Parhesia+Aphasia

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Aphasia+Parrhesia:

Code and Speech in

the Neural

Topologies of the

NetChristina McPhee

transmedia artist

Department of Architecture, Hargrave

Studio, California Polytechnic State

University, San Luis Obispo CA USA

93407

E-mail: [email protected]

www.christinamcphee.net

ABSTRACT

An allegory of the net as a site, body, andvoice of neural trauma. The net is imaginedas a cyborg brain. Aphasia denotesrecursive, perseverant, garbled speechpatterns caused by aneurysm or traumaticshock. If the cyborgs aphasia iscontemplated as fearless speech, or

parrhesia, iconoclasm and algorithm meshin the dark space (amygdala) of a neural-electronic universe. Foucaultsobservations of unequal power relations asa signal characteristic ofparrhesia playthrough a critique of artificial intelligence

as an atopic net.

KEYWORDS

Trauma, entropy, parrhesia, aphasia,iconoclasm, amygdala

INTRODUCTION

The image of the net as the site of neuraltrauma, particularly one of low gradememory function brought on by posttraumatic stress, is an artistic trope thatoccurred to me during a year spentrecovering memory and awarenessfollowing

an experience of sexual and emotionalviolence. Topologies, or overlapping andnested worlds, are a commonplace ofgraphic design on the net, so that wecontemplate a universe behind the screenwhich is, simultaneously, an array of code.A Piranesian world of wired ruins [1] wasthe landscape that came to mind. I surveyedan imaginative landscape that formallyderives from montage and from the art ofthe fugue, and instantiated an explorationof violent memory and trauma. From'behind' the screen, I moved to a zone

'below' -- topologies of an underground.Linking this thought to the principle of

entropy as a sustaining principle of life,counterintuitive as it may seem, I foundmyself quickly engaged in the pursuit of anallegorical cyborg. Her body was a brain,her brain a city, or series of cities; thepassageways and routes through the citieswere in states of constant erasure anddisclosure; she was a body of information

in continuous entropic decline and, at thesame time, live communication.

With Calvino as Virgilian guide, I made aseries of cinematic net art works about thelandscape of the cyborg, visualized as adisappearing body, heard as a submergedvoice, or felt through the mouse as a hapticpresence within code(). I spun outthese spatialized tales as a series ofnarrative recursions, or loops. On a formallevel, the recursive aesthetic led at once to

an analogy to neural topologies,specifically, visualization in post-traumaticstress syndrome, and, in terms of sound, thecondition of aphasia. Now it becamepossible to generate a more developedallegory of the cyborg brain as a site ofentropic communication, and to loop thisallegory into a way of critically thinkingabout the cultural artifact central to mythsof artificial intelligence: semi-autonomousagents, or artificial life entities are bothicons, functional subjects and sites ofoperation/mutation. The essay that followsis meant as a literary fugue, that casts an

ear towards the rhetoric of posthumancommunication between 'human' and'machine' in the context of the net. I askthe reader's indulgence of allegory, as akind of ironic play. It is, after all, theembodied cyborg who initially appears asthe object of our gaze, but quickly morphsinto subject, site and speaker in our inferno.In this essay, themes are introduced as aseries of recursive nonlinear loops.Arguments are developed as points andcounterpoints to make an architecture ofassociations. All of the points stem from

traumatic memory as a generativesuggestion, towards a phenomenology ofcyberspace, and especially, the internet.

TRAUMA AND ENTROPY

Post traumatic syndrome impairs the senseof the experience of self as a discrete andfunctional whole. Triggers, both externaland internal, at random and withoutpremonition, instigate the amygdala fearresponse. The freeze frame visualizationstypical of this kind of memory areprimitive. They have a dispersed quality.One is quickly reminded of epileptic

flashes of light in darkness. I find itinteresting to figure out a way to representthis kind of visualization, particularly


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because its origins are in the preconsciousamygdala. For me, the visualizations had adetached and alien quality: they did notseem to connect with my identity, ofcourse, since the defense mechanism ofpost traumatic stress apparently functionsto both prevent full-blow memory of theviolent incident and to protect the sufferer

by warning of potential danger. Theamygdala stores violent memory in small,film-still like caches. Each memory is likea land mine. The explosion is like whitenoise. The metaphor that compelled mynet art became a nocturnal space lit byflashes. From this rather ominousperspective, I wonder about who might beinside the invisible city, a virtual Baghdad.The aura of a net-based cyborg. arisingfrom this psychic split or detachedvisualization, resides in a dark space [2].

