficult to replace. The sometimes traumatic experience of losing data is felt in other words both by 34

the individual and by society, and it reverberates through at the same time as it is coloured by the contemporary imagery and narratives of amnesia. Imagery of course is not something that occurs in fiction alone, as Stewart Brands suggestion in the quotation above that we inhabit a digital dark age makes abundantly clear. So before I turn to fictional accounts proper where a greater depth of perspective is to be found, I want to set the scene in which they are constructed and in which they circulate, inspired by a deliberately skewed outlook: for the talk about digital preservation has its own biases and trajectories, and in this chapter I am going to concentrate on its (apparently) darker, more pessimistic side, inhabited by those like Brand who argue that the age of computing is to some extent synonymous with cultural loss. Anyone who has had the experience of losing data stored on portable media, such as the CD- or DVD-ROM or on a hard drive, knows that digital information has a way of being there one day, gone the next. In most cases, when one finds that a file all of a sudden cannot be opened, it means that it is irretrievably lost. Not misplaced, like a diary left on a bus; not temporarily rearranged, like a book whose pages have come off the spine but can still be placed in their original order; not partially unreadable, like a page stained with coffee; but actually vanished. By comparison, a print document is a lot harder to disintegrate; when we actually wish to do it, and to make sure it stays gone, we have to use a special shredding machine, or employ the expensive services of a document destruction company. Portable media, which can be scratched or left too long in the sun, are objects that we are familiar with and by manipulating them we become aware that they can be damaged in several ways. The hard drive of a PC, on the other hand, hidden as it is from view save for its indicator light and familiar buzz, can be more easily mistaken for something immaterial, as if it too were made of bits of information and not subject to decay. But, as its

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name suggests, it is in fact an all-too-material object, one of the very few inside personal computers still to feature old-fashioned moving parts: metalcoated platters operated by a motor and connected to read/write heads. The heads are not meant to touch the surface of the disk, but rather glide on it and change the polarity of the metal particles of the coating (the pattern of positive and negative charges represents the stored data in binary code); however, if the heads lose their alignment even fractionally they begin to scratch the surface, effectively mangling the data as they read it. Of the two most common ways for a hard drive to malfunction the other being a fault in the motor this is the one that best highlights the fragility of the most common digital memory medium, for it has an almost primitive, exquisitely mechanical flavour; it recalls the act of scribes scratching the surface of clay tablets in order to trace cuneiform characters. Except that here the scratch is one that reverses the flow of information, that undoes language. Nor is physical decay the only threat to digital documents: in a paper entitled Ensuring the Longevity of Digital Information, Jeff Rothenberg cites also loss of information about the format, encoding, or compression of files, obsolescence of hardware, and unavailability of software1. A print document in English that still exists in but one surviving copy, will be readable for as long as humanity retains its ability to comprehend the English language as it is spoken and written today, and the paper and ink hold together; a digital document in English whose only surviving copy is encoded in Word Perfect 2.0 on a 3 inch floppy disc formatted by a 1989 Apple Macintosh, on the other hand, requires knowledge of English, a 1989 Apple Macintosh, and a copy of Word Perfect 2.0. The software in particular is a key element, so much so that it becomes difficult even to think of the document as being distinct from it. Rothenberg explains:As documents become more complex than simple streams of alphabetic characters, it becomes increasingly meaningless to think of them as Jeff Rothenberg, Ensuring the Longevity of Digital Information (originally published in Scientific American in January 1995. All the quotations are taken from the expanded version available as pdf file from www.clir.org/pubs/archives/ensuring.pdf), p. 3.1

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existing at all except when they are interpreted by the software that created them. The bits in each document file are meaningful only to the program that created that file. In effect, document files are programs, consisting of instructions and data that can be interpreted only by the appropriate software. That is, a document file is not a document in its own right: it merely describes a document that comes into existence only when the file is run by the program that created it. Without this authoring programor some equivalent viewing softwarethe document is held cryptic hostage to its own encoding. (pp. 10-11)

