NICHOLS SYNOPSIS

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Nichols - The Work of Culture in the Age of Cybernetic Systems

The computer is more than an object. The computer is icon and metaphor that suggest new ways of thinking about ourselves and our environment. Cybernetic systems include an entire array of machines and apparatuses that exhibit computational power. Being a cybernetic machine means that they are self regulating mechanisms or systems within predefined limits and in relation to predefined tasks. Systems and devices that exemplify cybernetic or automated but intelligent behavior. Are we constituted by the machines, or are we one with machine of the system we are part of.

We have current ambivalence with society as a whole -> positive being connected but negative being controlled. The difference between cybernetic and mechanical establish a central metaphor acquires the force of the ‘real’. Reality is socially constructed and the real symbolic system acquires the force to be real. The liberating potential of the cybernetic imagination and the ideological tendency to preserve the existing form of social relations. Cybernetic imagination is about the role we play in the world as a whole: We are so extensive of nature and the part of the rest of the world. We have a stable society, which means liberation. But at the same time this ‘liberation’ is ordering and controlling.

The aura of an object asks for our attention. We discover its use value in the exercise of ritual, in that place, with that object, or in the contemplation of the object for its uniqueness. Mechanical reproduction cannot reproduce is authenticity. Objects without aura substitute mystique, this in turn creates new forms of interpretation. When a form of art changes our views also become different:” : "During long periods of history, the mode of human sense perception changes with humanity's entire mode of existence"

Copies of objects pave the way for seeing, and recognizing, the nature and extent of the very changes mechanical reproduction it produces. This new form of machine-age perception is most strongly applied in Dadaism: "changes of place and focus which periodically assail the spectator." One medium that works with these facts is Film.

Mechanical reproduction involves the appropriation of an original. Film is not original in this sense, it is planned to be filmed, organized for the film. The process of adopting new ways of seeing that consequently propose new forms of social organization becomes a paradoxical, or dialectical, process. This goes on in terms of a culture of electronic dissemination and computation instead of mechanical reproduction.

For cybernetics, what drives is the simulation. Within this simulation is the moving information towards control of experience and interpretation, intelligence and knowledge. It posits the simulation as an imaginary Other which serves as the measure of our own identity and, in doing so, prompts the same form of intense ambivalence that the mothering parent once did a guarantee of identity based on what can never be made part of oneself. Humans are defined in relation to other machines. But the human machine – even though they are similar - remains different. Human identity remains at stake, subject to change, vulnerable to challenge and modifications. The metaphors that are taken for real, become the simulation itself.

Within cybernetic systems the concept of ‘text’ is slipping away. Text is no longer fixed, its open-ended and interactive based, the authorship is not emphasized, altered, addressed to and by us, dialogic, machine addressable. We encounter social practices in their own right, and they represent nothing. They suggest to having been there, being here or having come form nowhere. What cannot be represented in language directly can significantly inflect speech, and dialogue, despite its enforced exclusion from any literal representation.

In place of human subjectivity we encounter an interface, that selectively passes information without introducing consciousness in desire, will or empathy. Cybernetic systems give form, external expression, to processes of the mind. The social world and consciousness becomes mediated through a computational apparatus. Cybernetic dialogue offers the illusion of control. This provides a lure into the computational force, mostly worked by men. This entire issue becomes circumvented in cybernetic systems that simulate dialogic interaction. The other gender related side of cybernetics is the computer games that are more used by men. A (predominantly masculine) fascination with the control of simulated interactions replaces a (predominantly masculine) fascination with the to be looked-atness of a projected image. The consequence of systems without aura, systems that replace direct encounter and realize otherwise inconceivable projections and possibilities, is a fetishism of such systems and processes of control themselves. We can talk to a system whose responsiveness grants us an awesome feeling of power.

The desire to exercise a sense of control over a complex but predefined logical universe replaces the desire to view the image of another over which the viewer can imagine himself to have a measure of control.

The "other scene" where fantasies and fictions actually become conceptually and mechanically produced may be repressed, but will not be completely out of sight. If not immediately visible, it will be just off screen where the extension of the fictional world collides with the real world. With cybernetic systems. this other scene from which complex rule governed universes actually get produced recedes further from sight. The other scene has vanished into logic circuits and memory chips, into "machine language" and interface cards. The chip is pure surface, pure simulation of thought. Its material surface is its meaning without history. without depth, without aura, affect, or feeling. Electronic simulation instead of mechanical reproduction.

The zoo brings back alive evidence of a world we could not otherwise know, now under apparent control. The difference in the significance of what appears to be the same thing, the gaze, indicates that the change in context has introduced a new system of meanings, a new discourse or language. Computer based systems extend the possibilities inherent in the zoo and garden much further. “So we have the human operator surrounded on both sides by very precisely known mechanisms and the question comes up, "What kind of machine have we placed in the middle?"”

the staging powers of simulation establish a hyper reality we only half accept but seldom refute: "Hyper reality of communication of meaning: by dint of being more real than the real itself, reality is destroyed.” The real becomes simulation. the power of cybernetic simulations prompts a redefinition of such fundamental terms as life and reality.

Abstract automated entities become embedded into tangible objects that serve us as commodities. New categories of objects do not necessarily gain the protection of patent or copyright law. “The Constitution states, "The Congress shall have power. ..to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries”

Both a computer and a bio genetically designed cell "may be temporarily or permanently programmed to perform many different unrelated tasks." We ask whether "intelligent systems" can be protected by patent and, if so, what specific elements of such a system are eligible for protection. The patent protection has been allowed more for the fabrication of new life formats, instead of the development of computer software. In 1980 Congress passed the Software Act, granting some of the protection which previously was not offered, but still not addressing all the elements within the process. A Semiconductor Chip Protection Act followed in 1984 with a new form of protection for the templates from which chips are made. Copyright does not protect ideas, processes. procedures. systems or methods, only a specific embodiment of such things. Copyright cannot protect useful objects or inventions. The process of mechanical reproduction had assured that the copyright registration of one particular copy of a work would automatically insure protection for all its duplicates. Creativity directed to the end of presenting a video display constitutes recognizable authorship and "fixation" occurs in the repetition of specific aspects of the visual scenes from one playing of a game to the next. All these decisions have served to legitimate the cybernetic metaphor and to re normalize the political legal apparatus in relation to the question: who shall have the right to control the cybernetic system of which we are a part?

The human as a metaphorical, automated, but intelligent system becomes quite literal when the human organism is itself a product of planned engineering. Human life becomes a commodity to be contracted for, subject to the proprietary control of those who rent the uterus, or the test tube. What is most fundamentally at stake does not seem to be personal choice, but power and economics.

The justification for hierarchical control of the cybernetic apparatus takes a rhetorical form because it is, in essence, an ideological argument. The supposed liberating force of the technologies will in affect not control us in the whole. We have created a certain ambivalence towards these new technologies, this requires resolution in another field: (theory of) power.

Whereas deconstructing in the mechanical reproduction age focuses merely on film, montage, deconstructing has extended itself further within the cybernetic systems: what had been mere possibilities or probabilities manifest themselves in the simulation. The dynamite of the tenth of a second which can make or brake your film, explodes in limits within the computational force.

If there is liberating potential in this, it is seeing ourselves as part of a larger whole that is self regulating and capable of long term survival. Conscious purpose guides the invention and legitimization of cybernetic systems. We are part of the system and we are never able to control it, we should work with the system, flow with this simulation, and make use of its limits.

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