If cyborgs embody linguistic peripheries,transgress boundaries, erase and accentuatedifference, it is also important tounderstand them as material projectionsfrom a biological basis, and specifically,from human information technologies andprotocols. So they are both at the centreand at the margins of culture, especially inthe topologic system of information flowand entropy we experience as the net. It isperhaps evident how the uncontrollableaspect of post traumatic stress visualizationis interesting in this context. Like triggers,cyborgs are dangerous and fascinating in

part because they embody otherness andthey are not always under control. They arewe/not we; we are them/not them. In the

jargon of artificial intelligence, they aresemi-autonomous agents. Their presence ascultural icons is a collective hypnogogia,that is, a waking dream. I don't mean tosuggest that cyborgs are not real on amaterial level: but I am interested in howthey function on the level of abstraction asfigurations. With Donna Haraway, weobserve qualities of mutation andhabitation in the shared space of cyborg

and human: "I do not think that mostpeople who live on earth now have thechoice not to live inside of, and not to beshaped by, the fiercely material andimaginative apparatuses for making 'us'cyborgs and making our homes into placesmapped within the space of titanicglobalizations in a direct line of descentfrom the cybernetic Gaia seen fromNASA's fabulous eyes. The global and theuniversal are not pre-existing empiricalqualities; they are deeply fraught,dangerous, and inescapable inventions. Thecyborg is a figure for exploring those

inventions, whom they serve, how they canbe reconfigured. Cyborgs do not stay

still"[3].

If the reader will follow this narrative oftraumatic visualization as a series ofdisruptions and hallucinations to formalconclusions, it may be seen how cinematiccontinuity in a net art work might bedeveloped through the flashes of nightmare

triggers, like mines in a nocturnallandscape. Poorly discerned by humans,barely heard, the cyborg, as a topologyrather than a subject, does not develop adiscrete identity or story. Her presence is aplay on the distributed and globalizedidentity of data based artifacts on the net.Her aura exists at the edge of vision, at theedge of the net's ability to visualize andremember and hear itself think. As anaesthetic construct, she is a neural topologythat shifts across boundaries andcheckpoints, that keeps crashing and

coming back, a city on fire in the darknessof ubiquitous carcieri, labyrinth of prisons.

Moving imaginatively from on a virtualtopography "below" the screen, to thedaylight hours of the 'real' world, we noticethe labyrinth of screens in material culture,in urban spaces, as surveillance, displayand interactivity. The ubiquitous screencomes into its own as an environment andecology, not just a virtual space, as humansgenerate and simultaneously accept thephenomenology of cyberpresence. Even"the VR apparatus may be reduced to a

chip implanted in the retina and connectedby wireless transmission to the Net [and]we will carry our prisons with us" as LevManovich speculates[4]. Lacking thesurgical implants at the moment, we stillinhabit a screen medium characterized byflow of code is in recursive flux, whetherwe can see past the graphic interface or not.In this analysis, we are inside the net as anaesthetic and technological medium, justby the psychological process oftransference and projection. If we areinside the net, the space of the net becomesneurological, but only if we permit ametaphor of the brain as disembodied code.This choice, I think, leads to an evocativepoetics of the net as a place of forgetting oramnesia, and as a topologic series of neuraltraumas. In this sense, the tropes of thescreen generate an aesthetic of nettopologies, whose subsistence ismaintained through entropic crashes anderasures.