The first-level solution, storing the software along with the documents we wish to preserve, presents significant difficulties: software applications are written for specific operating systems, which are also subject to obsolescence, and these in turn are designed for specific hardware systems; we would therefore have to preserve the obsolete machines along with the documents, and be sure to always maintain them in working order, which compounds the problem. The requirement to preserve the software could be bypassed if successive versions of Word Perfect turned out to remain upwardly compatible, but even the compatibility within a single proprietary software package is unlikely to be reliable and consistent over long periods of time, say four or five releases down the track. Moreover, hardware changes are likely in the meantime to jeopardize our ability to read the document; versions of the Apple Macintosh as at the time of writing, for instance, no longer feature floppy disc drives, which have to be purchased separately as external units, and in PCs too they have become largely optional and soon conceivably will not be produced or sold at all. One needs only think in fact of the staggering number of media that have vanished over the last twenty years, many of which are enumerated by the Dead Media Project2, to come to the realisation that to store and forget is simply not an option in the way that it often used to be with older

This impressive inventory of dead media, which saw the involvement among others of Bruce Sterling, can still be browsed at www.deadmedia.org but has, somewhat fittingly, ceased to exist except as a by now outdated archive.

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technologies. This incessant procession of storage media that promise ever more durable and faithful storage and yet come in and out of existence in the space of a few years is mocked quite unwittingly, for certain by the title of CD-ROM: The New Papyrus, a ponderous and, needless to say, overoptimistic manual published by Microsoft in 1986 in order to promote and support this new technology. Papyrus was the dominant storage medium for written texts for approximately five thousand years. CD-ROMs, initially marketed in the mid-eighties, are now near-obsolete thanks to the DVDROM, which exists in two not entirely compatible formats and will soon in turn be replaced by either the Blu-ray Disc or its chief rival, the HD-DVD. Together, these two new media threaten to re-enact the format wars between Betamax and VHS of the early nineteen-eighties. The record of the papyrus seems quite safe.

MigrationProblems with the compatibility and longevity of software and storage media suggest a second-order answer to the problem, namely that digital content needs to be periodically copied onto newer physical media and software formats in order to stave off obsolescence. This process, generally referred to as migration, is fraught however with difficulties of its own. Firstly, as Rothenberg points out, it often entails a translation of the data, a process in which some information pertaining to the content or structure of the original document may be irretrievably lost. The migration of a scholarly essay from one word processor to another, for instance, could cause the loss of its captions, or the scrambling of its footnotes. Short of comparing the two documents word for word before destroying the older one a task which would make the process even more resource-demanding than it already is one has no way to be sure of what and how important the losses have been. Secondly, in order to be effective the migration has to be systematic and continual. It cannot skip a generation of software tools, or leave files behind; nor can it afford to underestimate the length of the next 38

obsolescence cycle, for a single break in the chain is likely to render the information inaccessible forever. As Stewart Brand writes in Written on the Wind, an article first published in Civilization Magazine in 1998:[f]ixing digital discontinuity sounds like exactly the kind of problem that fast-moving computer technology should be able to solve. But fastmoving computer technology is the problem: By constantly accelerating its own capabilities (making faster, cheaper, sharper tools that make ever faster, cheaper, sharper tools), the technology is just as constantly selfobsolescing. The great creator becomes the great eraser.3

It may follow from this line of argument that tying the existing technology into a single all-reaching network, the Internet, will compound the problem by several degrees of magnitude. Aligning himself with this hypothesis, Brand continues:We are in the process of building one vast global computer, which could easily become The Legacy System from Hell4 that holds civilization hostagethe system doesnt really work; it cant be fixed; no one understands it; no one is in charge of it; it cant be lived without; and it gets worse every year. (p. 72)

Contrary to this bleak pronouncement there are those who think like the Librarian of Babel, a character we will encounter in the next chapter that the Internet is doing precisely the opposite; that it can be an instrument not only for the propagation of content, but also for its preservation. In fact propagation and preservation can be regarded as two sides of the same coin: it was in order to enable the long-distance sharing of data over different platforms that the common protocols which constitute the Internet were created in the first place. These protocols make it possible for people using all sorts of different computers and programmes to look at the same information. But and here is the link between propagation and storage in

3 4

Stewart Brand, Written on the Wind, Civilization (Oct/Nov 1998), p. 72.