If life form or life like, the net, then, as aneural model, needs a flow of entropy inorder to subsist. For a form to be

consistent, a thermodynamic imbalance isrequired. The eddies whose morphologicalpersistence Leonardo marveled at and those


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now rendered by mathematical modelshave something in common: the existenceof a flow that maintains their form; if theflow is interrupted, the system breaks downand is ruinedRather than destroying thesystem, the flow feeds it, contributing to itsvery existence and organization [5].Put this idea together with a new media

format whose logic reflected the possibilityof the space between generations of routes,displacements, remappings, as oneconnected new types of topography...into astate labyrinth" [6] and you get alabyrinthine topology that is slowly fallingapart. Efforts by the state large oligarchiesto censor the net, if taken as an entropicforce, is continuously countered bysubjects--users, coders, agents-- seekingways to communicate around the blankspots, the amnesia sites. The resistance toentropy causes new flows of information,

wave upon wave, yet there is continuousflow in the other direction, of loss ofinformation, amnesia. This aesthetic of thenet as place suggests a zone of low gradememory function, like a stroked-out brain.The labyrinth of control and surveillancecreates a drama of amnesia, a sustainedremit to forget where and who and what,what came next, even; and in its expressionthrough the flood of filmic image, as drift,anomie, restlessness and pathos. Theproblem of remembering becomes evenmore acute, and through memory, theimperative to bear witness, to speak within

the context of a belief in a truth, becomesmore and more attenuated. Thus we arriveat a vision of the electronic universe as awired ruin, or alternatively, a topology ofneural trauma. Perhaps to to imagine sucha place is also to inscribe a cyborg, like acarytid on the columns of the Parthenon,inside the net architectonics, like amagical mimetic impulse[7].

If codes labyrinthine complexity risks--and sustains-- continuous entropy, theremight be an analagous loss of cyborg

memory, in continuously degrading halflife fragments. In this negative landscape, Iimagine that questions of the origins oftrauma and violence plays out withoutrecourse to mimetic sacrifice or desire, in ahell of modernity, as imagined by ReneGirard[8]. All that is left is the algorithmicpresets. This image of the net evokes aformal understanding of its topologies asengendered and sustained by traumaticcollapse.

PARRHESIA and APHASIA

A recent set of terms to define intelligentagency -- autonomous..can act without theintervention of othersreflection. able to

reason about itsbehaviordeliberationability tomanipulate symbolicrepresentationsreactivity, ability of anagent to respond to changes in itsenvironment within an appropriately smallamount of time" [9]ironically inspiredthe contemplation of the cyborg as an

aphasic neural site. Born of utopian hopes,these terms forget to include theconstruction of a posthuman 'self' orlocation who might be capable of a kind ofrhetoric. It exposes the erasure of the bodythat typifies much of the discoursesurrounding artificial intelligence andcommunication [10]. The semi-autonomous agent could be a systemprogrammed to trigger strategies thatextrapolate or interpolate based ongenerative algorithms and number theory,but at the same time, could this program be

capable of creating a fiction of the self, asan identity or subject? Of the cyborg wecan speculate that she knows herself as adistributive neuralscape. She can partially'speak' her 'mind' . In this regard, the figureof the cyborg as a brain has a reflexivequality, which is why it is interesting toimagine the dark side of this reflexivenature as a fugue-like aphasia. Reflexivityas an aesthetic principle becomes agenerative process: reflexivity, in thecogent definition of Katherine Hayles, "isthe movement whereby that which has beenused to generate a system is made, through

a changed perspective, to become part ofthe system it generates"[11]. The fugue likerecursions of speech in persons who sufferstroke or trauma signal the condition ofaphasia, characterized by perseverance, thatis, that the sufferer tries repetitively tocommunicate, but cannot but repeat andrestate in loops that do not generatecomplete messages, despite the desire forcoherent meaning.

Michel Foucault, in a series of lectures atBerkeley in 1983, offered an extended

comment on the Greek notion of parrhesia,or frankness in speaking the truth.Foucaults analysis observes the sequelaeof an inequality of power between the onewho speaks, theparrhesiastes, and the oneto whom he is speaking frankly. To extendthe thought of parrhesia into the allegory

of speech in the cyborg, I suspect that thecyborg speaks what she knows to be truebecause that is the only truth she knows,e.g. hers is a reflexive, and, thanks toentropy, aphasic rhetoric.Parrhesiazesthai means to tell the

truth... there is always an exactcoincidence between belief and truth. It


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would be interesting to compare Greekparrhesia with the modern (Cartesian)conception of evidence. For sinceDescartes, the coincidence between beliefand truth is obtained in a certain (mental)evidential experience. For the Greeks,however, the coincidence between beliefand truth does not take place in a (mental)

experience, but in a verbal activity, namely,parrhesia. It appears that parrhesia, in thisGreek sense can no longer occur in ourmodern epistemological framework.[12]An interesting point here is to speculate onan epistemology that would claim toinclude the rhetoric of the cyborg. Maybeshe is incapable of speaking anything otherthan parrhesia: this, then, removes theCartesian subjective doubt as acharacteristic of cyborg speech (although itcertainly remains the epistemologicalcondition of her interlocutors, those of us in

the space outside the electronic universe).The cyborg's speech, allegorically,expresses a resuscitation [13], a breathingback, in a reflexive looping wave. But,what does it mean?

ICONOCLASH AND AMYGDALAAmygdala.

what does it mean?

Nothing. Its a location. Its thedark aspect of the brain.

I dont

A place to house fearful memories.

Just fear?

Were not too certain of that.Anger too, we think, but itspecializes in fear. It is pureemotion. We cant clarify it further.

Why not?

Wellis it an inherited thing? Are

we speaking of ancestral fear? Fearsfrom childhood? Fear of what mighthappen in old age? Or fear if wecommit a crime? It could just beprojecting fantasies of fear in thebody.

As in dreams.[14]

Could iconoclastic violence come out ofour biological experience of traumaticmemory and visualization? An inverseratio between violence and memory,whether personal or cultural, seems to

characterize iconoclasm. Things aresmashed in order to forget them, to

generate a tabula rasa. Futile, since theact of smashing itself is violent, theviolence encodes itself in memory, in theamygdala. A crescendo of increasingcrashes and clashes leads to an algorithmicescalation of violent impulse. Smashingimages and sounds, seeking to lay waste tofixed meanings, seems to trigger an

antidote to the pain and horror and surpriseof a traumatic memory. It is as if to quelland subdue the sense of the chaos ofmimetic violence between the subject (us)and the object (the image flood), we keepsmashing away, and in the act storing moreviolent memory; like the addict, we cannever get enough to make the indictment offailure go away. What is this failure butthe experience of the loss of control of theimage, the condition sine qua non of netart. A continuous feedback loop ensues:the resort to violence intensifies the

distillation of traumatic memory as freezeframes, like film stills, poorly articulated,barely glimpsed, nightmarish, in theamygdala. Repetitive actions of mindlessviolence dulls the intensity of the triggersto the amygdala, while at the same time,adds to the layers of storage of violentmemories in the amygdala; thus there is anever escalating impulse to smash, todestroy, to deface, as a method of dullingthe sensation of terror. Could a terroristimpulse appease the intense nightmares ofthe amygdala by acting out, in broaddaylight, the smashing of images? If the

neural topology of the net is, in one sense,an elaborate poetics of memory, and if thismemory is, like the amygdala, a cache ofimages and sounds at the point of erasure,then it is possible to contemplate the net asa self-reflexive site of iconoclasm andviolence. Isnt it because, as Marc Lafiawonders, we can imagine ourselves attimes, both inside and outside the event, theevent of time, the event of duration, theevent of utterance, the multiplicity of allthese engines running their programs.What are they up to? We dont any longer

really like to talk about this and in turnthats why no one talks about allegory anymore, just metaphors, metonymy and otherrhetorical tropes"[15]. Maybe a neural posthuman topology that is both aphasic andcommunicative, entropic and generative, isa strange projection that we don't want toadmit we love--our double, our sister,ourselves [16].