In the jargon of the computer industry, a legacy system is an outdated hardware or software system which has to remain in use because of the time and money invested in it and because of the difficulties involved in migrating the data it contains.

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order to look at this information, each computer needs first of all to retrieve it from its original location. Every time we look at a web page, in other words, it is because we have downloaded it first. At that moment, our computer is offering itself as a new repository, as an alternative place to store the data. The moment is fleeting, however: for the cache memory allotted by the browser to store each page we visit is periodically freed up in order to make space for new pages. If we wish to become custodians, we need to turn the cache into permanently saved files with appropriate names and locations so that we may know that the information is there and how to access it again in the future. This is the flip side of what I will discuss in the next chapter under the label of the stickiness of the database; that is to say the fact that computers have a way of holding on to information beyond the point when it has ceased to serve its intended use. Similarly, a Web page visited does not disappear as soon as we move on to another, but survives in the computers cache. And although indiscriminate caching is often perceived as a problem as testimonied by the myriad of products which offer to rid us of the potentially insidious or embarrassing data this fleeting repository can help turn ones machine into a tool for capturing and preserving the information that we deem to be of most value.

DisseminationThis characteristic of networked computers and of their underlying protocols provides a third-order solution to the problem of digital obsolescence: dissemination. Dissemination crosses the boundaries of hardware platforms, spreads the data over different software applications and creates copies that multiply the chances of the data in question of surviving the next obsolescence cycle. The term copy needs to be treated with a degree of caution, of course, because dissemination involves a migration and therefore, in most cases, a translation. But we may choose to 40

liken this state of affairs perhaps a little romantically to what used to happen at the times of the copyists working in monasteries, and opine that the data considered by most people to be of most value will be more likely to survive in its purest form; indeed, the dissemination of different versions of a certain file may give rise to a new form of philology, one that concerns itself solely with the textual information encoded therein as Lorenzo Valla did with the Donation of Constantine rather than with the physical medium as well, as in the case of handwritten and printed documents. One can observe this philological sensibility at work in the so-called version histories of many files and applications that circulate on the Web, in which often the minutest changes between one version and the next are carefully documented. Predictably, however, dissemination too is embroiled in a series of complex and shifting negotiations. Firstly, for dissemination to work, and for the loss of information involved in the data exchange to be minimised, the environment in which the process takes place needs to feature the highest compatibility between various software tools. The Internet has indeed put itself forward as one such environment over the last few years, and HTML, the language used by Web browsers to deliver the content across every conceivable platform in more or less the same form5, has not been superseded yet. It does however have its detractors, critics who in the main believe it is simply not robust enough to fulfil indefinitely its role of lingua franca for Web designers. The main criticism is that HTML defines what the various elements in a page should look like, but not what they mean. A heading in HTML is defined for instance as having a certain aspect, but not5 For a discussion of the problems faced by Web designers in ensuring that their pages will be displayed correctly by at least the leading browsers on the market (at the time of writing these are Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator, Firefox and Opera), see Warren Baker, Cross Browser Compatibility, webpronews.com, 17 January 2006. http://www.webpronews.com/expertarticles/expertarticles/wpn-6220060117CrossBrowserCompatibility.html. Baker observes that 100% compatibility is impossible to achieve, but that by producing squeaky-clean code that abides with all the standards of the W3C consortium and by working around some of the key idiosyncrasies of the leading Web browsers, there will be a good chance of producing text that can be viewed by most.