REFERENCES

1. Marilouise and Arthur Kroker, TimMurray, curators, CTHEORYMultimedia

http://ctheorymultimedia.cornell.edu/issue3/


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2. Then the body separates itself fromthought, the individual breaks theboundary of his skin and occupies theother side of his senses. He tries tolook at himself from any pointwhatever in space. He fells himselfbecoming space, dark space wherethings cannot be put. He is similar, not

similar to something, but just similar.Roger Caillois, describingpsychasthenia, in Mimicry andLegendary Psychasthenia, quoted inThe Space of the Stain, by GeorgeBaker, Grey Room 05, The MIT Press,Fall 2001.

3. Donna J. Haraway, Cyborgs andSymbionts: Living Together in the NewWorld Order, in The CyborgHandbook, Chris Hables Gray, ed., withHeidi J. Figueroa-Sarriera and Steve

Mentor, xix, Routledge, New York andLondon, 1995

4. Lev Manovich, The Language ofNew Media, 114, The MIT Press,Cambridge and London, 2001

5. Luis Fernndes-Galiano, translatedby Gina Cario, Fire and Memory, 96-97, The MIT Press, Cambridge andLondon, 2000

6. Farad Amaly and RashidMasharawi, artists statement,

FROM/TO(2002) Documenta XI,Kassel, Germany, 2002

7. In this respect, the tradition in theRenaissance of inscribing humanfigures into the plans of buildings, theelevations of columns, and so on can beseen as a form of mimetic devices thatvicariously evokes the desire foridentification. The figure inscribedwithin the plan becomes a mimeticemblem for a physical body within theactual building. The emblem must beunderstood here as a device that is

magically invested with theproperties of an originary object, muchas in the sacrifice when the victim isoffered up as a substitute for others.Thus the figure incised in the groundplan transcends mere representation.The figure takes on a symbolicsignificance that can be understood onlybeyond the framework ofEnlightenment rationality. It isprecisely this investment that locatessuch devices within the realm of themythic. These emblems become

vehicles of identification, the objects ofwish fulfillment, that evoke theprinciple of the sacrifice, as Lvi-

Strauss has described it: For the objectof the sacrifice precisely is to establisha relation, not of resemblance, but ofcontiguity, by means of a series ofsuccessive identifications. NealLeach, Vitruvius Crucifixus, inBodyand Building, George Dodds andRobert Tavernor, editors, MIT Press,

Cambridge and London, 2002.

8. Robert Koch's language about imageviolence, as "active, mobile and fierce"is a curious echo to the 'fierce' cyborgimage in Haraway. [Ren] Girardstheory of mimetic violence has a veryprecise connection to critical modernity.Girard claims that modernity hasinvented desire, the form humanrelationships take when there is nolonger any resolution of the mimeticcrisis through the victim. In traditional

societies the prohibitions established toprevent the reappearance of this conflictare necessarily passive and inertobstacles; in modernity all this changes.The obstacle now becomes an active,mobile and fierce rival, - precisely thething that traditional societies sought toprevent. Robert Koch, The CriticalGesture in Philosophy, in Iconoclash:Beyond the Image Wars in Science,Religion and Art, Bruno Latour andPeter Weibel, editors, ZKM Center forart and Media Karlsruhe and MIT Press,2002

9. Mark DInverno and Jon Eacott, OnEmbedded Intelligent Ambient Music(or iHiFi the Intelligent HiFi),Cybersonica Proceedings, Institute ofContemporary Art, London, June 2002

10. Katherine Hayles, TowardEmbodied Virtuality, in How WeBecame Posthuman: Virtual Bodies inCybernetics, Literature, andInformatics, 5, The University ofChicago Press, Chicago and London,1999

11. ibid, 8

12. Michel Foucault, Fearless Speech,ed. Joseph Pearson, Semiotext(e), LosAngeles, 2001

13. Sa violence touch en moi tous lespoints ignores do explosent messouffls Hlne Cixous, Souffles,des femmes, Paris, 1998

14. Michael Ondaatje, Anil's Ghost,Knopf, New York, 2000

15. Marc Lafia, Algorithms and


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Allegories, Cybersonica Proceedings,Institute of Contemporary Art, London,June 2002

16. Hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable,mon frre T. S. Eliot, TheWasteland

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