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as fulfilling the role of introducing its topic. This becomes an issue when an HTML page needs to be updated or repurposed, for instance in order to be made accessible by the relatively new generation of browsers for mobile and handheld devices. To overcome this significant obstacle to establishing the Internet as a site for the creation of a universal or near-universal repository of content, the World Wide Web Consortium and other interested parties have had to put in a great amount of work over the last few years in order to promote and strengthen XML. XML is a meta-language, that is to say, a language used to describe other languages. The XML tags structure and describe the content, providing a meta-level for its translation into other mark-up languages used for its actual delivery. This means that every time the leading Web browsers should stop supporting a once-leading version of the mark-up language used to deliver a given Web page, such as HTML, it will not be necessary to retag the page, but only to update the translation tool that translates the deep XML tags into those understood by the delivery language. The key difference is that the task of updating the translation tool can be carried out by a single vendor or organisation, without having to actively involve each content provider. In these conditions, migration becomes a far more automatised and therefore less expensive and time-consuming business, thus increasing the chances of survival of digital content created in XML. What the supporters of XML can be said to be advocating is sustainable development in a digital environment. They take a longer view. To use XML means to slow down the production of content because the intelligent tagging has to be largely carried out by human operators, rather than by more or less automated authoring tools in exchange for the likelihood of a significantly longer life span. In this way XML offers itself as a remedy for the ever shorter cycles of built-in obsolescence described by Brand and others.

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In spite of these advantages, XML is not without its drawbacks. For one thing, its higher demands on the creators of content mean that only those who can afford to subscribe to its philosophy will produce durable artifacts. But if one agrees with the widely held position that the documents produced in this pioneering phase of worldwide digital networks are of particular cultural and historical value6, then conservation initiatives cannot be targeted only at the texts produced using XML, because the sample would not be representative. It would be like a library that chose to acquire luxury editions made with expensive, long-lasting paper, and nothing else. The high demands of XML may be driving parties involved in promoting worthwhile digitisation initiatives to turn to less expensive, proprietary formats that share few of its benefits. Besides, XML is very good at handling plain text, but does not offer a real solution to the proliferation of sound, picture and video formats. This means that the XML description of a document may survive while some or all of its actual contents have become unreadable because they are encoded in a format which has gone out of use.

Close to home Penny Carnaby, National Librarian and Chief Executive of the National Library has been a vocal supporter of the need for comprehensive digital preservation in order to stave off the spectre of a dark age. When the consultation process was at its beginnings, she declared for instance: Libraries have always been places for storing information on paper about our world. But now that so much of our heritage is electronically created, libraries have to gear up to store multi-media digital assets. After all, in an environment where the average life cycle of a web site has been variously estimated as 44 or 75 days, the potential for loss of the nation's digital cultural heritage is enormous if no one does any electronic harvesting []. The National Library has begun work to ensure that the threat of a digital dark age does not eventuate. (National Library to lead electronic harvesting, National Library Media release, 26 September 2003, http://www.natlib.govt.nz/bin/media/pr?item=1064531843). In the next chapter I will attempt a critique of the logic of total acquisition and storage, with reference for instance to the endeavour by the Library of Congress in the United States to take monthly snapshots of the whole of the Internet. For now it is worth emphasising that the threat of disappearance of a significant (in every sense of the word) portion of the texts circulating in the first decade of the Internet is very real, and as the US task force on the artifact in library collections reminds us has a disturbingly close precedent in the history of another recent medium. Writes the group that produced the report: 80 percent of all silent films made in the United States are gone without a trace. Fifty percent of films made in the nitrate era (that is, before 1950) have also perished. Among those extant, a significant portion is not well preserved. Given that the materials that have vanished were not well documented at the time of their creation, the full extent of this loss will never be known. The Evidence in Hand: Report of the Task Force on the Artifact in Library Collections, edited by Stephen G. Nichols and Abby Smith (Washington: Council on Library and Information Resources, 2001), p. 5.

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Lastly, XML data are of the standard digital kind, meaning that they have to be stored onto physical media that are prone to decay, on board systems that are prone to becoming obsolescent. The future of XML (or possibly Java, according to some commentators) may well hold the key to avoiding or at least deferring digital oblivion; but for now, we have come full circle: the survival of information which only exists in digital form is predicated to a large extent on acts of migration and dissemination, a constant and exhausting process of cultural death and rebirth. Only by incessantly copying the data onto new formats, and by distributing them across several platforms, can we hope to ensure their survival7. But every act of migration and dissemination requires a will: files do not spread themselves, only viruses do that. This extra burden on cultural subjects adds an important social layer to the problem of preservation: in order to survive, a digital artifact has to be deemed to be relevant by as many people as possible as frequently as possible. In this way the digital creates the conditions for a much greater involvement than in the past of people outside the main cultural institutions libraries, universities, publishers in the transmission and preservation of cultural knowledge. This is not to say that the efforts of traditional institutions have become less important, except in relative terms, but rather that they now operate alongside a peer-to-peer exchange which simply did not exist in this form when mechanical reproduction depended on large-scale efforts and was therefore rigidly commodified. This social reconfiguration, with its emphasis on the formation of groups of shared interest devoted to the circulation and maintenance of digital artifacts, adds a further dimension to Walter Ongs intuition that electronic7

In the course of the last decade many other recipes have been proposed to this end along broadly similar lines as the one proposed by Rothenberg. Giulio Blasis summary of the literature on the topic points to five fundamental strategies for digital preservation, namely refreshing (that is, the simple substitution of the physical memory support), migration, emulation, standardisation and conservation. See his introduction to Giulio Blasi (ed.), The Future of Memory (Turnhout : Brepols, 2002), pp.10-11.

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media may be ushering in an age of secondary orality. This idea has since taken on a complicated life of its own, partly due to the fact that Ong himself treated it only in passing in Orality and Literature, and left it to other scholars to pick it up and run with it, often in different directions. The sense in which I find Ongs dictum particularly suggestive in the context of the present discussion is linked to how the contemporary mnemonic practices described above are in some ways strikingly similar to those of primary oral cultures as he characterised them. Those too depended on networks of people, linked not by electronic means but through language and a highly sophisticated array of formulaic mnemonic techniques, common places for which Ong coined the magnificent epithet of mnemonically tooled grooves8. According to Havelock, the Muses were in fact not the daughters of inspiration or invention, but basically of memorization. Their central role [was] not to create but to preserve9. To which Ong adds the reminder that their mother was Mnemosyne, the titaness who embodied memory (p. 169). The moment of creation, in other words, was (and is) surpassed in oral cultures, according to this hypothesis, by the complex system of techniques that enables the future moments of recreation. This gives the oral text a foundational instability and a degree of shared authorship and interactivity that are arguably also found in electronic texts, particularly those that circulate on networks such as the Web. As Bolter writes:The electronic reader plays in the writing space of the machine the same role that the Homeric listener played as he or she sat before the poet. Electronic text is, like an oral text, dynamic. Homeric listeners had the opportunity to affect the telling of the tale by their applause or disapproval. Such applause and disapproval shared the aural space in which the poet performed and became part of that particular performance, just as today the applause of the audience is often preserved in the recordings of jazz musicians. The electronic writing space is also shared between author and reader, in the sense that the reader participates in

8 9

Ong, Orality and Literacy, p. 35. Havelock, Preface to Plato, p. 100.

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calling forth and defining the text of each particular reading. The immediacy and flexibility of oral presentation, which had been marginal in ancient and Western culture for over two millennia, emerges once again as a defining quality of text in the computer.10

This shared role applies not only to the performance of a text, but also to its transmission and preservation. After all, in order to become a Homeric bard, one needed to have been a Homeric listener first. Along similar lines, Erik Davis draws a detailed and convincing comparison between the ars memoriae of Greek and especially Roman antiquity and the organization of memory as a space of information in cyberspace, a three-dimensional realm thats outside ourselves while simultaneously tucked inside an exploratory space that resembles the mind,11 and reminds us that the anonymous author of Ad Herennium wrote specs for the visual imagery of ones internal memory places that seem tailor-made to describe the computer icons in use nowadays. Finally, Leah Marcus finds a closer analogy in time to our contemporary condition in the patterns of knowledge sharing and creation of early modern Europe, describing for instance Machiavellis and Miltons highly theatrical modes and auditory ways of relat